The Rise of the Climate Anti-Hero

Soup on a van Gogh may be more strategic than it seems.

- Elizabeth Weil

Kroegeor and Donald Zepeda in front of the U.S. Constitution, February 2024.

The National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C., is secured by 40-foot bronze doors, each of which weighs 6.5 tons. On Valentine’s Day 2024, around 1 p.m., Donald Zepeda walked the mile there from his Airbnb to throw paint powder on the Constitution of the United States. He was 35. The parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere was 422.99. He had been arrested 20 times for civil disobedience, including the day before, when he and two others sat in the middle of the George Washington Parkway and demanded that President Biden declare a climate emergency.

Zepeda had dressed respectfully for the occasion: khakis, plaid button-down, gray anorak, black Vans. When he arrived at the archives, he walked to the bathroom, where he removed a small plastic bag of tempera paint powder from his backpack and placed it in his jacket pocket. In the bottle, the powder had looked red, like blood. Now, tied up in this flimsy bag, it looked like hot-pink CAUTION tape.

Zepeda felt, as he often did, anxious, tired, and slightly numb. He got scared about time — how little he, or anyone else, had to do good deeds. His philosophy for trying to save the planet in 2024 was “Do the work, don’t think about the thing,” so as not to “always be crying 24/7.” If you were crying 24/7, Zepeda knew, it was “hard to convince people to do things.” But he also didn’t want to appear “chill and normal and casual.” Being chill and normal and casual would convey that everything was fine. Everything was not fine.

Zepeda’s partner that day was a 27-year-old man named Jackson Green whose nom de guerre is “Kroegeor.” At age 20, in Utah, Kroegeor had broken up with the Mormon Church and had a political awakening. He realized that “You are the king of history if you are a white man in America” and that, because of how greedily American white men live, “the world is fucked.”