The Rise of the Climate Anti-Hero
Soup on a van Gogh may be more strategic than it seems.
s rotunda, he and Kroegeor had stood before a judge, still covered in pink paint powder. They were charged with misdemeanors, which Zepeda knew would not stick. Back at home in Columbia, Maryland, Zepeda spent days surfing the web and playing video games, Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition and EarthBound Beginnings — “not virtuous, but it is what it is,” he said. Then a few weeks later, when he was in Union Station en route to visit Tim Martin in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. prosecutors arrested him again. This time, he was charged with felony destruction of government property.
We sat on white plastic chairs at a round wooden table before a wall lined with shelves, all nearly empty except for stacks of unread mail. Zepeda’s leg bounced for four hours straight. To be in his presence is deeply uncomfortable. He’d already served 20 days in jail for his actions on February 13, when he used his body to block the George Washington Memorial Parkway. He hadn’t been sleeping well. His bed, there in Columbia, was worse than the ones in jail. “I should probably get a new mattress,” he said, his voice flat. “But then I’m going back to jail or prison or something in November. So it’s like, I don’t know if I want to spend a lot of money.”
The terms of his confinement allowed him to visit the grocery store, the library, McDonald’s, church, and Jimmy John’s sandwich shop, where he works. He likes the small wins of the job: Someone orders a sandwich, and he makes a sandwich, and the work he set out to do gets done. The rest of his life feels like purgatory. His lawyer assumes he prefers house arrest to prison, but Zepeda isn’t so sure.
Just as he did at the National Archives, he still worries about time. He works night shifts and as a result sleeps late and misses morning meetings for Declare Emergency. His phone broke a few weeks before my visit, leaving him unable to phone-bank to solicit volunteers. “The options are very limited,” he acknowledged of what good he can do in the world these days. But they aren’t zero. “I could do some speak-outs,” he told me. Just stand on a corner between his house and Jimmy John’s, or his house and the grocery store, or maybe just show up at McDonald’s and talk to strangers like a sidewalk preacher. That would break people’s delusion that everything is fine, “convey that, okay, at least one person in my community is very concerned about this.”
He tries not to resent others for not stepping up. But he’s tired.
“I don’t know if I want to do more things,” he said. “I, yeah, I don’t know. At the moment, part of me feels like I’ve done enough, but another part of me is like, Not really.” The part that feels like he’s done enough “is winning right now.”
He knows that because of his record, the penalty for going red again would be steep. At his sentencing hearing for the Constitution action, on November 8, he could receive as many as ten years.
“I could do more,” he said. “I still have a guilty conscience.”
Along with worrying about not doing enough, he worries that his extreme self-sacrifice will make others feel bad. “I don’t want to …” His voice stalled out. “Do I? I don’t know. I don’t want to make other people feel guilty to the point where they push away and don’t want to get involved.”
Fellow activists often say he should take it easier. “Sometimes they’re like, ‘Oh, you need a break. Take a break. Get some sleep. Get some rest,’” he said. But the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere is 423.79, and he worries they are wrong.
