HOLT, Michigan — Donald Zepeda is a soft-spoken 36-year-old who has a degree in international relations, follows a mostly vegan diet — and just got out of prison for destroying government property in a viral climate protest.
Zepeda was one of two climate protesters who dumped red powder on the case holding the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives on Valentine’s Day 2024.
Back in his Michigan hometown after his release, Zepeda said he doesn’t regret his actions, which were aimed at getting the public to take climate change more seriously.
“It was worth a shot,” he said during an interview in a Michigan coffee shop in December. “I’m still for any kind of nonviolent civil disobedience to get better action on climate.”
The messy protest briefly garnered widespread attention in national news and on social media. It was part of a string of high-profile climate demonstrations that aimed to nudge leaders to take dramatic moves to slash emissions.
“We are determined to foment a rebellion,” Zepeda said at the time from the Archives’ rotunda. Covered in red powder himself, Zepeda urged then-President Joe Biden to “please declare a climate emergency.”
Biden never did declare a climate emergency, but his administration prosecuted Zepeda and his co-protester for the stunt.
Zepeda was convicted of a felony for destroying government property, an offense with a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison. A federal judge sentenced him to two years, citing Zepeda’s “significant criminal history” that included years of past climate protests.
He wound up serving a little more than eight months in prison, he estimates, along with time spent in holding jails, in a halfway house and under house arrest.
‘That might be it’
Zepeda grew up in Holt, a Lansing suburb, and studied international development at Grand Valley University on the west side of the state.
He wanted to work on economic development in one of the world’s poorer countries, he said. But toward the end of his college career, he read a Rolling Stone article by Bill McKibben titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” and emailed McKibben asking, “What can I do?”
McKibben had launched the advocacy group 350.org a few years earlier. His advice, Zepeda said, was to launch a local 350 group. “We tried to get Lansing 350 going,” he said, but that group has mostly fizzled beyond a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in some time.
Zepeda later escalated his activism and was arrested in a string of climate protests, including for attempting to shut down an oil pipeline in Washington state, distributing fliers at a Florida high school and blocking roadways in Florida, Virginia and Washington, D.C., according to court sentencing documents. By 2022, he was involved with the protest group Declare Emergency.
Zepeda said he is consumed by his worries about climate change. But he had served only short stints in jail — not prison — before the protest at the Archives.
Now that he’s finished his sentence, he’s considering stepping back.
“I feel like that might be it,” Zepeda said in December. “I did my part. Now, everyone else, you guys gotta go do your thing, too.”
Zepeda said he is “down to help with hypotheticals and things and advice” for other activists.
“Especially while on probation, it’s all hypothetical at best,” he said. “That’s kind of where I am, is not getting arrested anymore, I guess — especially during probation. But probably beyond too.”
Declare Emergency is also ending its “direct action” campaigns.
The group’s October announcement came after Zepeda and another activist had been sentenced to prison for the Archives protest and as another Declare Emergency activist awaited sentencing after smearing paint on an exhibit case holding an Edgar Degas sculpture at the National Gallery of Art.
Timothy Martin was sentenced in November to serve 18 months in prison for the Degas protest. Martin’s co-defendant, Joanna Smith, received a sentence of 60 days.
A felony conviction
Zepeda’s sentencing hearing took place on Nov. 15, 2024, 10 days after Donald Trump won the presidential election after campaigning on a pledge to tear down Biden’s climate work.
Zepeda’s pitch to the judge: Climate change “is very clearly an emergency,” and society isn’t doing enough about it.
“We need to feel that real sense of fear and emotion or we will continue to relegate this problem to future generations,” he told the court.
The judge — Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee — agreed that helping to fight climate change “is one of the most important things that you could decide to devote your life to. And I respect that and I admire that.”
But Jackson chided Zepeda for the National Archives protest and other “misguided, misdirected actions that bore no connection to climate change at all.” That included blocking traffic on Washington’s busy New York Avenue and the George Washington Parkway and helping other climate activists who smeared paint on the case holding the Degas sculpture, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
Berman said she wanted to send a clear message, noting that deterrence was a significant factor in her judgment.
“Eco-vandalism is not a good idea,” she said. It’s “just plain old vandalism in places where it’s particularly challenging and frightening to have to clean up.”
“It doesn’t inspire and it doesn’t motivate and it gives people who resist science and who resist the urgent need for action one more reason to say they’re just a bunch of crackpots and to ignore your message,” she continued.
Jackson sentenced Zepeda to two years in prison and another two years of supervised release. She ordered him to perform 150 hours of community service, including cleaning up graffiti or vandalism.
“You’re going to have to scrub stuff,” she told him, adding that the remainder of his community service must involve “a constructive effort on behalf of a reputable organization involved in fighting climate change, eliminating waste.”
“And maybe you will find your path for the future from that,” Jackson said.
Zepeda is still figuring out what’s next for him. He’s been volunteering for the congressional campaign of William Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement who’s running as a Democrat for Congress in Michigan.
Zepeda said he’s wrestling with conflicting desires: He doesn’t want to get arrested again, but he also thinks confrontational actions are needed to get people to adequately address the climate change problem.
“I’m afraid the best things I can actually do towards the fighting climate change goal will either probably wind up with me getting arrested again or involve me going around telling other people to do things that will likely get them arrested,” he wrote in a January text message.
