Climate protesters on Wednesday dumped pink powder on the United States Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Two young men poured the powder on the Constitution—which is protected by a glass casing in the building’s rotunda—as they called for President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, video showed. Security promptly cleared the area and arrested the protesters almost immediately.
“We are determined to foment a rebellion. We will not be held account to laws in which we have no voice or representation,” said one demonstrator, referencing Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband.
The other then appealed to the country’s Founding documents to argue his point.
“This country’s founded on the conditions that all men are created … and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the protester said. “We’re calling for all people to have all these rights, not just wealthy white men. We all deserve clean air, water, food, and a livable climate.”
That protester then called for removing subsidies for fossil fuels and “moving towards real climate solutions,” while the other said there were millions of “climate refugees” in the United States and across the world.
“We need to change how we do things. We need to change systems and value the lives and well-being of people over the profits of the many,” one of them said as security attempted to move the two away from the documents.
Climate protesters have in recent years taken to defacing famous artifacts in their demonstrations. On Tuesday, two activists from Last Generation, a European climate group, pasted images of a natural disaster onto Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” in the museum that houses it in Florence, Italy. Late last month, two activists from a food sustainability group in France threw soup on Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in Paris’s Louvre Museum. Those paintings are also protected by glass cases.
