Kroegeor: Full legal name, Jackson Green.. I guess if anyone’s seen me in the news that that might be what's there but I doubt it. I'm just a full-time climate activist now but I used to be a nurse’s assistant for a couple years. Now I'm a market gardener assistant. I'm interning as a market gardener slash vegetable farmer. I'm living in an intentional community.  Twenty Seven years old.

Will: So you were just released after spending nearly three months in a federal jail on pre-trial detention for a non-violent peaceful protest at the capital is that correct?

Kroegeor: At the National Archives, which isn’t the Capitol building, but it is in the nation's capital. For covering the constitution in temporary powder paint with my fellow activist and codefendant Donald Zepeda. I was held in DC jail for 95 days. I had broken my bond. (from a previous action) where I went  finger painting in the National Gallery to try to draw attention to this National Climate Crisis that we're in. (We’re trying to) bring national attention to the issue and ask Biden to start thinking about social justice and actually acting on that and not just talking about it.

Will: What was the date of the action?

Kroegeor: We called it Love In Action. It was on Valentine's Day - the Constitution action. My National Gallery action with the 54th Massachusetts (Display at the National Gallery of Art) was back in November of last year.

Will: Okay um so how do you feel about the federal jail system?

Kroegeor: Oh man,  I don't have any other jail system to compare it to. But it's awful. I mean it's just despicable. Frankly the fact that we lock people up in concrete boxes. I think most of the people I met did not deserve to be in that situation. Iit degrades you. It breaks down your Humanity. It causes a lot of pain to your soul and your body, your mental health. (Especially) if you can't get books and so certainly like your emotional health if you don't have people like constantly visiting you or writing you letters. It was definitely the hardest three months of my life. I can't imagine I'll have a much harder three months anytime in the future until climate breakdown gets severe and civilization starts to break down. I don't think there's a worst place anyone in America could spend three months.

Will: So how long have you been concerned about the climate?

Kroegeor: It’s been almost two years, maybe three. I've been concerned since I first learned about it - maybe maybe five years ago. We have to address it on a global scale and we're falling drastically short. And we are all screwed, glued and tattooed if we can't get our governments to act on our behalf within the next five-six years. We have to act drastically. So every year we need to be making huge changes that we are nowhere near on schedule for. So for the past couple years it's been in my mind and I've been kind of freaking out. I was kind of putting it on the back burner frankly for a time. Like I was bringing it up to people and I was like this is a problem but I wasn't like living like the way that we all need to be if we're going to get the work done to change our global economic political social systems to be able to deal with the climate and biodiversity and sustainability crisis. So I finally started living as an activist back in August of last Year. I think that's when we met, too. I think we ran into each other back then.

Will: Did you get a lot of communication? I know I sent one letter. I might have sent two.

Kroegeor: I got two from you. 

Will: Did you get a lot of communication from the outside? Books and things like that? Were you able to get a lot of stuff?

Kroegeor: Fortunately I had really great support going in. So I got some books after a couple weeks um people started mailing the books I think almost immediately within a couple days. But uh they the DC jail is like a black hole. The mail room there, it just takes weeks to get letters and books that are essentially delivered to the jail starting day one. They just take some time to process everything. So I got everybody's letters. Lots of good letters from good friends. That really made a difference. Especially early on. It was hellish. So everyone's letters were appreciated. But two weeks delayed and then I got to read some good books thatI can get into if if we have time but

outside communication was absolutely the most important part of me holding on to my sanity in there.

Will: We're heading into what's going to be a terrible summer. We've got the DNC happening. We've got you know

issues with Palestine. How important is it that Joe Biden like step up in this point and you know you know declare a climate emergency.

Kroegeor: There needs to be massive change. He needs to declare a climate emergency (with all that) entails. He's going to (need to) start affecting those changes very quickly. It doesn't look like he wants to do that. It doesn't look like he gives a damn right now. But if we could get enough people together to start acting in Civil Disobedience and we could get him to actually take action and declare and Institute a climate emergency then we'd have huge change across the board. Like shouldn't be manufacturing and sending and subsidizing weapons to Israel to bomb Palestine. We could stop being complicit in genocide. We wouldn't be subsidizing oil out the wazoo. We could start putting money towards far less energy in this nation and globally because we have our hands in everybody every other country's cookie jar. America would look vastly different - within a few years. I think lwe just need huge cultural shifts and it's imperative that Biden get us there and that Congress and everybody in the country gets us there. So him setting that example, taking that first step and letting the nation know that, by the way, we are prioritizing not causing ourselves to go extinct from the climate crisis.

Will: So um Donald Zepeda was with you on that day. He's also an organizer for Declare Emergency. You guys are both, from what I understand, facing a major legal battle. Any thoughts about strategy? Any major lawyers? Have any legal teams reached out to you about how that is going?

Kroegeor: We've got a lot of thoughts about strategy. No (private) lawyers, no, we just got our public defenders right now. We need to do a little more research to see if we can get anyone experienced in representing folks who have acted in Civil Disobedience. We need to see if there's any movement lawyers that we can get for like a sliding scale or pro-bono would be great. If we could find a lawyer to come at this from a social justice angle, that would be great. We might be able to raise funds for (something like that). As far as the major legal battle itself I think we have a clear sense that we're going to need to go to trial. I think we have a slim chance of getting a jury that's composed of the average American public to acquit us on this but the thought is that going to trial in and of itself is important because we can say, “Oh look we're guilty of doing something we shouldn't have done, but we're saying we did this thing we need to be doing this - To be causing disruption in society. We need to be acting in civil disobedience. We can't let business as usual carry on - this fairy tale of endless economic growth is going to kill us. It is killing people all over the world, it's causing mass migration, mass starvation, mass death from our military. We cannot allow this. We have to act in order to change things. So that's kind of the message we're going to try to get across. If we go to trial. Currently we've been offered, you know, years in prison as the best deal. So they're not giving us much to go on.  It's looking like we'll go to trial right now.

Will: I guess that's not ideal, to go to trial, but I mean ultimately you could do battle and you could you could win. I mean there's a lot of things that could happen. um people could raise money off of it. So yeah so yeah man I mean. You know I spent 20 days in jail in the Maryland jail. Um it was supposed to be 30 and it was down to 20 with good behavior. I remember one of the worst parts about it especially in a lot of the in between phases was just not knowing what was going to happen next. That’s when my heart really went out to you. I was like this guy doesn't know if he's going to get out tomorrow or in a week or in a month or ever. Like you know what was going through your mind when you were in there? Like was it as scary as it looked? It looked scary.

Kroegeor: It was hard not not being able to be in the Sun and not being able to feel the grass or be around any nature. Not being able to see any friends or family. Your loved ones um you know having to live in a cell with someone that I didn't really get along with. Um not being able to sleep very well because the mattresses suck. It was terrible and accepting that reality was hard. I didn't really feel it in my bones that I lived there, like that was home, until like over two months in. And part of the problem was that I was supposed to be getting out on an ankle monitor. For some reason this farm took forever. I couldn't stay with anyone from climate activist groups because they're potential accomplices. So this Farm is perfect but it just took forever. The red tape to have to jump and cut through with the legal system made it difficult so something I could have been out for literally within a week of going in actually I had to stay for 95 days for it because of all the Hoops you have to jump through to be on house arrest. 

Will: Yeah that's kind of what we saw from the outside. It seemed like every week they said okay it looks like Kroegeor might be getting out this week and then they're like no you know he's not getting out.

Kroegeor: It was a nightmare all right.

You can join Declare Emergency at declareemergency.org

"Uninhabitable India (The Greatest Genocide)

India will have millions of deaths by the mid 2030s and then be uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years.

At 50C, is anyone really doubting Indian cities will be getting evacuated by their middle classes every spring and summer from 2030.

And the working classes will be dying in the streets. Piles of corpses.

The UK Labour party will not stop our corporate elites from organising this greatest ever genocide in human history.

• No cancellation of new oil licences.
• No investment in emergency decarbonisation.
• No putting Life before Capital.

They know and they stand by and they do nothing. No one should vote for this. No one with any sense of decency should vote Labour. Vote for independents and then join the resistance.

Roger Hallam, Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion, via @RogerHallamCS21 on Twitter, June 4th, 2024

Fossil fuel psychopaths have DELIBERATELY broken the actual planet we live on, DELIBERATELY killing billions of people across the coming decades. Let that sink in. They should be rotting in prison. But instead, last year, they were gifted $7,000,000,000,000 of OUR money.

Climate Dad, via @ClimateDad77 on Twitter, June 6th, 2024