“Science is everyone's business,” Jerome Santolini (Scientist in Rebellion)

This is unprecedented and indicates a state of deep distress… On November 30, 13 scientists were put on trial on charges of occupying the world. National Museum of Natural HistoryNational Museum of Natural History In Paris to denounce the urgency of the environmental crisis and the government's inaction on climate action. These activists, who have since been released*, are part of the “Scholars in Rebellion” movement, launched in February 2020 in France, which calls for civil disobedience to try to make their voices heard. Beyond this commitment, it is our entire relationship with science that is worth questioning, as analyzed by Jerome Santolini, a life sciences researcher, one of the coordinators of Scientists in Rebellion and director of Citizen Science, an association that seeks to bring back science. In the community.

*The reason is “unclassified crime”

More and more scientists are speaking out and participating in acts of civil disobedience. Why ?

Citizens' movements for climateclimate Activist mobilization has become increasingly common, whether the Fridays for Future campaign was launched in 2018 by Greta ThunbergGreta Thunberg Extinction Rebellion began that same year, the first major civil disobedience movement in decades. For two or three years, whistleblower scientists have also been involved in responding to emergencies, especially climate and environmental ones. They're still a very small minority, but it's like wildfire. In 2020, thousands of us signed a platform calling for peaceful civil disobedience, marking the founding of Scholars in Rebellion. Since then, dozens of events have taken place around the world, in front of Dassault's headquarters in Paris, at the BMW showroom in Munich, etc. We are looking for other ways to have our voice heard. As scholars, our task is to produce knowledge but also to disseminate it in the public space. For moral reasons, we cannot hide it, act as if it does not exist, as if we do not know. This would be “failure to help humanity at risk.” Seeing this knowledge ending up in drawers in this emergency context is unbearable. It is this serious imbalance in relations between scholars and politicians that justifies our call for civil disobedience. 50 years after the Meadows Report, and 35 years after the organization's first report Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeIntergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeNothing changes. Despite warnings from scientists or international organizations such as the United Nations, intergovernmental conferences continue and do not provide any concrete response to the climate and environmental crises. Researchers' discomfort leads some to break away from business as usual in research, others to change topics to find meaning, others to abandon the institution, careers to decline, and burnout to increase. Some of them, more and more, are participating.

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