Earth Hero Interview: Scientist Rebellion
This is the third in a series of occasional articles on organizations fighting climate change. Read Earth Hero’s interview with As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar here and with Climate Justice Alliance Storytelling and Brand Manager Mark Chavez here. You can find additional articles from Earth Hero here.
By the nature of their work, scientists in many fields have been at the forefront of global efforts to blunt climate change. To cite just one example: Then-NASA climate scientist James Hansen’s congressional testimony in 1988 has long been touted for very publicly driving home the message that human-produced greenhouse gases are warming the Earth’s atmosphere.
But decades of research, reports, presentations, and warnings have failed to move world powers to reduce emissions sufficiently to deter environmental disaster, according to the global advocacy organization Scientist Rebellion. Today’s reality demands more forceful action—specifically nonviolent disobedience. In less than five years since its first protest—in which Scientist Rebellion co-founders Mike Lynch-White and Dr. Tim Hewlett painted the entrance to the Royal Society headquarters in London - upward of 7,000 scientists have participated in hundreds of actions. The scientists are recognizable in white lab coats as they block streets, protest outside businesses from BMW to investment firm BlackRock, or throw paint at select targets. Its members have often been detained, arrested, and even put on trial for their actions.
“Major transformations in society over the last 200 years, progressive transformations, things like labor rights, women's voting rights, rights for people of color, a big component of winning those rights … involved nonviolent direct action. It also involved many other tactics, including more advocacy work and political advocacy,” said Fernando Racimo, an evolutionary biologist working in Denmark. “But nonviolent direct action was a big component of how society was transformed in all these cases.”
Scientist Rebellion pledges to lead by example, create “centres of resistance” with academic and scientific institutions, and to support the actions and demands of other groups committed to nonviolent civil resistance. Alongside its commitments the organization lays out a five-part list of demands: that scientific and academic organizations cut all connections with fossil-fuel companies and other destructive business sectors, focusing instead on society changes; halting the drive for ever more economic growth at the expense of decarbonization and adaptation; establishing assemblies of the people to guide the transition to a post-carbon economy; abandoning extractavism; and calling for the release of all nonviolent activists and protecting democratic rights.
Racimo has been involved in about 30 actions with Scientist Rebellion. He is writing a book on the organization, and activism by scientists, to be published later this year.
In this Q&A he discusses the creation and mission of Scientist Rebellion, why it emphasizes nonviolent direct action, its belief that it is no longer possible to prevent the Earth from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, and how individuals can get involved in the work. This article has been edited for clarity and length.
Scientist Rebellion's mission statement is clear: That writing reports and giving presentations have not gotten us to the point where we need to be to press for sufficient action on the climate crisis. What brought the first members of Scientist Rebellion to this understanding?
It sort of sprung from this wave of civil disobedience movements, like Extinction Rebellion, that were pretty popular, especially in 2018, 2019, 2020. And what they and several other scientists that eventually became part of the movement were realizing is, we're giving all these reports, we're producing papers, we're telling people to be alarmed, we're telling people that we're in a crisis of massive proportions. We're saying all this, and it's very scary things to say, but we're not standing side by side with the people that are trying to steer policies in the direction that can at least prevent the worst versions of the catastrophe.
So it's sort of like where we're talking the talk but we're not walking the walk. And there was a realization at the time that scientists being shoulder to shoulder in these movements in action could send a very powerful signal to society that scientists are also freaked out. We're also realizing that all of this science-policy interface has not really worked. I mean, we’ve had dramatically rising emissions for the last 30 years. And so it could signal to society—look, the people that are really studying the problem, that can understand the problem well, are on the streets. They're also joining these mass movements. And so the first action was sort of an appeal to the rest of the scientific community to join this movement.
It was first two physicists, Mike Lynch-White and Tim Hewlett, who posted these scientific papers on the doors of the Royal Society, which is this very prestigious institution in London. I think it's the oldest scientific institution in the world that's still operating. And they chained themselves to the stairs of the doors and they were arrested for putting these papers on the door. The papers were papers that were published by the Society itself. There were papers about climate breakdown. But they were sort of saying, we're producing all this knowledge, but is this massive amount of knowledge really being acted upon? And that sort of sprung a whole wave of actions by scientists in multiple countries around the world that led to the formation of Scientist Rebellion.
What made nonviolent direct action seem like the most forceful, most viable approach then? And does that remain the case now?
Major transformations in society over the last 200 years, progressive transformations, things like labor rights, women's voting rights, rights for people of color, a big component of winning those rights … involved nonviolent direct action. It also involved many other tactics, including more advocacy work and political advocacy. But nonviolent direct action was a big component of how society was transformed in all these cases.
At the same time, the movement has been evolving in its tactics. I think at the beginning we were operating pretty similarly to what Extinction Rebellion was doing. So trying to appeal to those in power, asking those in power to tell the truth, to act. And I think that's changed over the years where now we're trying much more to speak about power rather than to power. So speak to the people on the ground, the people that are barely trying to make ends meet because the climate crisis is also a cost of living crisis. To say, look, these people in power, they're not acting on scientific evidence.
So we're trying to level down, kind of honor the trust the public's putting on us and saying, look, if we're being honest, people in power are not doing remotely what they should be doing to avert the worst consequences of the climate catastrophe. And even within that, there's also been an evolution. I mean, this type of campaigning has won some victories, but we're still on a pretty catastrophic trajectory, right? And I think still the movement is evolving and trying to figure out what are the best routes to go.
I'd say the biggest kind of philosophical change that has emerged a lot in the last few years in Scientist Rebellion is trying to align ourselves with the degrowth movement, with decolonization movements, with other movements that are engaging in similar struggles, trying to find where we can articulate demands and what we can pursue together. And part of the nonviolent direct action is obviously sort of like causing trouble, but it's also about building community, building connections with other people and trying to have them go through sort of a process of realization that like you can't just wait for people to vote for the right things. We're seeing right now, (the) emergence of fascism, authoritarianism all throughout the world. So it's becoming very clear to us that a lot more bottom-up organization is needed. And I think Scientist Rebellion is trying to engage with that sort of bottom-up organizing a lot more than they were a few years ago.
In terms of those more recent strategies, how do you then try to get your message to the public and how do you start building those connections with other members of the climate community?
One campaign together with another group called Growth Kills that Scientist Rebellion is doing, especially in Europe, but also in Abya Yala (Latin America), involves not so much telling people what to do or telling people that there is a massive crisis. It starts, like a lot of these actions start, by just asking people on the street what they see as the good life, what do they value in their lives? A lot of these actions start with gathering of information from random people on the streets. They were doing this a lot during Black Friday events and asking, what for you is a good life?
And then they are sort of channeling that into direct action in a way that creates disruption but does it in a way that reflects the larger wishes of society. So, for example, some of these actions have involved collecting these answers and then pasting these answers over billboards, over advertisements to say, well this is what people want. And so the capitalist system is not giving people what they value, what they see as a good life in terms of well-being. And a lot of this doesn't involve consuming more, producing more. It involves very basic things like having safe healthcare, like food, housing, the things that make our lives rich.
I think connecting with the degrowth movement especially has helped us a lot to figure out, OK, what are concrete policies that we could be pushing? So, for example, things like universal basic income, more commoning of public services, things that sound good because it involves less work, more provisioning, and doesn't necessarily sort of involve just the doom. So you have the doom of the crumbling system that we're in, but we're also trying to provide alternative visions of what our world could be in if we transformed it to something else.
When did you come to Scientist Rebellion? And what brought you to the organization?
So I've been in the organization, the movement, for a bit over four years. I was doing some sidelines work with Extinction Rebellion here in Denmark, but not really breaking the law, not really doing anything very high-risk. I was helping them with social media, with presentations. But after this action in the Royal Society, several actions started springing up in different countries in Europe—[for example] Germany, people putting scientific papers on the Ministry of Environment. There were actions in France, Switzerland, and Italy.
And within Denmark, I was in dialogue with other people, other scientists that were also very frustrated with the Danish government at the time. They had passed this law, which was very celebrated, it was the first climate law in the country’s history. They were promising to deliver fairly ambitious, or at least in relative terms, reductions of emissions by 2030. But just a few months after this law was passed, the government released their plan for how they would commit to the law. And the plan involved basically doing nothing for the first five, six, seven years and doing a lot in the last few years, which essentially means sort of passing the buck.
So we said, OK, let's do something that's a bit unusual, that will attract attention. And our first action in Denmark was a teach-in, which is also drawing from history. Teach-ins were this mode of action that sort of straddled the line between academia and activism. You give a lecture in an unusual space or on an unusual topic to alert society about a crisis.
The teach-in was basically on the street in front of the Climate Ministry here in Denmark. So we blocked the road in front of the Ministry. We brought chairs, people could sit. There were students, but also members of the public that could sit on the chairs that were placed on the road. And then a professor would be standing on a fruit crate, giving a lecture about some dimension of the crisis—ecological biodiversity losses, climate breakdown, capitalism and the links between imperialism and appropriation of labor.
The point of this was to do it in front of a building that sort of symbolized power in a way that got the media to react. And every Danish news outlet reported on this teach-in, from very right-wing conservative news outlets to very progressive academic newspapers. They even had to ask the Climate Minister why they had a bunch of scientists wearing lab coats giving a lecture just below his street if, as he was claiming, he was listening to the science. This sort of illusion was what we're trying to break. Since then in Denmark, we've been involved in a lot of campaigns, some targeting financial organisms that fund fossil fuels.
Currently we're in a campaign where we're demanding a ban on private jets. This is another focus of Scientist Rebellion, which has especially been stressed in the last few years, which we're also trying to direct attention to the ultra-rich, right, the people with the most power, the 1%, and trying to connect the massive amount of power these people have with how much they control the economy and how much they could change society but they don't. So we're trying to sort of build a class struggle as we engage in ecological struggle as well. And so we have a campaign where we're demanding, ban private jets in Denmark. We go every month and we block a street in front of the airport.
To your mind, what has been the most consequential aspect of Scientist Rebellion's mission, whether that's an action that really reverberated, a campaign, or even just the fact that it exists and is pushing scientists to action?
I guess on the surface probably the most consequential effect is it has sort of pushed the limits of the political; the conception of what scientists can do has changed a lot. I think right now it's not unusual to see scientists being arrested for particular actions. So people don't look at scientists in a weird way when they say, well, “I just got arrested or I just got detained last weekend engaging in action.” So in some sense normalizing scientists engaging in activism, engaging in politics.
So it's about maybe dissolving the myth that science is supposed to be neutral and not take a stand on the major crisis of society. Because usually just not taking a stand means sort of supporting whatever system is currently in place. I would say that's sort of on the surface, but to me much more deeply what has affected me the most is this giant community of scientist activists that now exist kind of like underground, but also overground, that enables a lot of other things beyond actions.
So I think one of the things that happens as you engage … is you find other people that are just as freaked out as you are, that are finding that within our academic departments these are not topics that are even discussed. And so you have a venue where you can talk about them freely and then organize together. And so you find other people in other universities, in other departments, with whom you can do things that are transformative in different ways. And this giant network of radical academics talking to each other did not exist before. And I think Scientist Rebellion has facilitated this.
There's many different ways you can get a bunch of scientists together to do something transformative beyond, you know, the standard conception of a lab or academic department. There's ways in which we can relate to each other that could be a lot more conducive to transformational change. So, yeah, this kind of community building, network building, that's happening between academics, between scientists, and also with other people outside of the academy has been very touching. It's also been humbling.
Part of engaging in movements involves meeting people that have been engaged in these fights for much longer than scientists have, indigenous environmental defenders, and learning from their experiences, learning from their knowledge, their wisdom, and realizing, as scientists, we sort of have a very narrow sliver of knowledge, which is what we're specialized in. But when it comes to big-picture thinking, systems thinking, we're very bad at that. And sort of humbly learning from people that know a lot about social media, about mobilizing has been really transformative.
One of Scientist Rebellion’s campaigns is 1.5 degrees is Dead, which I don't think is a controversial statement anymore.
We were saying it when it was controversial.
If that is the case, what is the best perhaps that we can hope for from Scientist Rebellion's point of view?
That was one of the earliest campaigns of Scientist Rebellion. And we were saying it when a lot of the mainstream scientific community, especially people in very high positions of power within the scientific community, were very averse to saying 1.5 is dead. Because in some sense the argument was, you know, we have to keep people hopeful. There's still a path there. I think this year we're definitely going to pass 1.5, and the prediction for the next few years temperatures will hover at 1.5 or even higher. I think the reason we launched that campaign originally was that we realized, if we're not honest with people, if we're not truthful about the situation that we're in, [then] we're not believable as science communicators.
And this illusion that 1.5 was salvageable at that time, I think a lot of us thought this is counterproductive. It's basically treating the public like children and not really engaging in truthful dialogue with them. That being said, you're asking, what's the better scenario? One could say, OK, now we're aiming for 2.5, now we're aiming for 3. They're all catastrophic scenarios, including 1.5.
Given the situation that we're in, I don't know where we're heading. I think most scientists agree it's somewhere between 2 and 4 [degrees], some even say more than 4. All of those sound horrible. And in all those cases, regardless of where we're heading, the best thing I could be doing as a scientist is trying to prevent the worst things from happening, right?
I think one thing we should be doing is less future thinking or less sort of scenario thinking and more realizing where we are now. It's been more than three decades of climate failure. Juat today, what are things that we can change, not thinking, 2030, 2040, 2050. Where we are now, what are things that we could push towards? And I mean this in a very concrete way.
The Danish government is currently opening up several oil fields in the North Sea. Those should not be opened up. Actually, fossil fuel production should be going down, not up!. So concretely, those oil fields should be closed down. Also, our government here is pushing for an airport expansion. And no, that should not be happening.
And what can we do with these spaces, these fossils spaces, if they were to be disassembled, instead of expanded. What could we replace them for instead? And so it's about thinking about, how can we concretely move towards a more democratic, more degrown, more decolonial future rather than thinking, OK, we're in the 2 degree trajectory or 3 degree trajectory, these are things that we can keep as they are and still be roughly OK. Because none of these scenarios are OK. Honestly, everything needs to change. So let's more think about the things that need to change rather than where we're going to be 30 years from now.
A lot of what Scientists Rebellion does is engaging questions of climate justice: Who has been damaged by the world we live in today, whose lands have been expropriated, whose people have been enslaved in order to maintain the current capitalist modern economy. So the past, I think, bears a lot on our present situation and I think that's something that sometimes gets a bit discarded. But it's crucial to understand how we can move towards a very different system than we're in right now.
Earth's Hero's mission is to advocate for individual and community engagement on climate change. How can people get involved in Scientist Rebellion's mission?
We advocate for both individual and collective action. I think we see them as highly related. A lot of people that join movements end up taking a lot of individual lifestyle choices, which sort of feed back on their collective work.
In terms of joining what you can do on the Scientist Rebellion website, scientistrebellion.org, is you can send an email. We have chapters in over 30 countries. Send an email if your country is represented there. We also have intro sessions, some in English, some in Spanish, some in German, some in other languages, that are happening every month, if not every week, depending on the chapter.
Basically, it's a Zoom chat where you get to meet other people from the movement and they can direct you to where in your local area you could meet other Scientists Rebellion members and try to see what you could do within the movement.
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