Let These Rebel Scientists Rekindle Your Hope In The Future
In a remarkable new book, more than 20 researchers recount how they put their careers and their freedom on the line for humanity and a kinder future. The effect is joyful.
My anxiety has been replaced with an assurance that whatever the future holds I am part of a community that will respond with care and conviction. I have demonstrated to myself that I have the ability to be responsive to crises with a community I trust.
- Shana Sullivan, Scientists On Survival
Humanity finds itself at a crossroads. An illustration of this could be found in the week’s Big Silly Social Media Story, which was about an influencer called Ashton Hall, who purports to wake up at 3am to perform a series of increasingly arcane luxury rituals in a horrifying cycle of synthetic solitude. A kind of inverted monk, Ashton’s message is that you, too, can devise your own Roko’s Basilisk by pursuing all material Earthly pleasures, such that you might transcend society and become a being of pure, distilled Ego.
As superficially funny as it is, Ashton’s story is also profoundly depressing. There can be no doubt that countless thousands of people will look at his life and see not a being in profoundest duḥkha, but someone to admire and to emulate.
Not coincidentally, Ashton’s apparent worldview shares an awful lot—perhaps everything—with that of today’s Silicon Valley griftset. Not for nothing did NBC subtitle its recent piece about Bill Gates with the dark phrase “humans won't be needed”. Pursuing the explicitly fascist ideology of technocracy, the Musks, Thiels and Gateses of the world foretell of the very literally inhuman dystopia that they are directing all their Godlike resources towards achieving.
In the face of such apocalyptic nihilism, as we’re now seeing enacted and in too many cases acquiesced to all across the United States, courage is in short supply. The rapid descent threatens to sap us all of our anima.
Thankfully, a hefty dose of adrenaline has arrived in the form of Scientists On Survival, an account by more than two dozen activist-scientists—a group called Scientists for Extinction Rebellion—of how political ambivalence and planetary breakdown caused them to take to the streets and get into high-profile civil disobedience. And oh boy are their accounts inspiring.
Or perhaps inspiring is the wrong word. In my case, at least, reading these varied and deeply personal anecdotes of awakening, courage, fear and hope elicited feelings both of reassurance and of community. In turn, this generated joy.
Introduced by presenter and naturalist Chris Packham, the book is upfront about what it is and is not. Abi Perrin, who ditched a career in microbiology to take up activism, points out that this expressly isn’t another climate facts book, but a set of very personal, often emotional narrative accounts. Perrin points out that scientists aren’t just scientists: they’re regular people with interests, passions and lives of their own, who share a common desire. “What unites us is our fascination with and love for the world around us, and the incredible diversity of people and species which are part of it,” she writes. “We share a desire not only to understand our world but to protect it, too.”
She is also at pains to point out that minority and Global South voices are, in this volume, underrepresented, acknowledging the authors’ privilege. As the authors here note, elsewhere in the world, people who raise their voice are being disappeared and murdered. Global Witness reported last year that, in the space of a little over a decade, more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders have been killed for their activism. It's a suitably solemn starting point for such a work.
Scientists On Survival kicks off with the eminent scholar Stuart Capstick outlining exactly how humans got themselves into this mess, but moreover how we can, and must, get out of it. Revealingly, he notes that, following his first arrest, “a strange and gentle calm” descended on him: this was the experience, common to accounts by freedom fighters and other battlers of injustice, of knowing at a profound level that you are doing the right thing. That’s a sentiment echoed in a following chapter by cognitive psychologist Alison Green whose segment is titled “Why I Killed My Career”. Green’s story of apparent self-sabotage turns out to be one of emancipation. As Rebecca Solnit has written elsewhere, joy is an act of resistance. Capstick, Green and their fellow writers show that, chicken-and-egglike, resistance delivers its own joy.
Another common refrain throughout the book, yet told in each instance with unique colour and variety, is the recollection of “discovering” climate consciousness. This, it seems, is deeply personal to everyone: I, for example, will never forget the alarm inculcated in a 10-year-old me by a long-forgotten primary school teacher who—apparently very effectively—outlined the basics of what she called the greenhouse effect. Sitting at my Formica desk, I painted a crappy protest poster featuring an approximation of the Earth, and ran home to yell at my mum about it.
That very experience is mirrored in the book by population scientist Jen Murphy, who has carried that bucket-of-iced-water awakening throughout her career, and recounts her helplessness in the face of the anguish of a student who, in turn, has just received that knowledge. Yet she acknowledges that those same feelings lit within her “the glimmer of that empowering and hopeful version of the future”.
In her celebration of being both a teacher and a student, Murphy reminds you of the wonder you felt at discovering the natural world and the horror at the prospect of losing it all. That the world’s financiers and industrialists and so-called serious men have relegated such critical, intelligent, emotional wonder to the status of childish naivete is, collectively, thought-genocide; a crime against both nature and our nature. The enormity of that act has directly elevated our contemporary necropolitics, enabling such flatulent, Sauron-lite figures as Donald Trump to ooze their poisonous trail across our birthright.
But this isn’t a book that gives time to such villains: there is work to be done. In a segment focusing on the scientists' protest actions, Aaron Thierry delivers a gorgeous, lyrical account of overcoming his fear ahead of gluing himself to the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, again finding joy in the act while not shying from the uncomfortable, tragicomic farce of it all. After he is painstakingly peeled off the building by specialists and is sitting in the police van, Thierry takes the time to ask his arresting officer to look at the nearby Thames and imagine the city and his home inundated with water, then walks him through a crash-course on climate mechanics. The officer, originally from Romania, expresses bafflement at why Thierry would glue himself to a building—after all, he’d seen firsthand what a vengeful state can do to its people. “But,” Thierry responds, “wasn’t it ultimately a popular rebellion that forced Ceaușescu from office?”
Throughout their accounts, the authors of Scientists On Survival downplay their ironclad willingness to embarrass and make absolute spectacles of themselves in furtherance of their goals, and yet in a society that values decorum far more highly than it does conviction, that willingness alone is stirring. The people featured here repeatedly return to the theme of direct action being emancipatory in its own right; a feeling that, once discovered, doesn’t seem to go away. As the bios of the writers indicate, many have now dedicated their lives to activism full time, forgoing otherwise relatively comfortable lives as academics to tread a path that appears ever more precarious. As the book points out, many of the governments we might in moments of intellectual weakness describe as democracies are in the process of eliminating the prospect even of peaceful protest. Gentle, caring climate activists are being handed sentences more commonly associated with violent offences for what amount to thought crimes.
Scientists On Survival is, in a sense, a vessel of discovery: each crew member started out in a very different place, but arrived at the same destination—the realisation that power really does reside within. In recounting their journeys, each its own, singular thread, they weave a tapestry of kinship of which we are all, whether we know it or not, a part. Reinforcing this, one of the most powerful entries, and the last in the book, comes from physicist Shana Sullivan, who narrates her own sort of epiphany.
“I believed, all my life, that the power to change the world was in someone else’s hands. Someone more powerful than me,” she recalls. “I’ve come to a new belief that we should not need to appeal to ‘power’ for system change. Instead, a better world is made by uncovering and using the power we ourselves possess.”
Scientists On Survival is not a book that proffers some tired epithet about "saving the planet": it is about saving each other. It is a celebration of community in its broadest, richest sense, encompassing everyone determined to hammer the arc of our fragile existence toward justice. Let it radicalise you.
Scientists On Survival is out now in paperback. Order it.
Digital review copy kindly provided by Michael O’Mara books.
