Why I, as a scientist, am a climate activist.
I take part in climate protests because research alone no longer feels like an adequate response to the scale of the crisis we face. The science is unequivocal: insufficient action is causing immense suffering and we face the possibility of irreversible harms. Yet despite decades of warnings, governments and corporations remain unwilling to change course.
Joining Scientist Rebellion allows me to align my professional understanding of the crisis with my moral responsibility as a citizen. Civil disobedience is a means of breaking through political complacency and communicating the urgency that data alone cannot convey. Standing alongside others from the academic world – scientists, students and other researchers – embodies the conviction that knowledge carries an ethical demand: to act when our politics fails.
In this sense, protest is not a departure from my academic role, but a continuation of it: an act of truth-telling in the public sphere.
Dr. Gerrit Schaafsma. Philosophy docent, Universiteit Leiden. Civil Disobedience (doctoral thesis: Contestation in the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Civil Disobedience).
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