What responsibilities of geosciences in the turmoil of the Anthropocene? Example of a political ecology perspective.

Given the ever-widening gap between current policies and the socio-economic transformations required to mitigate and adapt to the ongoing environmental and related social upheaval, a growing number of academics question their role within and beyond academia. Geoscientists are holding important responsibilities, some of them they could be regarded as accountable for: if, on the one hand, they bring strong disciplinary knowledge on climate change, and they contribute to modeling scenarios of socio-economic trajectories (and, therefore, sociological imagination); on the other hand, as geological survey is key to fossil fuel exploration and minerals extraction, they have close relationships with companies and institutions that are threatening the habitability of the planet. Accepting those responsibilities means a significant departure from the research-as-usual stance, which defines a barrier between knowledge and how society uses that knowledge. Geoscientists who do not consider such a barrier as relevant may act in many different ways, such as taking moral positions in the professional arena, learning from humanities within interdisciplinary studies, or adopting a situated knowledge standpoint in place of the illusory principle of scientific neutrality. We should emphasize that these behaviors do not necessarily undermine scientific integrity. But they do reflect an epistemic view different from research-as-usual, and which requires learning and careful practices. Under the Atécopol acronym (“Atelier d’écologie politique”), the Toulouse Studies in Political Ecology is a network of academics created 5 years ago to experiment those practices. The Atécopol collectives (now about 7 in France) take a political ecology perspective, in which environmental issues necessarily imply socio-economical choices. These choices convey representations and value systems that require scientists to take a reflexive and situated stand. The collectives bring together a diversity of disciplines and professional status, with the aim to create bridges between scientific knowledge and social and political debates at a regional scale and beyond. As such, they constitute an alternative way to conduct scientific research leveraging conscious, transformative actions: an ethical posture, transdisciplinarity, horizontality and reflexivity. The Atécopol collectives therefore intend to transform local organizations and institutions within the research community, and more broadly within society as a whole. The actions undertaken so far by the Atécopol collectives include (i) knowledge circulation, such as, training, communication and scientific events, (ii) appeals to the general public in the form of opinion columns and petitions, (iii) initiating local interdisciplinary research projects and (iv) challenging research policies. Here, we intend to share the outcomes of these experiences in order to pause, reflect upon and radically question research-as-usual in the field of geoscience.