Overwhelmed by the severity of the climate impacts and the resulting human suffering, Abramoff, who was completing her postdoctorate in France at the time, began volunteering for Extinction Rebellion, helping proofread the activist group’s documents and media statements. Once she returned to the U.S. to take up her position at Oak Ridge, she was ready to risk arrest, which she did when she joined the global Scientist Rebellion protest in Washington, D.C., on April 6.

She couldn’t sleep the night before, she recalls. However, she wasn’t nervous about the experience of being in a processing cell “but of not actually being able to accomplish the task, which was to chain myself with four other women to the White House gate”, she says. “And we managed it.”

Abramoff went on to be arrested six more times, most recently for chaining herself to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, whose approval U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law last year. The $6.6bn pipeline, which is set to carry 56.6 million cubic metres (2 billion cubic feet) of shelled gas a day across West Virginia and Virginia, is estimated to emit 89 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

In an opinion piece for The New York Times that she penned shortly after her dismissal from Oak Ridge, Abramoff describes how being a “well-behaved scientist” did not have any tangible effects. “I’m all for decorum, but not when it will cost us the earth,” she writes.