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Knowledge does not develop only in laboratories or “confined places”. It also needs “outdoor spaces”, places of confrontation between disciplines and with civil society or political decision, what Michel Callon named “hybrid forums”. For a little over 25 years, from 1975 to 2002, the Exploration and Multidisciplinary Research on Environment and Society Group (Germes) offered such a forum – a dialogue structure, unparalleled at that time, between researchers from all disciplines which stimulated collective reflection or co-production of knowledge on the environment, involving the scientific spheres, public officials and civil society at large. The article reports on the genesis of this group, in a context marked both by the emergence of environmental policies, the structuring of research on this topic and the influence of systemic thinking – still very strong in the 1970s. It then highlights the pioneering role that Germes played in three main directions: the promotion of a truly multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach to environment-development relations, modernization and democratization of public action and analysis of tensions and mediations between science, politics and civil society. Through the multiplicity of initiatives and documents published by Germes during this period – as, for example, the conference “ Les experts sont formels”, organized in 1989 –what we propose is a historical look at the transformation of ideas and knowledge on the environment in its relations with society. A look that is naturally partial and specific to France, but which makes it possible to relocate current research and debate into a long dynamic of knowledge, with its advances, its retreats, its continuities and its epistemological breaks...