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Since its early days, the political ecology is entangle with a (self)critique of science. However, the legacy of the radical critic of science from the 1970s is today invisible in the cultural transmission among researchers and within the ecologist movement. How can we explain it ? This paper aims to bring some answers by describing the critical political engagement of scientists between 1968 and 1981 and exploring the social, political and institutional reorganizations which have produced such occultation. The study of two moments is conducted : the political and industrial takeover of research in the 1980s, which gave birth to a new scientific ethos made of mediation and innovation ; and the “science and society” reformist movement of the 2000s which, pursuing a liberal regulation of technocapitalist innovations, aims to manage the protest resurgence by including civil society in its apparatus.