Attacking science is attacking democracy

Complexity, enemy of action

Biodiversity suffers from a problem that climate does not have. It is invisible. Diffuse. Impossible to summarize in a degree, a curve, a date.

Tatiana Giraud, research director at CNRS and member of the Academy of Sciences, has decided to tackle it head-on. Her book, Biodiversity in infographics, the urgency of life: understanding to act, published on March 12, 2026 by Tana Editions, is an ambitious attempt: to make the complexity of life accessible to everyone, without betraying it.

We know the bees. We do not know what they depend on. We plant trees without knowing that three quarters of them do not grow without symbiotic fungi. We concrete without realizing that we are removing the natural buffers that absorb floods.

“Ecology is about interactions between hundreds, thousands of species, with beneficial relationships and antagonistic relationships,” explains Tatiana Giraud for La Relève et La Peste.

This complexity is a political as much as a scientific problem. What we do not understand, we do not defend. What we do not defend, we let die.

The project stems from her courses at the Collège de France, between 2020 and 2021. Twelve years of teaching at Polytechnique have taught her to read faces. Infographics are not an aesthetic choice. They are a pedagogical conviction. Showing the cascade of effects caused by the disappearance of the wolf in Yellowstone, overabundant herbivores, disappeared trees, departed beavers, dried up ponds, lost amphibians, takes pages of text. A diagram says it in one glance.

Science under attack

The context in which this book appears is not insignificant. In the United States, research funding is being cut by decree. Environmental data is disappearing from government websites. Researchers find themselves without positions from one day to the next.

Tatiana Giraud follows this closely. Some of her former American postdoctoral researchers are directly affected. “Some are really in very difficult personal situations. It’s terrible, and we feel that this movement is also happening in France, for the time being on a smaller scale.”

In France, the mechanism is different, but the direction is worrying. The voice of experts is increasingly challenged in the public space. Some media outlets put a researcher and a contradictor on equal footing without data or protocol. Opinion prevails over evidence.

“We put a hyper-expert scientist, who knows established data with rigorous protocols, face to face with someone who says the opposite without any argument or proof, and we present this as equivalent.” However, there is no ambiguity: “Science is not an opinion.”

The mechanism is well oiled. “As soon as we formulate a message that does not please some, we are immediately labeled as activists, which allows us to discredit the argument.” The label is enough. It allows avoiding addressing the substance.

Tatiana Giraud chooses, for now, to defend rigor as a shield, evidence as an argument, pedagogy as a strategy. She nevertheless understands those who choose another path.

“I completely understand colleagues, like the Scientists in Rebellion, who consider that calmly stating things with scientific evidence is not enough, and who choose other stronger forms of action.”

The diversity of positions within the scientific community is not a weakness. It is a diverse response to a collective threat.

From science to democracy

With the Academy of Sciences, Tatiana Giraud supported a text inspired by a Stanford Tribune, published notably in Libération. The message is clear: attacking science is attacking democracy.

“If we start to say that there is no longer a method to establish truth, no protocol to search for it, then we can say anything, and it is democracy itself that is in danger.”

Without shared truth, no debate is possible. Without debate, no legitimate collective decision. Misinformation about biodiversity is not just an environmental problem. It weakens the foundation on which all democratic life rests.

“Many solutions, especially technological ones, that are often imagined as answers, are actually inadequate and mainly serve as an excuse not to act.”

Understanding what biodiversity really is also means learning to resist these superficial discourses.

“This is a question of the common good. People should understand that it is their interest to protect their environment and their health, in the face of the financial interests of a minority benefiting from the destruction of life.”

Life is collapsing. The science that studies it is under pressure. Tatiana Giraud is betting on understanding remaining, despite everything, the first act of resistance.

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