Complexity, enemy of action
Biodiversity suffers from a problem that the climate does not. 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 about bees. We ignore 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 interactions between hundreds, thousands of species, with beneficial relations and antagonistic relations,” explains Tatiana Giraud for La Relève et La Peste.
This complexity is a political problem as much as a scientific one. What we do not understand, we do not defend. What we do not defend, we let die.
The project arises from her classes 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. It is a pedagogical conviction. Showing the cascade of effects caused by the disappearance of wolves in Yellowstone, excessive herbivores, missing trees, departed beavers, dried-up ponds, lost amphibians, takes pages of text. A diagram says it all in one glance.
Science under attack
The context in which this book is published 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 a job from one day to the next.
Tatiana Giraud closely follows this. Some of her former American post-docs are directly affected. “Some are really in very difficult personal situations. It’s terrible, and we feel like this movement is also happening in France, for now on a smaller scale.”
In France, the mechanics are different, but the direction is worrying. The expertise of experts is increasingly challenged in the public sphere. Media outlets put a researcher and a contradicter on an equal footing without data or protocol. Opinion prevails over evidence.
“We pit a hyper-expert scientist, who knows established data with rigorous protocols, against someone who says the opposite without any argument or proof, and 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 doesn’t please some, we are immediately labeled as militant, which allows the argument to be discredited. “ The label is enough. It allows one to evade addressing the substance.
For now, Tatiana Giraud chooses to defend rigor as a shield, evidence as an argument, and pedagogy as a strategy. However, she understands those who choose a different path.
“I totally understand colleagues, like the Rebel Scientists, who consider that calmly stating things with scientific evidence is not enough, and who choose other stronger forms of action.”
The diversity of stances within the scientific community is not a weakness. It is a diverse response to a collective threat.
Tatiana Giraud – Wikimedia Commons
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 saying 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 issue. It weakens the foundation on which all democratic life rests.
“Many solutions, especially technological ones, which are often imagined as answers, are in reality inadequate and mainly serve as an excuse not to act.”
Understanding what biodiversity really is also means learning to resist these facade discourses.
“It’s 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 that understanding remains, nevertheless, the first act of resistance.
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