For three weeks, the leaves have been falling from the trees in my garden. They fall from thirst. Every morning, a few more cover the terrace, still green, barely yellowed at the edges. Under the effect of water stress, the tree sheds part of its foliage to limit its water loss. A survival strategy. Silent. Well before fall time.
Naturalists know how to read these signs. It’s a watchman’s art. See what the landscape whispers about. A caterpillar that misses its appointment with a still tender host plant. An undergrowth that cracks underfoot from July onwards, dry as we only expected in the middle of August. This year, the signs did not have time to remain discreet. Early drought, repeated fires: the living have stopped murmuring, they have raised their voices.
Biodiversity makes our territories habitable
The farmer exercises the same art of monitoring on his land. He reads the soils which dry out too early, the crops which struggle to hold on, as the naturalist deciphers the forest. Both sense the flaw before it is given a name. The climate has become an unstable component of their profession.
And meanwhile, the text adopted by Parliament this week opens, for certain agricultural uses, the possibility of derogating from the ban on acetamiprid and flupyradifurone. The first is a neonicotinoid banned since 2018. The second, banned since 2020, acts in a similar way. For these two substances, risks and effects on certain pollinators are documented.
The reasons given by their defenders include: the impasse in which many farmers find themselves, caught between climatic hazards, pests, economic constraints and production requirements. Presenting this situation as a choice between agriculture and biodiversity would be easier. Above all, a lie. It is the relationships between soils, plants, insects, rivers and human uses that make our territories habitable.
The living being treated as a minor power
However, we have chosen to treat the living as a minor power, confined to the borders assigned to it while the real decision is made elsewhere. A long time ago, we carved out a separate ministry and a budget line that we cut first. The norms that protect it come across as obstacles, in a law that claims sovereignty.
Living things ignore this hierarchy. Hedges slow down the wind and encourage water infiltration. Structured soils retain more. Pollinators contribute directly to our food. We depend entirely on life, whether we recognize it or not.
An insecticide does not stop at the organism it targets. It exposes non-target organisms through soil, water, nectar or pollen. It also affects them indirectly, by making the insects that birds and bats feed on scarce. It’s never a species that we reach, it’s everything that has to do with it. This overflow also applies to this law, which is not limited to pesticides.
Have the courage to translate our knowledge into political actions
It facilitates defensive shooting against wolves, modifies the rules for compensating for damage to wetlands, and these are just two articles among several dozen. Each provision, taken in isolation, is justified by a sectoral emergency. Together, they outline a single way of inhabiting the world: treating each of the relationships that link us to life as a variable to be adjusted under pressure.
We know how to measure temperatures, soil humidity, the decline in animal populations, and fires observed from space. The evidence is piling up. What is missing is no longer knowledge. It is the courage to translate it into politics. Reintroducing an insecticide whose ecotoxicological risks are documented occasionally protects production.
But this response weakens the balances on which agriculture relies. The real trade-off is therefore not between agriculture and biodiversity. It opposes an agriculture condemned to increasingly compensate for the degradation of its environments with an agriculture capable of coming to terms with living things. The climate has already changed the rules of the game. Our laws continue to answer the questions of a vanished world.
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