Contenu du sommaire : Les mondes des inventaires naturalistes *

As the eighteenth-century world was disputed between rival empires, European naturalists were competing to bring back useful knowledge of the natural world from their increasingly frequent expeditions. At the same time, many natural environments in Europe were being investigated by scientists and nature enthusiasts. Naturalistic collections were being enhanced by substantial amounts of material or virtual data. Books on botany boomed, with a hundred titles published worldwide, which included botanical art. Therefore, botanists had to deal with a massive amount of newly-discovered plant species and turn their attention to a proper method of classification.

Using the case of the European otter, this methodological article proposes a socio-historical analysis of the construction of naturalist knowledge as opposed to traditional knowledge and to contemporary lay observations, likewise disqualified by the recognized field of knowledge on otters. It sheds light on the relations between producing an inventory and its external environment. The calibration and standardization of the inventory data make it possible to gain a full grasp of all the otter's possible behaviours. Are not the characteristics usually attributed to the animal (rare, discreet, etc.) also the result of another history, that of its constant adaptation to ecological and human conditions?

In 1966, the senior official Philippe Saint-Marc was selected by Olivier Guichard, the government delegate for territory planning and regional action, to implement an “inter-ministerial assignment for developing the Aquitaine coast.” Saint-Marc called upon the conservation services of the National Museum of Natural History to collect data on a specific part of the territory – the Aquitaine hinterland, characterized by its abundance of ponds and marshlands. In this area one finds side by side the logic of public development and the logic of naturalistic exploration. This article describes the first phase of the mission from 1964 to 1969, which also marks the beginning of public inventories compiled by the museum. “The spirit of the mission” in this specific case, refers as much to the administrative model as to improvising protocols in order to gather naturalist data.

Using a field study on green space in the city of Grenoble, the authors show that the introduction of naturalist inventories in the urban environment constitute a technology of education that participates in a change in “the system of perception.” Previously treated as resembling “nature morte” (“dead nature,” the French term for “still life” in art), these green spaces were progressively seen as ecosystems where biodiversity was burrowed, waiting to be discovered and preserved. This shift is based on a process of educating the attention of gardeners, which revealed a growing range of beings and a way of seeing in a new manner what they had been used to seeing differently. This evolution was also based on the constitution of new collectives – the establishment of links with external specialists, the designation of “referents” within the services maintaining the green spaces, the supply of equipment both textual (guides, charts, and identification cards) and technical (butterfly nets, boxes, etc.), along with the arrival of new species of animals and plants.

Created in 2010 under the aegis of the Ministry of Agriculture, the “Agricultural Biodiversity Observatory” (ABO) carries out biodiversity monitoring in agricultural areas whose data are provided by a network of volunteer farmers. It stems from the convergence between a farming world seeking to take over leadership on environmental issues, a concept of biodiversity now redesigned in its functional dimension, and the booming of participatory ecology. This article analyzes the local appropriation of this “citizen science” program. Participating in the ABO enables the agricultural sector to position itself vis-à-vis environmental issues. It helps farmers re-establish experiences of nature and its processes as well as expertize the state of their farmland. It also supports the reconfiguration of professional relations, especially between farmers and extension services. The ABO helps farmers re-anchor farming practices in the environment. This is particularly opportune at this moment when agricultural paradigms are moving from artificialization to the stewardship of nature.

The preservation of biodiversity necessitates global knowledge attained by connecting pieces of information that have been dispersed in the multiple data banks around the world. Starting with the implementation of the Système d'information sur la nature et les paysages (Information System about Nature and Landscapes, the SINP) created at the initiative of the Ministry of Ecology, the authors have put the notion of transparency into action in order to analyze the passage from the artisanal and specifically local production of naturalist data to the globalized world of big data. They point out firstly that naturalists' data – collected from associations whose public interest has been recognized – are “embedded” in the territory along with its social bonds. They go on to speak about how, in the dynamic of the SINP, there is a process of standardizing and uprooting the data as it is removed from its context. Thus the local associations, in fear of being dispossessed of their data, have developed diverse strategies to control access to them, likewise insisting on their particular skill at maintaining a sustainable vigilance on their own territory.

“Our Planet Revisited” is the name of a series of naturalist inventories, organized by the National Museum of Natural History of Paris and the NGO Pro-Natura International since 2006. Is it about reiterating a previous naturalist adventure or is it about inventing something new? Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork, we have characterized the kind of transactions that the expeditions' entrepreneurs-organizers experimented with actors of scientific institutions, private funders and media, and governments. In our examination, we show how this question of innovation refers to a more general discussion about the transformation of North-South relationships and of the modes of scientific production.