The dominant discourses on nature justifies its protection because of the ecosystem services it offers (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) and the resilience of nature-based solutions to human problems (Cohen-Shacham et al., 2016). In this perspective, the different components of nature should be understood as more or less contributing to the maintenance of processes useful to humans. This discourse frame the paradigmatic puzzles (Kuhn, 1963) posed by the natural sciences in a functionalist reasoning: What are the functions provided by the various components of ecosystems? The functional approach has supposedly more systematic explanatory power than a taxonomic approach. In this paper, I propose a thought experiment to question this assumption.
Geographers have long documented the uneven geography of knowledge. Entire sections of the living world are not documented and their functions remain unknown. We can imagine that we ignore the existence of very dangerous for earthworms pathogens. Let’s call them anti-worms. Let's imagine that anti-worms are in low numbers because they need a resource for which they are in competition with another group of species, the worm-friends. For humans of the Anthropocene, the history of soil fertility is a history of the presence of worms, sometimes disturbed by deep ploughing, sometimes favoured by the addition of organic matter. But if we knew about the anti-worms, we would celebrate our history as one permitted by worm-friends, without whom the beneficial earthworms would have disappeared.
In fact, human have only discovered their dependence from a species when they experienced its disappearance. To stick to a functional framework is to assume that the functions we know are sufficient to explain the maintenance of the processes on which we depend.
Our ignorance of the unknown functions of living organisms should lead us to reconsider the interest of geographically contextualized systematic knowledge on nature.
Mots clés : ignorance|fonctionalism|taxonomical knowledge|context
A102834GB