L'écologie humaine de Pierre Dansereau et la métaphore du paysage intérieur

Abstract

Pierre Dansereau's reputation is well established in the world of environmental sciences, and more specifically in ecology and human ecology. The man's recent passing, a few days before his centennial, has brought up a wave of recognition for his long career and great humanist engagement. In this paper, we explore the scientific side of his work in human ecology. Our goal is to measure its actual scientific relevance in the light of two related epistemological challenges faced by all sciences concerned with the nature-culture dualism, that is the use of naturalistic explanations and that of metaphors. Naturalist metaphors, we argue, are over simplistic regarding the complexity of the symbolic dimension of the human-nature relationship. After an evaluation of the pitfalls of the principal metaphors in the sciences of ecology and human ecology, we show that while Dansereau's human ecology is anchored into one of them, it avoids the fallacy that consists of ignoring the importance of symbolic representations in our relation to the environment. P. Dansereau does so by introducing the beautiful metaphor of the inscape. © NSS-Dialogues, EDP Sciences 2012.