Deux portraits sur le bureau de Pierre Dansereau pour être [vraiment] au monde

• Published in: Dynamiques environnementales
• Main Author: Schroeder, Jacques
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux 2017
• Subjects: Dansereau; paysage; explorateurs/naturalistes; sociologie végétale; solidarité biologique; écologie humaine; landscape; explorers/naturalists; plant sociology; organic solidarity; human ecology; lang; droit; Arctic; Canada
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4000/dynenviron.529; http://journals.openedition.org/dynenviron/529

Since 1976 and for nearly 30 years, Pierre Dansereau has been working at Université du Quebec in Montreal. Collaborators as well as visitors often noted that, on his desk, there were two small frames with reproductions of Darwin and Humboldt portraits. Life stages of this ecologist’s life, who died in 2011, can be used to recall how knowledge about the world of living has evolved in the 20th century and what part he took in it. His early childhood fascination with words and its enjoyment to be in touch with things were followed, in teenage years, by an enlightenment coming from contact with «French Canadian», French and English literature. Sailing for two years toward Arctic and Tropics led him to study plants, discover the heuristic effectiveness of Darwinism and complete a PhD in Geneva. Back in Canada, on the eve of World War II, he studies maple’s forests, develops and validates its «plant sociology» and teaches successively in 3 universities. Now a renowned researcher, he travels and participates in the strengthening of the Evolutionary Synthesis. In 1957 he published «Biogeography: an Ecological Perspective. Away from ambient academicism, he sets plants and animals, from individuals to populations, in a dynamic landscape enabling others to understand the complexity of their distribution. As a new editorial phenomenon, Dansereau ends his book with a chapter on “Man’s impact” on the natural environment. The ever-increasing growth of world population and the ascertainment of natural systems limits, push Dansereau to develop its ‘human ecology’, in line with his plant sociology. The perspective is however turned around since it is imperative for humans to anticipate the consequences of desired development. Hence his “ever enlarged sympathy”, dear to Darwin, is transformed into an efficient organic solidarity. Such a solidarity has the advantage of relying on world realities that were uncovered by the previous century explorers and naturalists. They discovered lands and seas and helped develop comprehensive ...