Hi Juan and Dr. McNeely,
Thanks Juan for the reference. I'll have a look at it in the near future.
Thanks also to Dr. McNeely for the comments and precisions.
I did not mean to suggest that we should manipulate ecosystems without caution.
I was more interested in the definition of ecological dysfunction, or in the
words of Dr. McNeely, of something being unfavorable to an ecosystem; in
relation to the analogy between functions of organs in organisms and those of
processes in ecosystems. In the case of the organ-organism relation, it makes
sense to say that some organs is diseased or malfunctioning. I was wondering if
such thing could be said about ecosystem processes in more than a metaphorical
or subjective way. I would think that it can, but I'm just a student and I read
many ecologists arguing that such assertions are too value-laden to be
scientific.
One approach is to invoke ecosystem services and to state that ecosystems are
dysfunctional when they stop providing the services that we need. However, this
makes the analogy with organisms imperfect, because, arguably, in the case of
organisms, the judgment that an organ is malfunctioning is an objective
judgment independent of any subjective interests (e.g. one can judge that the
liver of an wild animal is sick even if she does not care about what she could
possibly gain from this wild animal). So, I was wondering if something similar
could be formulated about ecosystems: a norm of function and dysfunction which
is objective and scientific, and so is independent of our desires and
interests.
Hope my questions make sense...
Antoine
