Tarpan ou Konik polski ? Mythe contemporain et outil de gestion écologique

The current fashion for large indigenous "primitive " herbivores goes hand in hand with a social discourse on nature, generalized procedures of inventorying species and the insistence upon the necessity of protecting an increasingly endangered patrimony. These "archaïc herbivores" seem to typify in both a symbolic and a concrete manner the new set of rela-tionships that practicing ecologists are developing with animals, nature and territory. Let us attempt to summarize them in the following words: to fabricate the wild and to restore natural Systems that have disappeared. We have followed the history of the Tarpan-Konik polski (a small Polish horse), going more deeply into the subject matter that was already developed by the interdisciplinary meeting "The environmental crisis : ethics, science, politics" (1994). We will discover the role played by scientists in Poland in the period between the two World Wars in the birth of a national myth through the agency of this small horse with re-created origins.