Résumé
Environmental specimen banks (ESB) emerged in the 1970’ to study contamination and accumulation of pollutants in the environment and to evaluate the efficiency of public policies of chemical risk management, through the collecting and long-term storage of samples collected in various ecosystems and their differed analysis with new techniques.Relying on sociological works on knowledge infrastructure, the communication focuses on the visions of future embedded within these knowledge infrastructures and their agency on present practices of conservation. Based on a comparison between the German ESB and the ongoing project of “Water Library” (Aquathèque, PEPR OneWater), which would be dedicated to freshwater and aquatic environments in France, we show how visions of future frames their design and evolution, their present or projected uses for acting on environmental regulation policies or struggles. The communication points out how uncertainties and ambiguity about future influence these infrastructures with distinct institutional configurations and technical choices. If both rely on the predicted arrival of new analytical techniques to build up more knowledge, they encapsulate distinct visions of future and ways to act on the causes of environmental degradation. Designed to study anthropogenic pressures and threats, as pollution by man-made chemicals, the German ESB project extend these negative trends and anticipate gradual evolutions, such as the substitution of chemicals by new one, relying on standardization and cryopreservation. Taking also into account the climate change and the steady loss of biodiversity, the Aquathèque project searches for renewed ways to construct an archive open to civil society and ecologically sober.