Anniversary Forum

The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?

Linda Nash

WHAT UNDERPINS the study of history is the notion of human agency, the ability of people to act intentionally to shape their worlds. When modern historical scholarship emerged in the nineteenth century, it recounted the ability of European male elites to shape political and intellectual arrangements. With the rise of social history after World War II, historians sought to demonstrate that intentionality and purposive action were not solely the preserve of the powerful. In short, the premise underlying social history was the belief that agency resides in all human beings—not only elite European men, but Native Americans, women, workers, colonized peoples, slaves. More recently, environmental historians have argued that nature too has agency. This claim often has been met with skepticism. After all, the argument goes, although nature may resist and complicate human actions, producing all sorts of unintended consequences, nature has neither the intentionality nor the choice that humans do. Nature may constitute a dynamic structure, but it is not an agent. Human beings alone are the motor of history.1	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-91070-ZB. Environmental historians have studied the machine as a metaphor for nature, the factory as the site of disassembly of animal bodies and reshaping of human bodies, and the changing nature of both human and animal bodies. In an age of factory farms and genetic engineering, how might we consider the ways all of those themes come together in cultural understandings of nature? Frame 10 from a WWII Filmstrip, "More Milk for Victory," 1942.
I agree that there is a problem when environmental historians assert an "agency" for nature, but it is not that we are confusing agency and structure. Rather, the problem is that we have not overtly challenged common assumptions about human agency. What are these assumptions? Typically, the agency of human beings is distinguished by our ability to convert ideas into purposeful actions. Thus while it is not only human action that alters the world, human action remains unique. To invoke a classic example, while a bee can build a hive, the bee cannot envision the hive prior to its building. The bee just builds, whereas the human is presumed to think and then build. The bee is not an agent, while the architect clearly is.2 This assertion locates agency in the human mind, separating it from both the body and the non-human environment.	2
But what if, instead of following the model of social history and insisting on the "agency of nature," environmental historians followed those scholars who insist on the need to think about agency in altogether different terms. To give but two examples, Bruno Latour, in his studies of modern scientists and engineers, has maintained that agency is better understood as something that is dispersed among humans and non-humans in what he terms "actor-networks."3 Tim Ingold, an anthropologist, has argued that our point of departure for social analysis should be the organism-in-its-environment rather than the self-contained individual confronting an external world. This perspective, he suggests, allows us to overcome the dichotomy between evolution and history, biology and culture.	. . .