Michael Pollan recently published an essay in the New Yorker (December 2013) introducing the notion of ‘plant intelligence’ and how plants have evolved by virtue of their lack of mobility to cultivate and attract the resources they require. Although not using the humanistic language identified with ‘agency’, a widely used term most frequently associated with human motivation, action and accomplishment, Pollan lends his implicit support for the communicative ‘behaviours’ of plants and their own brand of agency in effecting change in the world. Veronica Strang champions this view for the role of the non-human organic world, but moves a step or two further in suggesting that the inorganic has its own sense of agency. And though she and those phenomenologists whom she cites attribute agency to all things, it is difficult for some of us to entirely accept such a premise.
Strang is an influential scholar who has published widely on the role of water as a principal resource, perhaps the fundamental resource for all life on Earth (air and light are right up there too). Granting water agency rather on its own terms seems to be the thrust of her present piece – logic felt necessary to accent its physical properties in the context of its present overexploitation by humanity, principally following our recent neo-liberal and Western world view. Although I am fully appreciative of much of what the author articulates, I am not sure ‘agency’ is productively attributable to non-human life forms or the inorganic.
By way of definition, the term ‘agency’ is used so often and widely that its meaning can be confusing for many of us. Of course context is everything, but my use of the word suggests a human thought process – ‘water is good to think’, Strang's own adaptation from Lévi-Strauss. Although plants and animals can be identified with behaviours and patterns of activities, humans interpret those behaviours and patterns and discern their meanings. We work and play in their world, with all the interdependencies implied by our evolutionary and developmental pasts. Together with the inorganic elements – water, fire, air and earth – societies are constrained and find opportunities to approach degrees of well-being in the only material world we know. It is the human mind that deciphers the codes posed by their ‘natural’ patterning.
I understand the argument that domestication was a set of variable pathways, with plants, animals and perhaps even the inorganic elements adapting to facilitate their own ‘lifeways’ in allowing human society to flourish or at least develop as the most influential force for radical and sustained change on the planet over the last 10,000 years. Recent discussions concerning how far back in time this ‘Anthropocene’ extends are debated. Regardless, the unfortunate truth of humanity's seven billion consumers today is that our most pressing influence is by way of changing the global climate. This powerful human hand has forced itself into and through the relatively slow-moving, accretional developments in the biophysical landscape of the Earth, and it is this principal development that now argues against an agency attributable to the non-human. Because of the concentration and speed of our minds – inclusive of the conscious, the less conscious, and the attendant ‘unintentional consequences’ of often rash decisions and actions – we can and do interrupt the checks and balances set in place by Lovelock's notion of Gaia. Our societal separation from the non-human world is our ability to plan, project and implement a future; and through our conscious recognition of the interdependencies we have cultivated with the non-human world, we have driven and will drive many plants and animals to extinction. Without developed sentience – agency – they have limited options but to follow our path.
Our earthly mismanagement will be of consequence to our present definition of humanity, forcing millions of us toward catastrophic ends. And though the organic and inorganic worlds will likely redefine themselves – as palaeontology has vividly shown – our overexploitation will drag many of today's plants and animals down with us as both global sea levels and temperature rise. Although humans are highly resilient, measured in part by our technologies that buffer and distance us from the fluctuations and extremes of the environment, we will be but a subset of ourselves if our collective human minds do not attribute a different and deeper value to life on this planet.
I, too, think of myself as a water scholar, and try to be inclusive of the all-encompassing influence it has on this planet (Scarborough Reference Scarborough2003; in press). As a field archaeologist having worked in several regions of the world, my interests are in how ecologies have been altered by societies and, in turn, how engineered landscapes modify the course of culture (human niche construction). Although archaeologists frequently apply the term ‘agency’ to the material record – the shreds and patches of the preserved past – my bias rests in an assessment of the environment as it acts upon the social collective, societies' reaction to the ecological settings they produce and consume, and, in turn, how these groups socially structure themselves. Although our excavations do allow a sometimes tentative view of the individual, our lens can generally only magnify at the family level of abstraction at best – the house or shelter – and then permit meaningful assessments about the course or coarseness of life at the community level. Notions of agency are different for the ethnographer, or the ‘instrument’ assigned to the interviewee by a sociologist; historians, too, can locate that occasional literate individual commenting on his person – perhaps most apparent with kingship and nobility as society develops into more complex appearances.
The archaeological record can show how societies have deliberately modified their surroundings, perhaps most significantly by way of altering the movement and containment of water. I do not see water as having a mind of its own or any sentience to deliberately work for or against human interests. Water simply is and humans have directed its course with all the unintended consequences of their efforts. The volume of water on the planet is fixed, and it will continue with its cycle of vapor to liquid to ice with or without the human mind. However, our escalating dependence on technology initiated with those first stone tools, but accelerating with growing social complexity, has disrupted the flow of water in a dramatic manner. What archaeology can offer is the myriad of low-tech solutions to move and collect water at the level of the community – techniques and associated methods that were frequently a glove fit with societal structures of shared social identity and common pool resources.
Linton (Reference Linton2010, cited by Strang), in his most compelling book, makes it clear that we are not outside the hydrological cycle but are part of, and heavily influence, its rhythms and circulations. The idea of water is big and understanding its sacred place rather than its mundane and predictable availability is an important lesson yet to be accepted or acculturated by the dominant drivers of a Western world and our all-pervasive, fast-paced, materialistic consumerism.
Of special merit is the notion provided by Aaron Wolf (Reference Wolf2000; Reference Wolf2007) that historically water conflicts seldom result in major warfare. The first recorded treaty has been attributed to a water deal between Lagash and Umma along the Euphrates drainage (2nd millennium B.C.), and since then humans have been negotiating water allocation, access and rights in collaborative and lasting agreements. What is it about this medium that unites many times more often than it divides, even in the most drought-prone zones? Perhaps it is the immediacy of its effect on a neighbour when it is made unavailable for a day, a week. So it is the humanity in humanity that unites us and water; if it were to have agency, then it would know this.
Is the requirement to grant ‘agency’ to things the need to have things then push back on the detrimental ways in which societies are disrupting the balance between the non-human and the human? If this is the endgame for this definition of agency, then there may be at least as convincing other ways to engage change and a mindful understanding of the earthy processes of which societies are but a component (though a highly influential and integrated component). It is true that non-Western societies have given ideological agency to both non-human life and the inorganic world that has surrounded them, but to do so sacrifices notions of evolutionary theory and frequently conflates historical time depth. The Water People or the Bird People of indigenous groups are highly significant metaphors and concepts that have unified and worshipfully affected the fundamental fabric of many societies. However, they need separation from our science and aspects of our scholarship. We need both, but like church–state separations they require some distance from one another if we are to most effectively address our societal human futures and project a world where myths and metaphors of non-Western ways can be thoughtfully contextualized.
