Ecological Agency
Sebastián Figueroa Rubio
It is common to distinguish between happenings and doings. We usually assume that there are changes in the world that do not just happen, but seem to have a specific directionality and that they are the doing of someone. Generally speaking, an agent is the one who has the power or powers to intervene in the world.
The exercise of agency involves a variety of skills, abilities, and dispositions that are configured and organised in different ways to produce that intervention. This typically results in agents expressing themselves in non-random behaviours as they interact with their environment.
The exercise of these capacities involves at least three things: the possibility to act voluntarily and intentionally, the possibility to understand and account for one’s own behaviour and that of others (sometimes by giving reasons) and to express through behaviour how we see and understand our lives (e.g., our commitments). In this sense, the control associated with agency can be more or less complex and includes the perspective of the agent (Moya, 2017 ch. 1), which makes it possible to explain the relationship between behaviour and the psychology of the individual (Ferrero, 2021; Tomasello, 2022). It is this schema that defines a set of motivations and ways of doing that generate a form of being in the world, that different species have developed, and that allow individuals to adapt and flourish in a changing reality.
Although, in general, agency can be attributed to collectives and individuals, what has been said in the previous paragraphs leads us to focus on individual agency. The difficulty of making the distinction in plants makes it advisable to focus on human and non-human agency in the animal kingdom, without denying the agency of plants nor that the analysis here can be extended to them (Ryan, 2012).
To think about agency in ecological terms is to consider the relationship of the individual to his or her social and natural environment as constitutive of agency (which does not imply a dichotomous distinction between nature and society). This entails that individuals develop in an environment on which they depend not only in the basic sense that their survival is subject to it, but in a more complex sense according to which the development of the various elements of their agency is determined in and by that environment.
This has at least two consequences for the way agency has generally been conceptualised. The first is that it diverges from the idea that we are self-contained beings, a common assumption in modern thought. According to the modern view, agency manifests itself primarily in individual autonomy, linked to the possibility of self-constituting and self-managing what one does independently of others. This has led to an idealised understanding of human agency (i.e. as agents who always act rationally) and, in turn, to the notion that only members of the human species have the capacity to be agents. This can be understood as a variable of anthropocentrism.
The aforementioned, in turn, leads us to another consequence, as it has been common for several centuries to create dualities and differentiations between the human species and other species (García Rodríguez, 2023, ch. 1), with non-human animals being viewed as machines rather than agents. Like many of the post-humanist approaches, the notion of ecological agency challenges these dichotomies by opening the door to the attribution of agency to non-human animals in a more sophisticated way than usual, giving room to incorporate the complexity of diverse ways of inhabiting the world into this notion. More details about how both issues are expressed are shown in what follows.
Beginning with the human aspect of ecological agency, one first issue to consider is how deeply social the species is. Kevin Timpe has developed an ecological vision that takes this into account by pointing out that what he calls an ambitious thesis should be adopted, according to which “the [agential] capacities themselves, or at least a significant sub-set of those capacities, depend on social or environmental factors. That is, what an agent can do depends, at least in part, on those social or environmental factors” (Timpe, 2019, p. 21).
To show this, the author considers examples of how the development of certain basic abilities is socially configured. He cites studies that show how, in people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, akinesia manifests itself in different ways depending on the context in which the movements are performed. When the person must initiate movements themselves, they have much greater difficulty than when they do so in response to a command or in other contexts that involve socially mediated interactions. Similarly, Shaun Gallagher (2020, ch. 2) argues with respect to certain cases of ideomotor apraxia in which motor control improves in contexts where actions have social significance.
It should be added to this that interactions within a community have three significant features. First, they generate content about how to interpret one’s own actions and those of others, creating knowledge that individuals acquire in social learning processes. Second, our psychology and the idea of self-control are developed and cultivated within a community (Vargas, 2020). Finally, societies produce symbolic and material structures within which a notion of normality is formed in which individuals develop and construct a self-image.
Finally, this kind of relationship takes place in a broader context that includes other living beings and nature (v. ecodependency). On the one hand, we develop relationships of varying intensity with other animals and plants (e.g., the various types of domestication, or even develop aesthetic judgments and compare ourselves to other species in order to make them). This conditions our actions and the conceptual framework in which agency unfolds. The culture in which agency is modelled is embedded in an environment that sets limits to it and challenges the imagination of its members. It influences economic, religious, artistic, and ethical action and shapes the way we define and understand the limits and consequences of our agency (Haudricourt & Bardet, 2019). This in turn shows the possible consequences of our actions for the world (v. Ecological Responsibility)
Given this background, it is not surprising that the behaviour of members of other species is determined by their socialisation, their relationship to other species and their natural environment, and by their cognitive, motor, and communicative abilities. Studies of primates conducted in recent decades show that primates have complex social skills, as well as the possible development of certain types of morality, the ability to make complex decisions and carry them out both individually and collectively, and various forms of communication, which is a crucial factor in the development of individuals (Tomasello, 2022). This is not limited to the animals that are evolutionarily closest to humans, but is also found distributed in many other species, particularly mammals, but also in more distant species such as members of the cephalopod family (Godfrey-Smith, 2016; Andrews & Beck, 2017).
The knowledge that has been acquired of the way other species operate indicates the development and exercise of complex capacities that enable individuals to exercise their agency in different ways. For example, it is plausible to attribute to various species the possession of complex concepts such as death (Monsó, 2021), leading to the assumption that they exhibit expressive mourning behaviour in the face of the death of someone with whom they have established an affective relationship (Clairy & Gruen, 2021, ch. 2). Agency takes place within various forms of life.
Reference has previously been made to interactions between members of the same species, but it is crucial not to overlook the fact that there are interspecies encounters in our everyday lives that determine the way we inhabit the world (Haraway, 2007). Some of these interactions are rooted in relationships between species that have been cultivated for thousands of years, as is the case with domestication. Domestication is a process that influences all species involved in it and allows for the configuration of a division of tasks for carrying out different kinds of activities that are part of the diverse forms of inhabitation, a division based on the agential capacities of individuals of different species. Forms of life develop within more complex socio-ecosystems.
These interactions and relationships take place in a natural environment. Realising this, species and their interactions can be viewed as part of ecosystems. These ecosystems are shaped by geographic and climatic factors that present different challenges to species and individuals. They adapt to and shape their ecosystem by exercising their agency. Finally, it should be noted that issues of social injustice, such as systems of oppression, also impact on these interactions and the lives of members of different species (v. socio-ecological justice). An example of this is the operation of macro-farms, which involve the indiscriminate exploitation of both human and nonhuman individuals, and the space in which the interactions of such economic activity take place (Clary & Gruen, 2021; Zuñiga, 2023).
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