The next time you’re watching a movie, consider: are there at least two named female characters … who talk to one another … about something besides a man? That’s the Bechdel test, and a lot of your favourite movies fail it. The Bechdel test has been around for a while, but it became better known in 2013 when some Swedish cinemas began using it to rate films for gender bias.
I was reminded of the test over the past couple of days when, as a member of the editorial board of Environmental History, I read through the journal’s four 2013 issues in preparation for voting for the year’s best article. It’s going to be a tough decision: there are a lot of impressive essays, covering a wide range of topics and methodologies, across the globe and across time. But as I read I was struck by the infrequent appearance of named historical agents in the articles. It may be a simple matter of essay naming convention that only one of the year’s 23 essays has a person’s name in the title.1 But only five titles directly reference human actors at all: besides Alfred E. Smith, there are “Squatters,” “Fishermen,” “Anglers,” and “Fisheries Biologists.”2 The titular nouns instead tend to be nature- and resource-related words such as snow, sea, oil, mountain, forestry, production, and degradation, and places such as Spain, China, the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and the Florida Keys.
More surprising, the relative absence of named humans continues within the essays themselves. The most quoted upper-case people would seem to be historians, not historical figures. In an utterly unscientific sampling, I searched the October issue for instances of one named historical actor communicating with another in the body of the text. After finding one fellow talking to God, and another to Congress, I finally came across “Wilkes ordered Ringgold” – apparently, the only such case in the entire issue.3
I may be accused of making a rearguard defense of an outdated kind of history that privileges individuals, rather than communities or processes, as historical agents. Perhaps environmental history (or history writ large) has simply moved on.4 But the fact that environmental history stretches our conception of what constitutes historical agency and of what possesses it is no reason to ignore the agency of individual humans. Specific things make history, and some of those things are people. What’s more, environmental history prides itself as a field that has a place for stories, and we should consider that many of the readers we are trying to reach like their stories to be peopled by … people.
What if, in the process of writing environmental history, we were to ask ourselves: does my work include even one named historical actor… communicating to another … in the body of the text … about anything? The answer need not always be yes, of course. The Bechdel test is not a judgment of individual films – Bridesmaids isn’t intrinsically better than Citizen Kane – so much as an inducement to consider how the film industry skews toward men and their interests. In similar fashion, asking ourselves the question would help us reflect on how, when writing about the relationships between people and nature, we actually write about people.
Feature Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.
[1] This includes the research essays that make up the Forum, but excludes the Galleries.
[2] I may be accused of omitting “Human Impact,” “Man-Made,” “Stewards,” and “Peronist.”
[3] If I missed any, please blame the boringness of the task, rather than any intent to deceive.
[4] Or perhaps I just picked an anomalous issue of the journal.
Alan MacEachern
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This is a really interesting observation about environmental history. I thought about the same thing when writing my own book. Inventing Stanley Park does not have many star human protagonists. There was no single figure who guided the creation of Stanley Park. There was no single celebrity landscape architect who designed the park. The book doesn’t follow the administrations of the various Park Board chairmen nor does it discuss the individual compositions of the Park Board much at all. Instead, the individual human actors share the pages with trees, insects, fire, wind, rain, and broader communities of human actors. There are certainly some individuals who played important and prominent roles in this history (August Jack Khatsahlano, Andy Paull, Richard Clement Moody, James Malcolm Swaine, Lauchlan Hamilton, Arthur Wellington Ross, Theodore Ludgate, Louis D. Taylor, Emily Carr, etc…), but they are not necessarily the driving forces of the narrative.
Perhaps this is a shortcoming of the book. Still, I think that one of the strengths of environmental history is its ability to present historical narratives that take a wider view of agency. Your point still stands, however. If we hope to understand the changing relationships between people and nature, environmental history must continue to include people.
I will go back and check to see if any of the people in my book speak to one another.
I might point out that my article on Niagara Falls is in the October 2013 volume which apparently has only one named actor – I just skimmed through and by my quick count I have 8 cases of named historical actors (almost all politicians: e.g., Roosevelt, King, Hepburn, etc.) doing something (e.g., writing, deciding, creating, etc.), including in the opening line of the article, and three more instances of unnamed historical actors (i.e., interviewees). Apparently my article was too boring to read in much detail lol