Environmental determinism

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Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism, environmentalism, or the geographic factor, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate.

Key proponents of this notion have included; Carl Ritter, Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, and Thomas Griffith Taylor. Jared Diamond's work is often characterized as a revival of environmental determinism.

Environmental determinism's origins go back to antiquity, when the Greek geographer Strabo wrote that climate influences the psychological disposition of different races. Similar ideas continued to be propounded up into the modern era.

Environmental determinism rose to prominence in the late 1800s and early 1900s when it was taken up as a central theory by the discipline of geography (and to a lesser extent, anthropology). Clark University professor Ellen Churchill Semple is credited with introducing the theory to the United States after studying with human geographer Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. The prominence of determinism was influenced by the high profile of evolutionary biology, although it tended more to resemble the now-discredited Lamarckism rather than Darwinism.

The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly that of climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed. For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven work ethics. Because these environmental influences operate slowly on human biology, it was important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under.

Between 1920 and 1940, environmental determinism came under repeated attacks as its claims were found to be severely faulted at best, and often dangerously wrong. Geographers reacted to this by first developing the softer notion of "environmental possibilism," and later by abandoning the search for theory and causal explanation for many decades. Later critics charged that determinism served to justify racism and imperialism. The experience of environmental determinism has left a scar on geography, with many geographers reacting negatively to any suggestion of environmental influences on human society.

While this accurately reflects the popular belief and perception in the geographic community towards environmental determinism, the debate was overlaid with hues of gray. Rostlund pointed out in his essay in Readings in Cultural Geography "Environmentalism was not disproved, only dissaproved." He also points to the fact that the dissaproval was not based on inaccurate findings, but rather a methodological process which stands in contrast to that of science, something the geographers have arguably sought to ascribe themselves to. Carol O. Sauer followed on from this in 1924 when he criticized the premature generalizations resulting from the bias of environmentalism... He pointed out that to define geography as the study of environmental influences is to assume in advance that such influences do operate, and that a science cannot be based upon or committed to a preconception."

A variant of environmental determinism was popular among Marxists. To Marx's basic model of the ideological and cultural superstructure being determined by the economic base, they added the idea that the economic base is determined by environmental conditions. For example, Russian geographer Georgi Plekhanov argued that the reason his nation was still in the feudal era, rather than having progressed to capitalism and becoming ripe for the revolution into communism, was that the wide plains of Russia allowed class conflicts to be easily diffused. This Marxist environmental determinism was repudiated around the same time as classic environmental determinism.

[edit] See also

• Determinism
• Linguistic determinism

[edit] External link

• North Dakota State University - course notes

History of geography
Age of Discovery ·Environmental determinism ·Regional geography · Quantitative revolution · Critical geography