Environmental Determinism Research Paper

Frequently dismissed as passe, environmental determinism nevertheless touches sensitive and perhaps unresolved issues—the remote and continuing impact of nature on humans, human and racial genesis, ethnic and national origins, conditions that favor or frustrate economic and intellectual achievement, the global constraints and opportunities that define all hopes of present or future accomplishment—perhaps the whole panorama of human studies, now extending into biogenetic and biosociological realms.

1. Prehistory From Hippocrates To Montesquieu

Frequently entangled with astrological or ‘cosmic determinism,’ environmental determinism permeated Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, and Greek philosophy before the dawn of Western Civilization. By the fourth century BC, Hippocrates had combined the ‘elements’ of earth, air, fire, and water with geographic location to promote economic and communal health, evaluating swampy hollows and windy uplands accordingly. Greeks generally perceived their Mediterranean shores as a ‘golden mean’ remote from northern winters and southern heat, a zone favoring moderation, intellectual pursuits, and civil discourse. Open steppes were fine for savage Scythians, and sun-burned Africans and Asians were deemed to lack the spirit essential for liberty and war. As Glacken (1967) remarked, ‘the familiar assertions of modern times … are found in a cruder form in antiquity: warm climates, produce passionate natures; cold, bodily strength and endurance; temperate climates intellectual superiority; … and a fertile soil produces soft people, a barren one makes them brave.’

Greek thought cast long shadows across Medieval Europe, with variant determinisms facing the unforeseen. P. Sorokin found few who failed to mention ‘geographic influences ,’ and Renaissance sage Jean Bodin (1530?–1596 AD) scanned 2000 years of earth and sky for principles to guide the French monarchy through religious and ethnic strife. Two centuries of Enlightenment later, Montesquieu (1689–1755) might ignore the stars, but still insisted that ‘climate is the first, the most powerful, of all empires.’ Such epigrams evoked challenge from Church and philosopher alike. Theologians could scarcely accept ‘revealed religion’ as a matter of climate, Voltaire found bad weather no excuse for bad government; and skeptic Hume could not correlate national characteristics with atmosphere. In rejoinder, Montesquieu affirmed he had never thought that blind fatality could generate intelligent beings, that physical and moral causes were always intertwined, thereby provoking later determinist-possibilist debate, but his ‘determinism’ lingered beyond the Encyclopedic era as the particularizing sciences, geography included, took shape.

2. Cosmos, Teleology, And Environment

Montesquieu’s ‘environmentalistic’ instances were echoed by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as he lectured on the roles of space and time in organizing geographical and historical phenomena, and shortly thereafter Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Karl Ritter (1779–1859), founding fathers of modern geography, generated similar interests, although not necessarily in deterministic fashion. Humboldt, seeking law in the natural Cosmos, repeatedly warned that presuppositions regarding environmental impact on human character involved ‘wanton trespass’ beyond the limits of knowledge, pointedly observing that New World grasslands lacked the pastoral nomadism of the Old World, even as American desert skies generated no parallels to Arabian astronomy (Tatham, in Taylor 1957). Yet environmental awareness informed his views of esthetic life, and (however secular) he sought always to manifest ‘the perpetual influence of physical nature on the moral system and on the very fate of mankind’ (Anuchin 1977).

Such thoughts were central for Ritter, confident (with J. Herder) that Divine teleology joined earth and humans as body and soul, relating historical progression to geographical form. The continents, framed by landform and climate, presented natural regions which fostered cultural education and differentiation. Localizing human–historical data in ‘Erdkunde,’ Ritter thought that once the ‘general laws’ of nature and humans became clear, humans could glance ‘backwards and forwards, to determine from the whole of a nation’s surroundings, what the course of its development is to be and to indicate, in advance of history, what ways it must take to retain the welfare which Providence has appointed for every nation whose direction is right and whose conformity to law is constant’ (Dickinson and Howarth 1933). Much already seemed apparent, for civilization, dawning in the Orient, reached its contemporary zenith over the fretted coastlines and narrow European seas, and could brighten to an American sunset. Such qualified determinism, stripped of its teleology, could harden into the ‘scientific’ determinism that was to follow.

3. The Anthropogeographical Tradition

Deterministic thought flowed strongly through the late-1900s, with Darwin, Marx, and Freud becoming household names, and sociologist Comte and historian Buckle articulating ‘social laws.’ It would have been surprising had some not invoked ‘geographical environment’ as determinative. As memories of Ritter and Humboldt faded, and Departments took shape in Germany, influxes from the natural sciences reinforced physical geography, while human geography paused uncertainly. Darwinism seemed a welcome barrier against academic Balkanization, bonding all life forms to an ancient earth, rather than presuming the adaptation of earth to humans (Freeman 1962). ‘Survival of the fittest’ was linked with race and culture, natural law plausibly extended through ‘Social Darwinism’ to society, and ‘Evolution’ accounted as excluding teleology. Re-evaluation of such interpretations now seems essential, given neo-Lamarckian thoughts, and P. Kropotkin’s cooperative evolution. Yet a ‘superficial gilding of Darwinian rhetoric’ entered geographical discourse (Livingstone 1992). Certainly biological Darwinism was initially appropriated by Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) as he sought application of natural-scientific law, with his trilogy of space, location, and social dynamics situated in environmental settings. Critics found his first volume on ‘Anthropogeographie’ presenting ‘man as essentially passive, [responding] with Euclidian precision [to] the laws of the physical environment which determine human activities, distributions, and organization, in both space and time’ (Dickinson and Howarth 1933).

But subsequent readings have softened early criticism, for Ratzel followed analyses of the historical impact of geographical features with attention to cultural migration and growth, measuring and mapping the ‘co-variants of human distributions’ (Dickinson 1969). In ‘Politische Geographie,’ evolving societies and states filled their respective lebensraum, expanding toward natural or ethnically shaped boundaries—an idea conceptually fertile and generally devoid of the nationalistic provocation some discern among later geopoliticians.

Ratzel’s American disciple, Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), excised organic metaphor and extended illustrative examples in ‘translating’ anthropogeography for the ‘Anglo-Saxon world.’ ‘Influences of Geographic Environment’ were traced through the history of America, the World, and the Classical Mediterranean. Particular attention was given to mountain passes, rivers, sea routes, cultural migrations, contact zones, and the subsequent emergence of political entities. To critics her examples seemed tendentious, furthering a dubious mono-causal approach to historical and cultural complexities. Darwinian concepts obtruded in statements that ‘Man is a product of the earth’s surface,’ molding every thought and act, strengthening body and wits together. Yet, she warned, ‘geographic determinant’ was shunned and ‘geographic control’ mentioned only with caution (Semple 1911).

4. Physiography And Climatic Change

Attempts to find ‘anthropogeographical laws’ variously appropriate for inhabitants of mountains, plains, coastlands, peninsulas, and scattered islands aroused skepticism, but were compatible with the views of W. M. Davis (1850–1934), founding father among American geographers. Discarding Ritter’s and Guyot’s teleology for evolutionary ‘cause-andconsequence,’ he postulated that it was only the relationship of earth to inhabitants that gave geography its distinctive and unifying character, a theme encapsulated as ‘physiography’ and ‘ontography,’ all life-forms included—a formulation which ‘set the pattern for the pursuit of man–land relationships on a deterministic basis’ for the first decades of the twentieth century (Dickinson 1976).

Other American universities, pioneered by Chicago, followed this Davisian concept (Blouet 1981), even as Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947), moving from physiography to ontography, became intrigued with the potential linkages of climate and civilization, a theme pursued from the dune-fringed lakeshores of Central Asia to tree-rings in the American Southwest, from Yucatan to Palestine, and beyond. Typed as a climatic arch-determinist by the ‘Pulse of Asia,’ he revised his ideas with criticism and experience, replacing progressive desiccation with climatic oscillation, and searching for climatic optima within the cyclonic Westerlies, where sequences of fine and stormy weather seemed to stimulate. Field observations revealed abandoned villages, evidence of bygone agriculture, alluvial deposition, and glacial retreat. Combing historical records and voluminous correspondence (selective fact gathering, some said), he sought to match, measure, and correlate historical and geographical patterns. Using maps, graphics, and sometimes vivid prose, he personified geography (and climatic determinism) to the American public. Not unaware of challenge, he accounted climate a largely overlooked factor in the selective triad, a process blending natural environment, eugenics, and cultural impetus—dying, however, with his magnum opus unfinished (Martin 1973).

5. Stop-And-Go Determinism

Huntington exchanged similar views with Griffith Taylor (1880–1963), British born and Commonwealth oriented, who, migrating to Australia, moved through geology and climate to geography, seeing environment as suturing his physical and human concerns. As weather-person and physiographer, he accompanied Scott’s last Polar expedition, and thereafter Antarctica’s icy wastes and Australia’s desert Outback were engrained on his environmental consciousness. He found his own assessment of the economic margins curtailing development and population growth at odds with those of ‘boosters’ advocating ‘Australia Unlimited.’ Somewhat pugnaciously, he relinquished his Geography Department at Sydney for the hopefully more congenial University of Chicago, whence he moved to found the Department at Toronto, incidentally close to the margins of the vast Canadian Shield, where settlement was restricted by geology and climate.

Taylor’s outspoken ‘geocratic’ determinism had its limitations. Conceding Western Europe and Eastern America to the Possibilism advocated by ‘We-ocratic’ microgeographers, he scanned the earth as a whole, affirming that, facing expanses of barren rock, frigid cold, and harsh aridity, habitation was reduced toward the vanishing point (Taylor 1957). Correlating the racial distributions of anthropology with ‘evolution on the map,’ he viewed geography’s task as environmental analysis. As a ‘stop-and-go-determinist,’ he sought ‘Nature’s plan,’ believing that ‘humans are like the traffic controller’ in a city, accelerating, slowing, or stopping the flow of traffic, but ever alert to the economic cost of disregarding Nature’s directions, including those of ‘geopacifics,’ focused on the benefits of international cooperation.

6. Russian Environment And Marxist Thought

Beyond the bounds of the West extended vast steppes, forests, and waterways, and Tsarist historians ‘attributed many peculiarities in the historical development of Russia to the direct influence of the natural environment,’ K. M. Ber affirming ‘the fate of peoples is determined in advance and seemingly inevitably by the nature of the locality they occupy’ (Anuchin 1977). Such theses breed their antitheses, especially when urgent priority is given to industrialization. Wrestling with the determinism of dialectical materialism, geographers such as N. N. Baranskiy sought to link productivity with environment, but were overruled when the Communist Party accepted Stalin’s 1938 edict, precluding consideration of ‘the geographical environment’ as ‘a determining influence,’ and affirming modes of material production as crucial (Matley 1966). With ‘geographical deviationists’ silenced and environmental determinism shunned as ‘Western,’ Soviet geography separated into ‘physical’ and ‘economic–cultural’ branches, reflecting ‘incompatible’ natural and social laws.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, some geographers ventured public challenge. V. A. Anuchin, finding ‘inhuman’ physical geography and ‘unnatural’ economic geography objectionable, urged a synthesis expressive of dialectical–materialistic ‘determinism’ rather than the ‘indeterminism’ of those who, denying causation, separated humans from Nature. Invoking Marxist phraseology, he presented the human race, emergent through labor and tool-making, as qualitatively distinct, if thoroughly ‘natural .’ Not all geographical exegesis was considered relevant to humans, for earth’s ‘landscape envelope’ included untouched components (such as sea-floors and Himalayan peaks) remote from nature–human relationships, and excluded from ‘the effective environment.’ There, the spread of human population and its products reshaped ‘the natural environment’ into ‘the geographic environment,’ complexly uniting inorganic, organic and societal components into one humanized world, roughly equivalent to Western concepts of ‘cultural landscapes.’ Within this ultimate and seamless ‘geographic environment,’ natural elements continued, so Western-style environmental determinists—although likely to mistake conditions for causes, and be mechanically direct rather than dialectical when mediating natural laws into human settings—could thus appear valid, given occasional and accidental circumstance. Consequently, ‘certain occurrences and phenomena in the geography of population and economy … may be determined, admittedly in an indirect but yet decisive manner, by the geographic environment and even [by] its natural complex alone.’

Anuchin’s appeal for a merger of nature and humanity into one ‘geographic environment’ seemingly failed, but his impact appeared in 1963 when the Communist Party, prompted by geographers including N. N. Baranskiy and Y. G. Saushkin, rescinded Stalinist definition of geographic environment as ‘a purely natural category,’ even as dusty Virgin Lands, shrinking Aral Sea, and planning complications reinforced contentions that a unified geography could indeed assist in rehabilitating nature and humanity in Soviet ‘territorial complexes.’

7. ‘Possibilities’ In Western Geography

Given Soviet insistence that social laws reflected dialectical materialism, such changes were not viewed as concessions to Western-style ‘possibilism,’ and Russian geographers were becoming aware that few Western colleagues appreciated description as ‘environmental determinists.’ After 1900, European opinion had moved as ‘determinism’ and ‘organism’ became suspect, and society, not environment, was scanned for essential causes of social change. (Martin and James 1993). Alerted by sociological critiques of Ratzel, French geographers followed Vidal de la Blache and Brunhes into ‘possibilism.’ Environment was conceded its essential role, but genres de ie (or lifestyles) were followed into ‘regional personality.’ British geographers, also regionally inclined, were perhaps less precise, casually invoking Darwinian ‘response to environment’ (Freeman 1962), and indulging in ‘frankly boring’ debates about determinism (Livingstone 1992).

In the seminal 1920–40 era, pragmatic American geography was redefined by European—especially Germanic—influences. Anthropologist Franz Boas promoted anti-environmentalism, W. M. Davis moved from physiographic environmentalism toward regionalism (Blouet 1981), and others, H. H. Barrows in particular, urged geographers to move to undeterministic ‘human ecology.’ More decisively, C. O. Sauer, alluding to O. Schluter and vs. Passarge, challenged all definitions presupposing environmental relations as parasitic and biased, moved tangible ‘landscape’ to the fore, and left environmental ties to be proved. Agreeing with A. Hettner, R. Hartshorne defined ‘the nature of geography’ in ‘chorological’ or ‘areal differentiation’ terms, thus deflecting attention to regionalism rather than environmentalism—a ‘deviation’ from geography’s raison d’etre.

With environmentalism excluded from definitions, some sensed a ‘death blow to the doctrine of environmental determinism’ (Dickinson 1976), but sub- sequent statements suggest otherwise. Questioning views that the valid search for environmental relation-ships necessarily presupposes ‘determinism,’ some note shifts to influences—‘probabilistic,’ ‘possibilistic,’ or simply ‘permissive’ (Lewthwaite 1966). Many, broadening their concept of geography to encompass historically formulated ‘traditions,’ followed ‘the man–land tradition,’ with mutual interaction sometimes progressing from land to humans deterministically. Others, following ‘spatial traditions,’ abstract geometrical ‘deterministic systems’ from the overall environment. Some have traced analogies, with cultural variations, between Western environmentalism and Oriental geomancy. Others have seen ‘eurocentricity’ at the core, and some, inspired by Marxism, view environmentalism as a class-derived phenomenon.

8. Environment Remains

Doubtless many a component—eurocentricity, imperialism, nationalism, racism, class, and other interests—have been involved in origin and expression. However, if ideas be judged on their own merits, not pronounced ‘guilty by association’ but evaluated for potential insights, then ‘environmental determinism’ cannot be dismissed out of hand. Buttimer (1993) affirms that ‘the most demanding challenge for the geographer today is how to incorporate nature and the biophysical environment in descriptions of context while avoiding the resuscitation of environmental determinism .’ Of course, with mind as well as matter involved in all human thought and action, a robotic response to environment is automatically excluded, but nevertheless ‘physical causation’ is an unavoidable fact, evident when an earthquake or hurricane strikes. In such situations ‘geographical controls’ are real enough, and at the abstract conceptual level (presumably in conjunction with other and alternative concepts) environmental determinism has its analytical value.

Whatever our views, the environment is always with us: driven out the door, it comes back through the window. ‘Environmentalism’ covers many things, not least recurrent crusades to avert the spoliation of natural or cultural treasures (Manners and Mikesell 1974). However, environment surrounds and touches all things, whereas ‘environmental determinism’ suggests ultimate limits to human aspirations. Willy-nilly, ‘environment’ seems likely to evoke abiding interest.

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