Environmental determinism

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.

Carl Ritter, Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, and Thomas Griffith Taylor were prominent environmental determinists. Friedrich Ratzel was mistakenly viewed as deterministic by many of his students. 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 bringing the theory to the United States after studying with Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. The prominence of determinism was influenced by the high profile of evolutionary biology, although it tended to resemble the now-discredited Lamarckism rather than Darwinism.

The basic argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, influenced the psychological temperament of individuals, which in turn shaped the culture and society that those individuals formed. For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness and promiscuity, while the frequent weather changes of the middle latitudes led to sharpened intellects. 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.

In the 1920s and 1930s, environmental determinism came under attack as its claims were found to be hopelessly inadequate at best, and often destructively wrong. Geographers reacted first by 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.

A variant of environmental determinism was popular among Marxists at the same time. 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 Georgii 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.