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Essay on Environmental Determinism
Essay Contents:
- Essay on the Rise of Environmental Determinism
- Essay on Environmental Determinism in the Middle Ages
- Essay on Renaissance and Determinism
- Essay on Environmental Determinism in the Nineteenth Century
- Essay on Environmental Determinism in the Twentieth Century
- Essay on Darwinism and Determinism
- Essay on Stop-and-Go Determinism
Essay # 1. Rise of Environmental Determinism:
The philosophy of environmental determinism is, perhaps, the oldest surviving philosophy that can be traced back to the classical antiquity. ‘Among the ancients, a people and their country were inseparable, and where unusual customs or strange physiognomies were found a cause was sought in one or other of the physical elements-climate, relief, or soil’.
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Environmental determinism is an exclusive philosophy in human geography, centered around humankind—whether humankind to be looked upon as a ‘passive being’ or as an ‘active force’, reacting to his environment and changing it.
In other words, in the deterministic view of struggle and survival (i.e., the environment controls the course of human action), humans are not free to have their own choices and their achievements are to be explained as consequences of natural conditions.
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, came out with the very old idea that ‘all history must be treated geographically and all geography must be treated historically’. This idea was an implicit recognition of determinism. Herodotus further observed that geography provided the physical background, the stage setting, in relation to which historical events occurred.
Hippocrates (c. 420 BC) contrasts the easygoing Asiatics living in a very favourable region with the penurious Europeans, who must seek through greater activity some amelioration of their poor environment. He also contrasts the tall, gentle, brave folk of the most windy mountain lands with the lean, sinewy, blond inhabitants of the dry lowlands.
Plato (428-348 BC) insisted that the observable things on the Earth were only poor copies of ideas, or perfect predicates from which observable things had degenerated or were in the process of degeneration.
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However, he was not an extreme determinist like his predecessors; rather, he missed the chance to change the whole history of speculation concerning man-land relations by identifying man as a destructive agent. Eudoxus, a contemporary of Plato, however, developed the theory of climate based on increasing slope away from the Sun on a spherical surface, and emphasised the importance of climate in the life of man.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) is credited with the most speculative concept of environmentalism of his period. He markedly differed from Plato who was rather hesitant to accept the extreme form of determinism. Aristotle tried to conceptualise the varying habitability with differences of latitude.
He contended that the parts of the Earth close to the equator, the torrid zone, were uninhabitable; that the parts of the Earth far away from the equator, the frigid zone, were constantly frozen and also were uninhabitable; and that the temperate zone in between constituted the habitable part of the Earth. ‘Ekumene, the inhabited part of the Earth, was in the temperate zone, but much of it, said Aristotle, was not inhabited because of the ocean.
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Emphasising the importance of climate in shaping the human skill and sustainability, Aristotle observes in his Politics:
‘The inhabitants of the colder countries of Europe are brave, not deficient in thought and technical skill, and as a consequence of this they remain free longer than others, but are wanting in political organization and are unable to rule their neighbours. The people of Asia, on the contrary, are thoughtful and skilful without spirit, whence their permanent condition is one of subjection and slavery’.
Greeks, however, living in the intermediate region, he considered, combined the best qualities of both.
Eratosthenes (c. 234 BC) redefined Aristotle’s zones of habitability, but he also emphasised the climatic determinism while describing the ekumene, the inhabited Earth. Posidonius, who lived shortly before the time of Christ, however, contradicted Aristotle’s assertion that the equatorial part of the Torrid Zone was uninhabitable because of heat.
The highest temperatures and the driest deserts, he said, were located in the temperate zone near the tropics and the temperatures near the equator were much less extreme. It is not clear whether he refuted the contemporary assertion of climatic control on human activities because his belief concerning the habitability of the equatorial region was overlooked.
Strabo (64 BC-20 AD) carried forward Aristotle’s standpoint on habitability in his book Geography. Like Eratosthenes, he also redefined the habitable part of the Earth, the ekumene, but held the view of environmental control on human activities. He sought to explain how shape, relief, climate, and space relations of Italy affected the rise and strength of Rome.
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaus), who lived in the second century after Christ, repeated Aristotle’s heritage of equating habitability with latitude, and the effect of the position of the celestial bodies on human affairs.
With the death of Ptolemy came to an end the geographic horizons that had been developed and widened both physically and intellectually by the Greeks. But the concept of equating habitability with latitude developed by Aristotle did not die out and was carried forward by successive generations. However, the deterministic idea of the classical antiquity lacked empirical validation.
Essay # 2. Environmental Determinism in the Middle Ages:
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The Middle Ages were a dark period for the development of science in Europe. At best, scholars made accurate, but sterile copies of the works of the ancients, rejecting anything which did not conform to the dogmas of the church.
Ptolemy became the major authority in the medieval Christian world, and his works were translated from Arabic into Latin by Plato of Tivoli in 1138. The geographical ideas of Aristotle, particularly of his deterministic concepts, were made available in Christian Europe by translation from the Arabic in the twelfth century.
The first medieval writer to make use of Aristotle was Albertus Magnus, whose book on the nature of places combined astrology with environmental determinism. The Greek theory of equating habitability with latitude became strongly implanted in medieval writings. Albertus even went beyond the Greeks.
From them, he accepted the idea that people who lived close to the limits of the heritable Earth turned black; but then he insisted that if black-skinned people should move into the temperate latitudes they would gradually turn white.
One of the major controversies in the medieval Christian Europe was ‘whether or not the torrid zone was habitable’. Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, in his book published in the early fifteenth century attempted to explain climatic determinism, but he did not take any stand regarding the habitability of the Torrid Zone. Aeneas Silvius (Pope Pius II) in his book published in the mid-fifteenth century, while subscribing to the deterministic idea, insisted on the possibility that the Torrid Zone was habitable.
The Arab scholars during the medieval period greatly subscribed to the Greek idea of environmental determinism though some of them contradicted Aristotle’s zone of habitability by new findings based on observation. One of the earliest Arab scholars’ lbn-Hawqitl insisted on the fact that considerable number of people lived in those latitudes that the Greeks thought to be uninhabitable.
His assertion was based on his voyage along the African coast to a point some 20° south of the equator. Nevertheless, he supported the idea of environmental control on human affairs.
Al-Masudi, who died about 956 in Egypt, was clearer in his assertion on environmental control. He was quite emphatic in describing the effect of environment on the mode of life and attitudes of people. To him, ‘the powers of the Earth vary in their natural vegetation and topography’.
Al-Maqdisi, who in 985, prepared a new division of the world into 14 climatic regions, also described human activities, particularly in the torrid and temperate regions, emphasising the importance of climate on human actions.
Al-Biruni in his book on India (Kitab-al-Hind) in 1030 also made implicit references to the impact of monsoon on the Hindu culture, particularly while describing the cultural landscape and the socio-economic institutions of contemporary India. His views on the monsoon were based on his visit to India.
Ibn-Sfiia or Avicenna, who is credited with the concept that ‘mountains were being constantly worn down by streams and that the highest peaks occurred where the rocks were predominantly resistant to ‘erosion’, also referred to the natural laws bringing changes in the landscape. It was a deterministic view, highly idealistic in nature’.
Ibn-Batuta, who travelled widely during the fourteenth century, confirmed what Ibn-Hawqal had implied earlier that the Torrid Zone in East Africa was not torrid and that it was occupied by numerous native populations as the environment there suited them. Nevertheless, he was an ardent supporter of the deterministic concept.
Ibn-Khaldun was the last Arab scholar to have contributed to and enriched the medieval muslim deterministic concept. His book Muqaddimah, in 1377, begins with a discussion of man’s physical environment and its influence, and also with man’s characteristics that are related to his culture or way of living rather than to the environment.
He repeated the old idea of climatic determinism that the people turned black when they lived too close to the Sun and that when black people moved to the temperate zone they gradually turned white and produced white children.
The physical environment impressed its characteristics on people in many subtle ways. Ibn-Khaldun insisted that the momadic culture was expressive of the desert environment. It may be said that he was the first scholar to have turned his attention especially to man-environment relations.
Essay # 3. Renaissance and Determinism:
Though the medieval Arab scholars strongly contradicted Aristotle’s Ptolemic concept of habitable zones, but they strongly subscribed to the idea of determinism. However, the idea of environmental determinism was revived with full enthusiasm in Western Europe during the renaissance. Explorations, discoveries, voyages and expeditions to different parts of the world from the early fifteenth century onwards substantiated the idea of determinism with new information.
In 1490, almost 20 years after the first Portuguese ship crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere without burning up, an Italian writer published a compendium in which he described the Torrid Zone as sterile and uninhabitable.
Notwithstanding the revival of the idea of determinism during the renaissance, the German cosmographer Sebastian Munster hardly made any explicit reference to the idea of determinism. However, Cluverius’s book on Italy, published posthumously in 1624, and his six-volume compendium of geography, which also appeared in the same year, did contain some references to the concept of the habitability zones.
British scholar, Nathaniel Carpenter, who prepared a compendium in English, gave numerous examples to show that human character was determined by climate. He fully accepted the Aristotelian Ptolemaic concept that the habitability of a place was a function of its latitude.
The enlargement of geographic horizons during the Age of Exploration provided much speculation regarding the influence of the natural environment on human behaviour. Jean Bodin, in 1566, sought to describe the people of northern lands as brutal, cruel and enterprising; those of the south as vengeful, cunning, but gifted with the capacity for separating truth from falsehood. Inhabitants of temperate regions are more talented than those of the north, more energetic than those of the south and they alone possess the prudence necessary for command.
One of the most influential of the eighteenth- century determinists was the French political philosopher, Montesquieu. One of the major themes in his work on laws had to do with the influence of climate on politics.
He sought to explain the determining effect of climate and soil on the character of the people as a guide to the law-giver. People in cold climates are stronger physically, more courageous, more frank, less suspicious and less cunning than those of the south who are like old men, timorous, weak in body, indolent and passive.
Northerners who go to live in south quickly lose their vigour and acquire the passivity of those around them. Consequently, the hot climate is the cause of immutability of religion, manners, customs, and laws in the eastern countries. Legislators must take cognizance of these physical facts.
Soil (i.e. ‘the goodness of the land’) is less potent than climate, but nevertheless has great influence on the form of government. Monarchies are more frequency found in fruitful countries, and republics in sterile ones. The barrenness of the Attica soil established there a democracy, and the fertility of Lacedaemonia an aristocratic institution.
However, Kriesel (1968) points out that a careful study of Montesquieu’s works shows that he recognised the importance of other factors than climate alone—such factors as religion, the maxims of government, precedents, and customs. In any one country, as some of these factors act with stronger force, the others are weakened. Kriesel, therefore, describes him as a possibilist rather than an environmental determinist.
Nevertheless, Montesquieu was very persuasive in his discussion of the effect of differences of climate on behaviour. In fact, he drew up generalisations about climatic conditions by continents rather than by zones of latitude. Yet, he made the theory of climatic influence so plausible that these ideas persisted long after his time.
‘The aim of the writers of the renaissance period, like that of their predecessors, was to understand the variation in the character of human types. They did not start from an interest in the earth; natural forces were mainly called in to supply reasons for human variation which otherwise were inexplicable…. Consequently, there was no systematic approach; each writer drew conclusions from his own experience and contradictory conclusions were common’.
The eighteenth-century geographers, in fact, were not very much active in the framing of the concepts of determinism. One of the reasons was that contemporary geography was yet to become anthropocentric; moreover it was still dominated by the conviction that its function was purely descriptive.
Human’s relation to its environment was not looked upon as a proper subject for geographical research. Nevertheless, many of the current concepts were incorporated in the geographical descriptions of different parts of the Earth.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was not a true determinist; rather he set forth a new concept of a chorological science, i.e. a subject which studies things which were mutually coordinated; not subordinated, in space. He believed that the geographical synthesis is distorted when nature is regarded as dominant and man as subsidiary. Nevertheless, he provided a short description, discussing the local geographical condition as having influenced the inhabitants on the coast of New Holland, and few more things like the impact of climate on the nature of man’s sustainability.
August Zeune (1808), however, in his attempt to define natural regions by their unique interrelations of all physical and biological phenomena, was led almost inevitably to develop the thesis. ‘Spaniards’, he observed, ‘must be lazy, languishing, sensual, and inflammable with all the burning passions natural to a hot climate. In like manner the speech of peninsular Italy on account of the proximity of the sea has many sibilants and almost no gutturals, just as Low German, because the moist air of the north coastal lowlands is softer and more drawling than the harsher, quicker High German of the upland regions further south’.
Essay # 4. Environmental Determinism in the Nineteenth Century:
The nineteenth-century geographers were more involved in framing deterministic hypotheses and attempting at empirical validation of such hypotheses through field observations and experiences. Two of such geographers of the early part of the century—Carl Ritter and Alexander Humboldt—known for their ‘positivist’ approach based on empiricism, had attempted to give a new dimension to the idea of determinism and such hypotheses. Carl Ritter’s anthropocentric viewpoint fastened their growth.
Ritter’s view of science sprang from his firm belief in God as the planner of the universe. He regarded the Earth as an educational model for man, where nature had a God-given ‘purpose’ which was to show the way for man’s development. Ritter did not regard the shape of continents as accidental but rather as determined by God, so that their form and location enabled them to play the role designed by God for the development of man.
His teleological viewpoint, therefore, seems to be a manifestation of an ‘implied determinism. In fact, he sought to combine a basic teleological standpoint with a critical scientific precision, and offered an ambiguous explanation of determinism.
Many people said that Ritter was not a determinist because he was much cautious to indulge in facile generalisations. Furthermore, though he was interested in the effect of the Earth on man, the reciprocal action of man on Earth was to him equally significant.
He believed that the unity of nature would be severely jeopardised if nature was regarded as dominant and man as subordinate to it; he felt that there was a mutual interaction between the two. Ritter, in fact, pursued ‘idealism’ in his explanation to this concept of unity of nature vis-a-vis the hypothesis of determinism.
Humboldt viewed the problem of determinism in a remarkably clear scientific manner. He realised that environment influenced man, but earlier was not convinced that evidence was available to permit the formulation of a hypothesis.
Elaborating the influence of the configuration of the Mediterranean on the evolution of early civilisation, he writes, ‘The influence of the sea was speedily manifested in the growing power of the Phoenicians and in the rapid extension of the sphere of general ideas’.
Humboldt included man and his works in the concept of nature and natural areas, but he did not consider man as a primary determinant— probably because he worked in an area in which nature was so overwhelmingly dominant. This he experienced during his long American travel during 1799-1804. Primarily, Humboldt was a determinist.
Nevertheless, he believed in the ‘areal associations of natural and organic phenomena’ in which he emphasised, what Hartshorne had traced, a chorological viewpoint, i.e. mutual coordination and interaction between various kinds of phenomena in which nothing could be regarded as dominant or subsidiary. Humboldt provided an ‘aesthetic’ explanation to develop his concept of the unity of nature. However, he made a reductionist approach to the idea of determinism.
Frederic Le Play (1879), the renowned French sociologist of the century, provided a broad portrayal of the socio-geographic structure of human societies. He postulated that the development of the European people took place in three very different geographical environments, namely, the steppes, the maritime shores and the forested lands. The Asiatic steppes were the home of stable nomadic families under the control of patriarchs.
On the maritime shores of Europe with their fishing resources, the boat and the habitation were patrimony of the family which was made up of parents, all unmarried children, and the eldest named son with his family. Forested land covering great areas of much variety, with grass openings, heath and varied soils, was the birth place of the unstable family that had also developed in the urban environments of Europe and had spread to America.
Demolins, who was the pupil of Le Play, provides an analysis of the social structures of the world’s people on the basis of what he calls their ‘geographical environment’, their resultant type of work, and their resultant type of social organisation (based on the family unit). A historical interpretation runs through his work published in two volumes in 1901 and 1903.
Groups develop or become markedly characterised in a particular geographical (physical) milieu and then move onwards, so that their social systems undergo changes in new and different environments. The environment rigidly controls the most extreme form of geographic (environmental) determinism.
The basic idea of Demolins is expressed in the preface to the first volume as follows:
‘The primary and decisive cause of the diversity of peoples and races is the route which has been followed by the peoples. It is the route (the environment) which created race and social type…. It has not been an indifferent matter for a people which route they followed- that of Great Asiatic steppes, or of the Tundras of Siberia, or the American Savannas, or African forests. Unconsciously and fatally these routes fashioned either the Tartar Mongol type, Eskimo-Lapps, the Red-skin or the Negro. In Europe, the Scandinavian type, the Anglo-Saxon, the French, the German, the Italian, and the Spanish are also the result of the routes through which their ancestors passed before arrival at the present habitat’.
Demolins carried forward Le Play’s deterministic concept and stated that ‘the presence of an exclusive grass cover determines a uniform mode of work— art of pastoralism’ (ibid.). This means a complete dependence on animals, chief among which is the horse. The steppe is essentially adapted to the horse and it is the horse that adapts the steppe to man.
The horse fills many roles; it provides food, it confers mobility. Mobility makes possible the work of the shepherd, preserves the link between families, maintains religious unity of the steppe and on occasion enables the great horders of Genghiz Khan or Tamurlaine to assemble and to conquer. Patriarchal family is characteristic of the steppe.
Essay # 5. Environmental Determinism in the Twentieth Century:
The Davisian concept of ‘Ontography’ in 1902 was a mere manifestation of continuation of the Darwinian idea of ‘natural selection and struggle’. Ontography, therefore, is some kind of crude determinism, which is necessarily concerned with the ‘rational correlation of the items that fall under two categories: on the one hand, the items of inorganic conditions that constitute the physical environment of living forms, and on the other hand, the items of organic response made by living forms to their environment’.
The organic response of the living forms to their physical environment is expressive of adaptation to the environment, which necessarily involves ‘selection’ according to the suitability, and ‘struggle’ in the light of natural resistance. Ontography is an idealist concept expressive of the Darwinian determinism, which W. M. Davis conceptualised to account for his hypothesis on determinism within a geographical framework.
The most influential determinist of the early twentieth century, belonging to the Darwinian- Ratzelian heritage, was the American geographer Miss Ellen Semple. She wrote her book Influence of Geographic Environment (1911) to introduce Ratzel’s ideas in Anthropogeographie to the English- speaking world.
The opening para of the book makes the following statement:
‘Man is a product of the Earth’s surface. This means not merely that he is a child of the Earth, dust of her dust; but that Earth has mothered him, fed him, set him tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with difficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened his wits’… she has entered into his bone and tissue, into his mind and soul’.
On the influence of climate, Semple says:
‘The influence of climate upon race and temperament has a direct and indirect effect cannot be doubted, despite an occasional exception. The northern people of Europe are energetic; provident, serious, thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The Southerners of the sub-tropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going, improvident, except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional, imaginative, all qualities which among the Negroes of the equatorial belt degenerate into grave racial faults … the blond Teutons of the north are a bleached out branch of the brunette Mediterranean race. This contrast in temperature is due to climate. A comparison of northern and southern people of the same race and within the same temperate zone reveals numerous small differences of nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total’.
Commenting on the deterministic hypothesis of Miss Semple, Derek Gregory (1981, 1986) points out that she ‘spoke of geographical factors and influences, shuns the determinant and speaks with extreme poison of geographic control’. But Montefiore and Willian (1955) argued that ‘claims of this sort failed to recognise that determinism was not a universal hypothesis capable of empirical validation, but rather a logical structure of cause- effect which required to be translated into the scientifically creditable vocabulary of ‘necessity’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions, and while many geographers had been drawn to ‘possibilism’ as an alternative, others have in fact attempted to establish a more rigorous, even ‘scientific’ determinism’.
E. G. Dexter (1868-1918) and Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947) stressed the importance of climatic determination. Dexter in 1904 published an empirical study of weather influences which attracted wide interest and which significantly affected later workers.
He compared the daily temperature, atmospheric temperature, humidity, wind, sunshine, and precipitation with the records in New York City and in Denver, Colorado, in respect to the behaviour conditions investigated, and found statistically significant correlations between weather and conduct, suicide and other crimes.
Huntington was often described as an imaginative thinker and interpreter of the effects of climate on human life. Correlating the periods of drought with historical dates, he developed the hypothesis that the great outpourings of nomadic people from Central Asia, which led to the Mongol conquests of India and China and the invasion of Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century, could be explained by the drying up of the pastures on which the nomads were dependent.
He presented this view in his book The Pulse of Asia in 1907. In 1915, he wrote another book Civilisation and Climate, in which he developed the hypothesis that man’s civilisations could only develop in regions of stimulating climate and that the monotonous heat of the tropics would forbid attainment of the higher levels of civilisation. He did much to establish the fact that there have been significant post-glacial changes of climate and that these played an important role. In his last book, ‘Mainsprings of Civilisation in 1945, Huntington suggested that diet was as important as climate as an explanation of human energy.
One of the American geographers, Albert Perry Brigham, who was a contemporary of W. M. Davis had held a relatively mild approach to the hypothesis of determinism. His book Geographic Influence in American History appeared in 1903; the same year in which Allen Semple’s book on the same subject was published. Brigham emphasised the origin of what he called ‘geographic condition’.
Brigham in 1915 urged upon the geographers to proceed with caution and commonsense in asserting the existence of influences and that every possible test should be made to ascertain the validity of any general principles that were suggested.
He was especially critical of generalisations concerning the influence of climate. He appeared critical of vague and unproved assertions of climatic influence on racial character, skin colour, or man’s institutions. The infinitely variable factors of the total environment, he insisted, produce diverse results upon body and mind.
In America, particularly in the field of human geography, social Darwinism was under attack, and indeed most of the historians and other social scientists had already rejected it. Many geographers were also ready to follow Brigham in rejecting strict environmental determinism in avoiding simple cause and effect explanations for complex associations of things on the Earth’s surface. But not all the geographers were aware of the validity of the criticisms of Davis’s scheme of human response to physical controls.
The persuasive teaching of Semple, the creative work of Huntington, and to a lesser extent the work of Whitbeck (1926) continued to gain support for some kind of environmental control of human behaviour. Long after the physical cause and human response paradigm had been dropped, some geographers continued to use the language of ‘geographic factor’ and ‘environmental control’.
Sir Halford J. Mackinder, the lone British geographer of the early twentieth century who had carried forward the Darwinian paradigm of determinism in his early ideas, reached the conclusion that ‘no rational political geography could exist which is not built upon and subsequent to physical geography’. He also opined that history without geography was mere narrative and that since every event occurred in a particular time at a particular place, history and geography, which deal respectively with time and place, should never be separated.
Mackinder applied the Darwinian idea of selection and struggle in his first work The Geographical Pivot of History in 1904, in which he argued: ‘European-civilisation is the outcome of the secular struggle against Asiatic invasion … through the steppe. There came from the unknown recesses of Asia … in all the centuries from the fifth to the sixteenth, a remarkable succession of Turanian nomadic people … against the settled peoples of Europe. A large part of modern history might be written as a contemporary upon the changes directly or indirectly ensuing from these raids’.
The geographical pivot was inaccessible on all sides by natural barriers except to the Caspian Sea-Ural opening to the west which necessarily provided mobility for the Asiatic tribes to the European mainland. The horse and the camel were the main sources of mobility for the Asiatic nomads to carry on raids on the European natives. The idea of the horse- camel mobility of Mackinder resembled the view of Le Play of the nineteenth-century France, who also held that the horse was the only source of mobility in the steppe lands.
The famous dictum of Mackinder’s ‘heartland concept’ in his subsequent work Democratic Ideals and Reality in 1919- ‘who rules East Europe … commands the world’ sought to generalise what he had said in 1902 that no political geography could exist unless it was built on physical geography. Moreover, he attempted to generalise that East Europe was so positioned geographically vis-a- vis the Heartland that any attempt to command/ rule the Heartland necessarily required the control of East Europe.
The position of East Europe, according to him, was geographically so viable that the further warfare would be decided to a greater extent on the soil of East Europe. Mackinder’s generalisations of environmental determinism were, thus, based on historical evidences and contemporary political events. His generalisation, particularly of the expectation and pressure of the Heartland state on the European-Asiatic coastal lands, remained valid for some decades in international politics.
Russian geography had been traditionally exercised by the environmentalist thesis which received an important impetus particularly through the efforts of L. Mechnikov, N. Baranskiy and G. Plekhanov. However, Mechnikov was rather ambiguous in his approach to the environmentalist hypothesis. He pointed out that though ‘river as a synthesis of all physical geographical conditions was one of the factors that determined the development of human societies, but at the same time man had played a significant part in the formation of the geographical environment’.
He further stated that ‘one should seek the principle of the rise and character of primitive institutions and their subsequent evolution not in the development itself but in the relations between the environment and the capacity of the people inhabiting a given environment for cooperation and solidarity’.
N. Baranskiy in 1926 argued that ‘the influence of natural conditions on man is taken into account in the Marxist scheme of social development to the extent in which these natural conditions form a natural basis for the material productive forces which determine the productive relations and through them the legal and political superstructure and, finally, forms of social conscience.’ But this was attacked and finally devastated in 1938 when Stalin decreed that although the environment accelerates or retards the speed of development of society, ‘it was not a determining influence’.
In the post-Stalin era, Plekhanov came out with an explicit statement which resembled Baranskiy’s paradigm of 1926. Plekhanov asserted that the ‘peculiarities of the geographical environment determined the development of the productive forces, the development of the productive forces determined the development of the economic forces and directly after them also all the other social relations’.
The Marxian philosophy, for Plekhanov, appeared to be the application to social development of the Darwinian paradigm of the adaptation of biological species to the conditions of the environment. Before closing the discussion on environmental determinism, it is necessary to conclude that the hypothesis of determinism appears to be as old as the human history itself.
Different periods of human history since the classical antiquity had different perceptions about it, necessarily based on pre-conceived and ‘carried-over’ notions over centuries. The Age of Exploration and Renaissance in the early medieval period provided some material grounds to the hypothesis of determinism, so that some form of generalisations could be made on it.
During the early part of the nineteenth century, geographers, social and natural scientists and others sought for the empirical validation of the hypothesis of determinism, citing examples of how people responded to their environments. But it was not until the rise of Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century that the hypothesis received a new scientific dimension to further its universal accountability.
It was made possible as a result of a ‘paradigm shift’ in the contemporary socio-biological thinking which tended to compensate weakness that remained in the hypothesis. The nineteenth-century Darwinian tradition seems to have well continued to the first half of twentieth century with much scientific precision, explanation and validation.
However, people in advanced societies, who were conscious of their material cultures and capacities vis-a-vis the natural control, sharply reacted to the extreme generalisations of the environmental determinism, and doubted their universal application/validation.
To some people, massive innovation-diffusion made the deterministic-paradigm inadequate to account for man’s creative genius, and creativity in shaping his environment. Therefore, an alternative paradigm was sought for. This led to the development of the paradigm of possibilism in which man was presented as an active rather than a passive agent.
Glacken (1956, 1967), however, attempted to identify three-different modes of nature-society or man-environment relations which appear to have permeated the history of Western thought:
1. Humanity in harmonious relationship with nature;
2. Humanity as determined by nature; and
3. Humanity as modified by nature.
The man as modifier and conqueror of nature has dominated modern thought though the other two perspectives have by no means been completely absent. Wittfogel (1929) made a forceful attack on the tenets of environmental determinism in modern geography in the late 1920s of the past century. He said that human labour organised in different social forms tended to mould nature into different material bases for economic development of regional societies.
This is what created the distinctive regional cultural traits, rather than, the environment per se. This man made himself- Societies are human creations rather than natural/environmental creations. Wittfogel, however, was not opposed to the idea of natural forms being a potent influence or factor in man’s life on the Earth.
To substantiate this view, he attempted to draw attention to the climatically determined need for irrigation which in the East (China and India) gave rise to a line of social development that was greatly at variance with the one followed in the rainfed agriculture being practised and pursued in the West, giving rise to entirely different kinds of civilisation in the two cultural realms.
Essay # 6. Darwinism and Determinism:
In geography; Darwinism was interpreted primarily as evolution in the sense of a ‘continuous process of change in a series of transformation’. Charles Darwin was primarily concerned with the mechanism of the change or, as The Origin was subtitled, ‘the preservation of favoured races in struggle for life’.
Darwinian ideas, in fact, revolutionised the early nineteenth century hypothesis on determinism. They provided a mechanical explanation to such hypotheses as an alternative to the ‘teleological explanation’ of Ritter and the ‘aesthetic explanation’ of Humboldt to the hypothesis of determinism.
The contemporary hypothesis on determinism, particularly since the mid-nineteenth century, seemed to have been greatly influenced by the major Darwinian themes which include:
(a) Change through time or evolution, a general concept of gradual or even transition from lower to higher or more complicated forms;
(b) Association and organism man as part of a living ecological organism; and
(c) Idea of natural selection and struggle.
The first theme of the Darwinian heritage sought to identify the forces and processes which tend to constitute the natural laws which, in turn, tend to cause changes within time-frames. Or, in other words, biological evolutionary processes necessarily manifest the operation or action of natural laws that the life had evolved from the amoeba through multitudinous forms to man under the selective action of natural forces. It was inevitable for the late nineteenth century geographers and other scientists to see in the differentiation of man the operation of natural laws.
The idea of change through time, or evolution, was taken up by the American geographer William Morris Davis in his famous cycle-of-erosion model of landform development in 1899. Even the subsidence theory of Darwin himself points to the fact of the operation/action of natural processes on the evolution of the coral reefs. The same standpoint seems to have been applied by the scientists in the latter part of the nineteenth century to account for the evolution of humankind.
Haeckel elaborated the idea of association and organism and outlined a new science ‘Ecology’ in 1869, which is the study of the mutual relations of all organisms living in one and the same place and of their adoption to their environment.
This science attracted the attention of geographers and was saturated with Haeckel’s materialistic philosophy. Man was only one of the organisms to be studied and was along with all other living things equally in the grip of surrounding forces. Perhaps Darwin’s most significant contribution to ecological thinking was to include man in the living world of nature.
The idea of ‘selection and struggle’ found its first legitimate expression in the view of British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who elaborated what is known as ‘Social Darwinism’. He believed that human societies closely resembled animal organisms and that human societies must struggle in order to survive in particular environment much as plant and animal organism’ do. Social Darwinism provided a new dimension to the contemporary thinking on determinism.
In fact, the Darwinian philosophy of selection and struggle seemed to have been necessarily based on cause-effect relationship as it sought to clarify the environmental influence, selection and adaptation depending upon the requirement of the way of life. Most Darwinian writers on the effect/influence/ control of environment were content to look for cause-effect relationships without enquiring too closely into the process.
Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) pioneered systematic human geography much on the basis of Darwinian philosophy and methodology, and he treated the contemporary hypothesis on determinism exclusively on a new explanatory dimension. He developed a new paradigm of natural science in human geography, in which he stressed the extent to which men lived under nature’s laws. He regarded cultural forms as having been adapted and determined by natural conditions.
Ratzel attempted to modify his environmental determinism in his later work. A different emphasis dominated the second volume of Anthropogeographie (1891) which discussed the concentration and distribution of population, settlement forms, migrations and diffusion of cultural characteristics. He did not merely explain phenomena in human geography in terms of natural conditions, but stressed the significance of the historical development and cultural background of populations.
The first volume (1882) treats the causes of human distributions, i.e. the dynamic aspect of geography, and the second, published 10 years later, deals with the facts of distribution, that is, the static aspect of geography. The first volume is an application of geography to history, and the second the geographical distribution of man’.
The Darwinian idea of ‘selection and struggle’ was explicitly used by Ratzel in his political geography, giving a new paradigm to the sub-branch. This idea, in fact, led Ratzel to develop what is called the ‘increasing space consciousness and conception’ on a national level.
In 1896, he provided a model for the spatial growth of states, in which he sought to give a ‘realist’ expression of the idea of selection and struggle through the concept of ‘lebensraum. ‘Just as the struggle for existence in the plant and animal world always centres around a matter of space, so the conflicts of nations are in great part only struggles for territory’.
It is clear that the organic analogy for Ratzel not only provided a simple and powerful model in analytical, but deterministic political geography, but also an apparently scientific justification for political behaviour. Through his new paradigm, Ratzel sought to justify the organic concept of Spencer, particularly in the light of idea of evolutionary struggle. The evolution and growth of states, therefore, are conditioned by the operation and action of natural laws under given time and space situations.
There is no doubt that Darwinism, necessarily, provided a new scientific impetus to the hypothesis of determinism, giving a new direction towards empirical validation of the hypothesis. About the same time or a little earlier than the publication of The Origin in 1859, the study of social statistics began to reveal an extraordinary regularity in social behaviour. Everything seemed to point to one and the same conclusion, that man was not as free as had been thought, and that his actions were largely controlled by natural or economic laws.
Environmentalism in history is well-documented in History of Civilisation in England by Buckle. To him, civilisations in Africa and Asia were most powerfully influenced by the fertility of soil and those in Europe by climate. Climate, he said, tended to influence labour in many ways.
Excessive heat enervates the labourer; a more moderate temperature invigorates him, while a short summer broken by a long winter in which low temperatures interrupt work encourages desultory habits. Less obvious, but equally closely connected is the relationship between climate and wages.
Buckle further pointed out that in a country like India, climate and fertility combined to produce dense population and low wages, an unequal distribution of wealth which in turn created inequality in the distribution of power and social influence.
A civilisation, he added, in the New World reflected the power of climatic influences. He continued that in India, Mexico, Peru, Egypt where Nature overpowers man, religion is one of complete and unmitigated terror. Everywhere the hand of nature is upon us, and the history of human mind can only be understood by connecting it with the history and the aspects of the material universe.
Buckle seeks to mention historical events as the outcome of man modifying Nature and Nature modifying man; yet it is Nature itself which determines when and how man shall be so active. In other words, natural powers are in every instance dominant; the determinism is complete.
The Darwinian environmentalism seemed to have no impact on the contemporary Russian thinking, simply because of the fact that in Russia itself greater studies of evolution were made. Those who conceived of the viewpoint of the role of man as passive, seemed to have developed independent standpoints, and they were mostly historians and social scientists, trained in geography.
The famous Russian historian, Sergey Solovyev, pointed out that the nature of a country had important significance in history as the national character to a large extent depended on it. Vasily Klyuchevsky studied the effect of the forests, steppes and rivers on the history of Russian people. He said that each of these separately, by itself, took a lively and original part in guiding the genre de vie of the Russian people.
The Russian historians and other scientists seemed to have rejected the more extreme form of environmental determinism stemming from Spencer and Ratzel, and also the use of biological analogy to describe sequences of landforms as proposed by Morris Davis.
However, some of the historians did support the ideas of climatic influence on national character or of the critical importance of the large Asian rivers in providing the setting for the development of early civilisations. But the geographers as a whole avoided such extremeness.
Environmentalism had its maximum development in the nineteenth century. Geographers, historians, social scientists and biologists made valuable contributions to its understanding. But the rise of Darwinism in the latter part of the century not only provided a new dimension to it, but also made room for some form of scientific validation of the hypothesis of determinism. The Darwinian legacy continued well beyond the nineteenth century, as more and more scientists and geographers of the twentieth century drew scientific bases for their empirical generalisations.
Essay # 7. Stop-and-Go Determinism:
Striking a balance between extreme determinism and extreme possibilism, Griffith Taylor developed a new philosophy, called ‘stop-and-go determinism’ or neo-determinism, in the early 1940s. It may be, he stated, that the well-endowed parts of the world offer a number of different possibilities for making a living, but in some nine-tenths of the Earth’s land area nature speaks out clearly- This land is too dry, or too cold or too wet, or too rugged’. Any settlers who fail to heed this nature-given limitation must face disaster.
Elaborating his philosophy of ‘stop-and-go determinism’ Taylor observes- ‘Protagonists of the possibilist theory instance the carrying of fertilizer to the Canadian prairies, or the remarkable development of somewhat sterile northern Denmark as examples of human control which have determined the utilization of the regions concerned. I do not for a moment deny that man plays a very important part, but he does not take fertilizer to the ‘barren grounds’; nor would the Danes have developed their less attractive regions, if they had been free to choose among the good lands of the world.
They have merely pushed ahead in Nature’s ‘plan’ for their terrain. Even when their example is followed in other similar parts of the world it will only indicate that man has advanced one more stage in his adjustment to the limits laid down by nature. Man is not a free agent.
‘The writer then is a determinist. He believes that the best economic programme for a country to follow has in large part been determined by Nature, and it is the geographer’s duty to interpret this programme. Man is able to accelerate, slow or stop the progress of a country’s development.
But he should not, if he is wise, depart from the directions as indicated by the natural environment. He is like the traffic-controller in a large city, who alters the rate but not the direction of progress; and perhaps the phrase ‘stop-and-go determinism’ expresses succinctly the writer’s geographical philosophy’.
It will be seen that Nature has only ‘in large part’ determined the programme; man who plays an important part determines the rest. Moreover, man only follows nature’s programme if ‘he is wise’; presumably he can act foolishly, which admits the possibilist contention that within broad limits set by environment man can choose, at the very least Taylor concedes him the choice between wise and foolish action. Possibility of choice is also suggested by the name ‘Stop-and-Go Determinism’, since traffic lights are not usually placed on one-way streets which have no interconnections.
Commenting on the philosophy of ‘stop- and-go determinism’; Tatham remarks- ‘Man, not environment, judges an action as wise or foolish by reference to some aim or goal he considers desirable. Until such a goal has been set up, wisdom and folly have no exact meaning. Taylor’s definition suggests that the goal must be adjustment to Nature’s plan, the carrying out of Nature’s programme. From among the possibilities of wise and foolish action how man can recognize this plan? Obviously, as the proponents of possibilism admit, the opportunities offered by any environment are not all equal. Some demand little effort from man, others continual struggle; some yield large, others meagre returns. The ratio between effort and return can be looked upon as the price nature extracts from man for the particular choice he makes’.
Tatham further adds – ‘Once the possibility of alternative action is conceded, then it is difficult to see how ‘Stop-and-Go Determinism’ can claim that man is not a free agent. That his liberty is curtailed all agree. In no environment are the possibilities limitless, and for every choice a price must be paid; proponents of possibilism admit this but within these limits freedom to choose exists. Man makes his choice, but man himself judges its relative wisdom or folly by reference to goals he himself has established. Limits to man’s freedom beyond those generally recognised by possibilists are … those imposed by man’s conception of wisdom.
There is nothing indeed that contradicts the assertion of Febvre that “there are no necessities but everywhere possibilities and man as master of these possibilities is the judge of their use”… Despite the extreme Determinism phraseology, closer examination then reveals ‘Stop-and-Go Determinism’ to be very different from the old Determinism. It introduces the idea of choice, and since it conceives of choice being guided by consideration of a goal that is to be attained, it could just as logically be named ‘Pragmatic Possibilism’ or ‘Stop-and-Go Determinism’.
However, Taylor made it clear that he was not an old-fashioned determinist who sought to make extreme statements about the effect of climate on man, but who never sought to put their statements to scientific validation and examination. Here is what he had to say, with considerable satisfaction, about the outcome of his arguments concerning potential settlement in Australia- ‘Thirty years ago I predicted the future settlement pattern in Australia’.
At Canberra (in 1948) it was very gratifying to be assured by the various members of the scientific research groups there, that my deductions (based purely on the environment) were completely justified. This aspect of geography is Scientific Determinism.
The Marxist geographer of the former Soviet Union, V. Anuchin (1960) had identical standpoint on the philosophy which Griffith Taylor had developed in the 1940s. Anuchin still insisted, against formidable opposition, that determinism (in the sense of indirect causalties or mediation) was ‘one of the indispensable facets of dialectical thought’.
Indeterminism ‘sharply separates and counterpoises human society to the rest of nature’ and so ‘rejects geography as a science’. An argument like this was about more than scientific status, of course, and its political resonances were unmistakable.
Anuchin’s neo-determinism was charged with restoring ‘the causal connection among phenomena and the unity of the material world’, but at the same time it had to transcend the classical doctrine and understand the qualitative difference between various categories of the world.
In short, ‘monistic geography’ had to reaffirm the essentially materialist dialectic between man and nature. While recognition of this was at the heart of classical Marxism and was unequivocally accepted by earlier radical tradition in geography, it was suppressed in modern structural Marxism, and remained peripheral too much of modern Marxist and radical geography.
R. Peet observed that such a theoretical base was as yet ‘conspicuously weak’ and largely untouched. But the scars of the debate over environmental determinism are at last beginning to heal. The physical environment is no longer seen as the exclusive preserve of a physical geography estranged from the human and social sciences. In part, of course, this flows from (and feeds back into) the rise of political movements concerned about environmentalism and environmental issues.
It is also in part the product of development within physical geography itself, and particularly the emergence of an applied physical geography, and in part the product of developments within the human and social science. It is now apparent that the emergence of an structuration theory which has one of its concerns the constitutive character of society-nature relations has done much to clarify the significance of what Marx once described as the process whereby people act upon ‘external nature’ and change it and thereby simultaneously change their own nature.
Debate over environmental determinism and possibilism continued into the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and was actively pursued in the United Kingdom in the first decade after the Second World War. O. H. K. Spate in 1957 proposed a middle ground with the philosophy of probabilism (the view that although the physical environment does not uniquely determine human actions, it does nevertheless make some responses more likely than others—’human action was represented as not so much a matter of an all-or-nothing choice or compulsion, but a balance of probabilities’. This view was in fact perfectly compatible with the original Vidalian concept.
‘Thus the lengthy discussion among geographers about whether man is a free agent in his use of the Earth or whether there is a “nature’s plan” slowly dissolved as the antagonists realized the existence of merit in each case. Some geographers proceeded independently to study man-environment interactions outside the confines of these debates.
But while environmental determinism was a view strongly held and widely preached by geographers about whether man is a free agent in his use of the Earth, respect for the discipline declined somewhat in the eyes of the academic community at large, which rejected the paradigm. As a consequence, geography’s next paradigm, which had strong roots in environmental determinism, was very much an introspective and conservative one’.