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Environmental Determinism www.AssignmentPoint.com www.AssignmentPoint.com Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism, is the belief that the physical environment predisposes human social development towards particular trajectories. A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. Geography, therefore, became focused on the study of how the physical environment affected, or even caused, human culture and activities. At the time that this field was expanding it's knowledge, practices and theories, it allowed for geographers to create "scientific justification for the supremacy of white European races and the naturalness of imperialism". A prominent member in the study of environmental determinism, Ellen Churchill Semple, chose to apply her theories in a case study which focused on the Philippines, where she, "sought to map the distributions of 'Wild', 'Civilized' and 'Negrito' peoples on the topography of the islands". From Semple's works, other members within the field of study were able to find reasonable evidence to suggest that, "the climate and topography of a given environment" would cause specific character traits to appear in a given population, "leading geographers to feel confident on pronouncing on the racial characteristics of given populations." The use of environmental determinism allowed for states to rationalize colonization, by claiming that the peoples within the given land were "morally inferior", therefore legitimizing exploitation. Consequently, the use of this theory in explaining, rationalizing and legitimizing racism, ethnocentrism and development, has been strongly criticized, and in recent years, has become mostly obsolete." Historiography Origins www.AssignmentPoint.com Environmental determinism's origins go back to antiquity, where it is first encountered in a fifth-century medical treatise ascribed to Hippocrates: Airs, Waters, Places. In Roman times it is, for example, found in the work of the Greek geographer Strabo who wrote that climate influences the psychological disposition of different 'races.' Some in ancient China advanced a form of environmental determinism as found in the Works of Guan Zhong (Guanzi 管子), perhaps written in the 2nd century BCE. In the chapter "Water and Earth" (Shuidi 水地), we find statements like "Now the water of [the state of] Qi is forceful, swift and twisting. Therefore its people are greedy, uncouth, and warlike," and "The water of Chu is gentle, yielding, and pure. Therefore its people are lighthearted, resolute, and sure of themselves." Another early adherent of environmental determinism was the medieval AfroArab writer al-Jahiz, who explained how the environment can determine the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of a certain community. He used his early theory of evolution to explain the origins of different human skin colors, particularly black skin, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt in the northern Najd as evidence for his theory: "[It] is so unusual that its gazelles and ostriches, its insects and flies, its foxes, sheep and asses, its horses and its birds are all black. Blackness and whiteness are in fact caused by the properties of the region, as well as by the God-given nature of water and soil and by the proximity or remoteness of the sun and the intensity or mildness of its heat." www.AssignmentPoint.com The Arab sociologist and polymath, Ibn Khaldun, was also an adherent of environmental determinism. In his Muqaddimah (1377), he explained that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa and not due to their lineage. He thus dispelled the Hamitic theory, where the sons of Ham were cursed by being black, as a myth. Many translations of Ibn Khaldun were translated during the colonial era in order to fit the colonial propaganda machine. The Negro Land of the Arabs Examined and Explained was written in 1841 and gives excerpts of older translations that were not part of colonial propaganda. Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the decline of Ghana and rise of the Almoravids. However, there is little evidence of there actually being an Almoravid conquest of Ghana. Ibn Khaldun also anticipated the meteorological climate theory later proposed by Montesquieu in the 18th century. Like Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldun studied "the physical environment in which man lives in order to understand how it influences him in his non-physical characteristics." He explained the differences between different peoples, whether nomadic or sedentary peoples, including their customs and institutions, in terms of their "physical environment-habitat, climate, soil, food, and the different ways in which they are forced to satisfy their needs and obtain a living." This was a departure from the climatic theories expressed by authors from Hippocrates to Jean Bodin. It has been suggested that Ibn Khaldun may have had an influence upon Montesquieu's theory through the traveller Jean Chardin, who travelled to Persia and described a theory resembling Ibn Khaldun's climatic theory. Environmental determinism rose to prominence in the late 19th century and early 20th century 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 www.AssignmentPoint.com 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. Decline Between 1920 and 1940, environmental determinism came under repeated attack as its claims were found to be severely flawed. 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. Some believe this rejection has gone too far, and that incorporating environmental factors into explanations of social outcomes is not only useful but necessary. The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, influenced the psychological mindset 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, promiscuity and generally degenerative societies, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven work ethics and thus more civilized and 'stronger' societies. 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. However, since evolutionary www.AssignmentPoint.com processes manifest over very long time periods, the ability to adequately correlate human behaviour with any specific environmental condition is speculative at best, and impossible at worst. Key proponents of this notion have included Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Thomas Griffith Taylor, and possibly Jared Diamond or Philip M. Parker. Although Diamond's work does make connections between environmental and climatic conditions and societal development, it is published with the stated intention of disproving racist and eurocentric theories of development. 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 disapproved." He also points to the fact that the disapproval 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. Carl 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, employing the dialectical materialism concept of history. 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, www.AssignmentPoint.com 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. Revival The late 20th century saw a revival in environmental determinism as a branch of the new, broader study of environmental history. This has been helped by the quantitative revolution in geography and demography by authors such as Braudel, and several popular accounts such as the works of Jared Diamond. Critics, however, suggest that the so-called "neo-environmental determinism" resurgence will promote harmful policies and should not merit scholarly discussion. www.AssignmentPoint.com