Environmental Determinism

Environmental determinism is the doctrine that individual human actions, beliefs, and values are controlled or determined by the ambient environment. Accordingly, when applied to aggregates, as the doctrine normally is, societies, cultures, and civilizations are also held to be the product of their environments. [Page 132]This doctrine or perspective on human–environment relations is among the oldest and most enduring ways of looking at, and conceptualizing, humans' place and condition in the world. Within geography conceived as the formal study of the earth's surface, environmental determinism has been an evident, and at times dominant, approach. Within geography's broader scope—that of humanity's individual and collective knowledge of the earth's surface (its places, patterns, and processes)—environmental determinism has been an evidential and fundamental feature of this thinking. No doubt, flickers of environmental determinist thought were part of our earliest cognitive awareness. Primitive cosmologies and religions are largely constituted on premises of natural forces' agency over human thought and action. Much of their ritual practice revolves around propitiating these forces of nature and environment. Over the past half century or more, there have been concerted campaigns within formal geography to counter and discredit environmental or geographic determinism. Nevertheless, it is a doctrine that continues to be retooled and deployed in cognate fields, and its persistence in popular thought is pervasive and seemingly permanent.

The ancient Greeks theorized and authored the first formal expressions of environmental determinism that are clearly part of geography's own scholarly past productions. The Greeks had well-developed ideas about the relation between climate, hydrology, vegetation, soil, relief features, and local to global locations and their controls or influences on individual behavior as well as on collective cultural attributes, attitudes, and actions. Climatic conditions in particular were linked to psychophysiological states of well-being or malady. In turn, from Hippocrates (fifth century BC) onward, the doctrine of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow and black biles) held that bodily balances and imbalances, and hence health itself, were determined largely by environmental factors. The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places served as one of the main bases of Western medical theory for the next two millennia or more. Implicitly, it also served as a fountainhead of environmentalist thought for an equal duration. Whereas many Greek philosophers and scholars expressed elements of this psychophysiological body of thought, virtually all subscribed to the notion that environmental factors influenced the lives and ways of different peoples and their cultures. Herodotus's ethnographic and historical observations on differing peoples through the ancient ecumene or inhabited world are encyclopedic and offer many instances of environmental–cultural influences. Aristotle is perhaps the most cited proponent of climate plus location equaling potential for civilizational fruition. People of cold regions, particularly Europe, were spirited and freedom loving but lacked skill and intelligence. People of hot regions, particularly Asia, lacked spirit but had skills and intelligence despite their tendencies toward subjection and despotism. Greeks occupied the intermediate climatic and location regimes most suited to achieving the golden mean. Aristotle and other philosophers commented in detail on specific environmental effects such as the insalubrity of marshes, the qualities of different winds, and alluvial soils versus stony soils. In addition to specific local or regional environmental effects, the Greeks conceptualized global controls by latitudinal zones. Aristotle posited that the torrid zone, or the lands closest to the equator, were uninhabitable and that those most distant, the frigid zone, were equally uninhabitable. Thus, the lands between these extremes, the temperate zone, were the only ones suited for human habitation. Within the temperate zone, the Mediterranean littorals were ideally situated. Most Greek thinkers, and later the Romans, agreed with Aristotle on his appraisal of the temperate latitudes as being most suited for the perfection of human habitation and civilization.

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