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Environmental determinism (also known as climatic determinism or geographical determinism) is the study of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular economic or social developmental (or even more generally, cultural) trajectories. Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, Ian Morris, and other social scientists sparked a revival of the theory during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This "neo-environmental determinism" school of thought examines how geographic and ecological forces influence state-building, economic development, and institutions. While archaic versions of the geographic interpretation were used to encourage colonialism and eurocentrism, modern figures like Diamond use this approach to reject the racism in these explanations. Diamond argues that European powers were able to colonize, due to unique advantages bestowed by their environment, as opposed to any kind of inherent superiority. Michał Apollo demonstrated that guest-host relations in mountain tourism are determined by altitude (vertical) and distance from the main route (horizontal).
History
Classical and medieval periods
Early theories of environmental determinism in Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome suggested that environmental features completely determined the physical and intellectual qualities of whole societies. Guan Zhong (720–645 BC), an early chancellor in China, held that the qualities of major rivers shaped the character of surrounding peoples. Swift and twisting rivers made people "greedy, uncouth, and warlike". The ancient Greek philosopher Hippocrates wrote a similar account in his treatise "Airs, Waters, Places".
In this text, Hippocrates explained how the ethnicities of people were connected to their environment. He argued that there existed a connection between the geography surrounding people and their ethnicity. Hippocrates described the effects of different climates, customs, and diets on people and how this affected their behaviors, attitudes, as well as their susceptibility to diseases and illnesses.
For example, he explains the Asian race were less warlike compared to other civilizations due to their climate. He attributes this to the fact that there are “no great shifts in the weather, which is neither hot nor cold but temperate” and how the climate conditions allow Asians to live without shock or mental anxieties. According to Hippocrates, anxieties and shocks promote passion and recklessness in humans, but since Asians lack this, they remain feeble. This connects to the manner in which Asians are ruled, stating they do not “rule themselves nor are autonomous but subjects to a despot, there is no self-interest in appearing warlike.”
Ibn Khaldun, the Arab sociologist and polymath, similarly linked skin color to environmental factors. In his Muqaddimah (1377), he wrote that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa and not due to African lineage. He thereby challenged Hamitic theories of race that held that the sons of Ham (son of Noah) were cursed with black skin. Many writings of Ibn Khaldun were translated during the colonial era in order to advance the colonial propaganda machine.
Ibn Khaldun believed that the physical environment influenced non-physical factors in addition to skin color. He argued that soil, climate, and food determined whether people were nomadic or sedentary, and what customs and ceremonies they held. His writings may have influenced the later writings of Montesquieu during the 18th century through the traveller Jean Chardin, who travelled to Persia and described theories resembling those of Ibn Khaldun.
Western colonial period
Environmental determinism has been widely criticized as a tool to legitimize colonialism, racism, and imperialism in Africa, The Americas, and Asia. The scholarship bolstered religious justifications and in some cases superseded them during the late 19th century.
Many writers, including Thomas Jefferson, supported and legitimized African colonization by arguing that tropical climates made the people uncivilized. Jefferson argued that tropical climates encouraged laziness, relaxed attitudes, promiscuity and generally degenerative societies, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle and northern latitudes led to stronger work ethics and civilized societies. Adolf Hitler also made use of this theory to extol the supremacy of the Nordic race.
Defects of character supposedly generated by tropical climates were believed to be inheritable under the Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, a discredited precursor to the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
Geographical societies like the Royal Geographical Society and the Société de géographie supported imperialism by funding explorers and other colonial proponents. Scientific societies acted similarly. Acclimatization societies directly supported colonial enterprises and enjoyed their benefits. The writings of Lamarck provided theoretical backing for the acclimatization doctrines. The Société Zoologique d'Acclimatation was largely founded by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a close colleague and supporter of Lamarck.
Ellen Churchill Semple, a prominent environmental determinism scholar, applied her theories in a case study which focused on the Philippines, where she mapped civilization and wildness onto the topography of the islands.
The role of environmental determinism in rationalizing and legitimizing racism, ethnocentrism and economic inequality has consequently drawn strong criticism.
David Landes similarly condemns of what he terms the unscientific moral geography of Ellsworth Huntington. He argues that Huntington undermined geography as a science by attributing all human activity to physical influences so that he might classify civilizations hierarchically – favoring those civilizations he considered best.
Late-20th-century growth of neo-environmental determinism
Environmental determinism was revived in the late-twentieth century as neo-environmental determinism, a new term coined by the social scientist and critic Andrew Sluyter.
Neo-environmental determinism examines how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular trajectories of economic and political development. It explores how geographic and ecological forces influence state-building, economic development, and institutions. It also addresses fears surrounding the effects of modern climate change. Jared Diamond was influential in the resurgence of environmental determinism due to the popularity of his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which addresses the geographic origins of state formation prior to 1500 A.D.
Neo-environmental determinism scholars debate how much the physical environment shapes economic and political institutions. Economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff argue that factor endowments greatly affected "institutional" development in the Americas, by which they mean the tendency to more free (democratic, free market) or unfree (dictatorial, economically restrictive) regimes.
In contrast, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson underscore that the geographic factors most influenced institutional development during early state formation and colonialism. They argue that geographic differences cannot explain economic growth disparities after 1500 A.D. directly, except through their effects on economic and political institutions.
Economists Jeffrey Sachs and John Luke Gallup have examined the direct impacts of geographic and climatic factors on economic development, especially the role of geography on the cost of trade and access to markets, the disease environment, and agricultural productivity.
The contemporary global warming crisis has also impacted environmental determinism scholarship. Jared Diamond draws similarities between the changing climate conditions that brought down the Easter Island civilization and modern global warming in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Alan Kolata, Charles Ortloff, and Gerald Huag similarly describe the Tiwanaku empire and Maya civilization collapses as caused by climate events such as drought. Peter deMenocal, Just as the earthworks in the deserts of the west grew out of notions of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as another environment and also as a platform to engage ideas and concepts about the environment to a larger audience. A scientist at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes that societal collapse due to climate change is possible today.
Ecological and geographic impacts on early state formation
Effects of species endowments, climate, and continental axes prior to 1500
In the Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999), author Jared Diamond points to geography as the answer to why certain states were able to grow and develop faster and stronger than others. His theory cited the natural environment and raw materials a civilization had as factors for success, instead of popular century-old claims of racial and cultural superiority. Diamond says that these natural endowments began with the dawn of man, and favored Eurasian civilizations due to their location along similar latitudes, suitable farming climate, and early animal domestication.
Diamond argues that early states located along the same latitude lines were uniquely suited to take advantage of similar climates, making it easier for crops, livestock, and farming techniques to spread. Crops such as wheat and barley were simple to grow and easy to harvest, and regions suitable for their cultivation saw high population densities and the growth of early cities. The ability to domesticate herd animals, which had no natural fear of humans, high birth rates, and an innate hierarchy, gave some civilizations the advantages of free labor, fertilizers, and war animals. The east–west orientation of Eurasia allowed for knowledge capital to spread quickly, and writing systems to keep track of advanced farming techniques gave people the ability to store and build upon a knowledge base across generations. Craftsmanship flourished as a surplus of food from farming allowed some groups the freedom to explore and create, which led to the development of metallurgy and advances in technology. While the advantageous geography helped to develop early societies, the close proximity in which humans and their animals lived led to the spread of disease across Eurasia. Over several centuries, rampant disease decimated populations, but ultimately led to disease resistant communities. Diamond suggests that these chains of causation led to European and Asian civilizations holding a dominant place in the world today.
Geography and pre-colonial African state-building
The effects of climate and land abundance on the development of state systems
In his book States and Power in Africa, political scientist Jeffrey Herbst argues that environmental conditions help explain why, in contrast to other parts of the world such as Europe, many pre-colonial societies in Africa did not develop into dense, settled, hierarchical societies with strong state control that competed with neighboring states for people and territory.
Herbst argues that the European state-building experience was highly idiosyncratic because it occurred under systemic geographic pressures that favored wars of conquest – namely, passable terrain, land scarcity, and high-population densities. Faced with the constant threat of war, political elites sent administrators and armed forces from the urban centers into rural hinterlands to raise taxes, recruit soldiers, and fortify buffer zones. European states consequently developed strong institutions and capital-periphery linkages. For example, because African farmers relied on rain-fed agriculture and consequently invested little in particular pieces of land, they could easily flee rulers rather than fight.
Some early African empires, like the Ashanti Empire, successfully projected power over large distances by building roads. The largest pre-colonial polities arose in the Sudanian Savanna belt of West Africa because the horses and camels could transport armies over the terrain. In other areas, no centralized political organizations existed above the village level.
African states did not develop more responsive institutions under colonial rule or post-independence. Colonial powers had little incentive to develop state institutions to protect their colonies against invasion, having divided up Africa at the Berlin Conference. The colonizers instead focused on exploiting natural resources and exploitation colonialism. Because the tsetse virus was lethal to cows and horses, communities afflicted by the insect could not rely on the agricultural benefits provided by livestock. African communities were prevented from stockpiling agricultural surplus, working the land, or eating meat. Because the disease environment hindered the formation of farming communities, early African societies resembled small hunter-gatherer groups and not centralized states. They could rely on their livestock to reduce the need for manual labor. Livestock also diminished the comparative advantage of owning slaves. African societies relied on the use of rival tribesmen as slave labor where the fly was prevalent, which impeded long-term societal cooperation. It is worth considering that the maximum extent of the Inca Empire coincided with the greatest distribution of alpacas and llamas. As a third point Troll pointed out irrigation technology as advantageous to the Inca state-building. While Troll theorized environmental influences on the Inca Empire, he opposed environmental determinism, arguing that culture lay at the core of the Inca civilization. the authors show that the colonial disease environment shaped the tendency for Europeans to settle the territory or not, and whether they developed systems of agriculture and labor markets that were free and egalitarian versus exploitative and unequal. These choices of political and economic institutions, they argue, shaped tendencies to democracy or dictatorship over the following centuries.
Factor endowments
In order to understand the impact and creation of institutions during early state formation, economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff examined the economic development of the Americas during colonization. They found that the beginnings of the success or failure of American colonies were based on the specific factor endowments available to each colony. These endowments included the climate, soil profitability, crop potential, and even native population density. Institutions formed to take advantage of these factor endowments. Those that were most successful developed an ability to change and adapt to new circumstances over time. For example, the development of economic institutions, such as plantations, was caused by the need for a large property and labor force to harvest sugar and tobacco, while smallholder farms thrived in areas where scale economies were absent. Though initially profitable, plantation colonies also suffered from large dependent populations over time as slaves and natives were given few rights, limiting the population available to drive future economic progress and technological development.
American economists William Easterly and Ross Levine argue that economic development does not solely depend on geographic endowments—like temperate climates, disease-resistant climates, or soil favorable to cash crops. They stress that there is no evidence that geographic endowments influence country incomes other than through institutions. The authors used a terrain ruggedness index to quantify topographic heterogeneity across several regions of Africa, while simultaneously controlling for variables such as diamond availability and soil fertility. The results suggest that historically, ruggedness is strongly correlated with decreased income levels across the globe and has negatively impacted state growth over time. They note that harsh terrain limited the flow of trade goods and decreased crop availability, while isolating communities from developing knowledge capital. However, the study also demonstrated that the terrain had positive effects on some African communities by protecting them from the slave trade. Communities that were located in areas with rugged features could successfully hide from slave traders and protect their homes from being destroyed. The study found that in these areas rugged topography produced long-term economic benefits and aided post-colonial state formation. By using variables to measure environmental determinism, such as climate, land composition, latitude, and the presence of infectious disease, they account for trends in worldwide economic development on local, regional and global scales. To do so, they measure economic growth with GDP per capita adjusted to purchasing power parity (PPP), while also taking into consideration population density and labor productivity.
Political geographers have used climatic determinism ideology to attempt to predict and rationalize the history of civilization, as well as to explain existing or perceived social and cultural divides between peoples. Some argue that one of the first attempts geographers made to define the development of human geography across the globe was to relate a country's climate to human development. Using this ideology, many geographers believed they were able "to explain and predict the progress of human societies". Like the political geographers, a crucial component of his work was the belief that the climate of North-western Europe was ideal, with areas further north being too cold, and areas further south being too hot, resulting in lazy, laid-back populations. A pioneering study by Apollo et al proved that the attitude of mountain populations towards tourism changes with increasing altitude. An advanced and multidimensional study conducted in the Mount Everest region confirmed that altitude determinism plays a major role in guest-host relations.