What Is Environmental Determinism?
Curated from: thoughtco.com
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Environmental Determinism and Early Geography
- Strabo, Plato, and Aristotle used climatic factors to explain why the Greeks were more developed than societies in hotter and colder climates.
- Aristotle developed a climate classification system to explain why people settled in some regions of the world.
- An Arab sociologist, Ibn Khaldun (1332AD to 1406AD), believed that the hot climate of Sub-Saharan Africa caused dark human skin.
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Environmental Determinism and Modern Geography
- In the late 19th Century, environmental determinism was revived by the German geographer Friedrich Rätzel. He was heavily influenced by evolutionary biology and the impact a person's environment has on their cultural evolution.
- Rätzel's student, Ellen Churchill Semple, introduced the theory in the United States in the early 20th Century, where it grew in popularity.
- Another student of Rätzel, Ellsworth Huntington, also worked on expanding the theory, which led to a subset of environmental determinism, called climatic determinism. He said that the economic development in a country could be predicted based on its distance from the equator.
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The Decline of Environmental Determinism
Environmental determinism's popularity began to decline in the 1920s as its claims were often found to be wrong. Critics claimed it was racist and perpetuated imperialism.
Carl Sauer said environmental determinism led to premature generalizations about an area's culture. From this critique, geographers developed the environmental possibilism theory to explain cultural development.
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