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What Is Environmental Determinism?
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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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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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When civilizations collapse
Looking at the rise and fall of historical civilizations, the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse can tell us about our own.
We can define collapse as a rapid and enduring l...
We're not immune to collapse
Societies of the past and present are just complex systems comprising of people and technology.
Although we have better technologies, we are not immune to the threats that faced our ancestors. If anything, our technological abilities bring more challenges. Our globalized economic system may be more likely to cause a crisis to spread.
A roadmap of past collapses
Although there is no conclusive explanation of why civilizations collapse, there are factors that can contribute.
- Climatic change can result in disaster, resulting in crop failure, starvation, and desertification. The Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others coincided with abrupt climatic changes.
- Ecological collapse theory: When societies overdo the carrying capacity of their environment, e.g., excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation, and the loss of biodiversity.
- Inequality and oligarchy: As a population increases, the supply of labor outstrips demand, workers become cheap and society top-heavy. Political violence follows.
- Complexity: Accumulated complexity and bureaucracy eventually leads to collapse. The returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, causing collapse.
- External shocks: War, natural disasters, famine, and plagues. The Aztec Empire was brought to its knees by Spanish invaders. Early agrarian states were passing due to deadly epidemics.
- Randomness: Collapse is often random and independent of age.
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Couples living apart
In 2000, a government survey showed that about 2.7 million married Americans lived apart from their spouse. The number rose to about 3.9 million in 2017.
Long-distance relationship...
The evolution of romantic communication
- Before video-chat and long-distance phone calls, written correspondence was used to exchange meaningful information. The goal was to write about the most important things that had happened since the last letter.
- Although the telephone was invented in the mid-19th century, it was only used for long-distance relationships in the 1970s, when the cost of phoning for pleasure instead of just business became affordable.
- The next major development in romantic communication was the internet. Email, instant messaging, and video-chatting were affordable for couples to share even the smallest details.
- Many couples today do "background Skype" where everyday living comes to the surface and add to a level of intimacy.
The pressure to live apart
In the past, couples were more likely to accommodate only one partner's job - mostly the man's. But today, couples have dual-incomes, are well educated, professionally minded, and pursuing careers in separate places. It is contributing to the rise in long-distance relationships.
The pressure to live apart for work is worse for younger couples who are still establishing careers.
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The genius
Genius is too elusive and too subjective to be easily identified. It requires too many traits to be simplified.
However, we can try to understand it by looking at intellige...
Intelligence as a yardstick
Lewis Terman, who helped pioneer the IQ test, tracked over 1,500 Californian schoolkids with IQs above 140, which is the near-genius or genius mark.
40 after the study began, the researchers noted that a number of the study's participants struggled to thrive, despite their high IQ scores. Others tested for the study that did not have a high enough IQ, grew up to become renowned in their fields.
Creativity and genius
Creativity is a part of genius that can't really be measured, but that can be explained to a certain extent. One sign of creativity is being able to make connections between seemingly different concepts.
The 'aha moment' that arises at unexpected times, like in a dream or the shower, often emerges after a period of contemplation. Information comes in consciously, but the problem is managed subconsciously, resulting in a solution when the mind least expects it.