ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM

Around the turn of the century, geographers, notably Friedrich Ratzel in Germany and his
American disciple, Ellen C. Semple, espoused the view that humans were completely the product
of their environment, a theory that came to be called environmental determinism. Followers of
this school, which dominated geographical thought well into the 1920s, asserted that all aspects
of human culture and behavior were caused directly by environmental influences. For example,
the British were a nation of seafarers because they were an island-dwelling race surrounded by
seas; the Arabs were monotheistic Muslims because living in the vast empty desert turned their
minds toward a single God; the Eskimos were primitive nomads because the harsh conditions of
their arctic habitat forbade their development into a complex civilization. The books of Semple
and others were filled with endless listings of seemingly plausible environmental determinants of
cultural forms.
Although seductive when first encountered, such claims of causal correlation between
environment and culture were easily refuted once given careful consideration. For example, the
Tasmanians, who lived on an island not unlike the one inhabited by the English, made no ships;
the Arab tribes who had wandered that vast lonely desert for thousands of years before the
appearance of Muhammad were believers in a large pantheon of spirits; and the icy wastes once
traversed by Eskimo dog sleds are now the scene of snowmobile races alongside giant oil
pipelines. There is simply too much variation in human behavior in seemingly similar
geographical settings for it to be environmentally determined.

ENVIRONMENTAL POSSIBILISM
In place of the discredited determinism, a new theory, called environmental possibilism,
was proposed. Its proponents asserted that while the environment did not directly cause specific
cultural developments, the presence or absence of specific environmental factors placed limits on
such developments by either permitting or forbidding their occurrence. Thus, island peoples
could be seafarers, but residents of Inner Mongolia could not be; inhabitants of temperate regions
might practice agriculture, but those living in arctic latitudes could not. The value of the
possibilist approach was perhaps best demonstrated by the American anthropologist Kroeber,
who showed that the Indians of northwestern North America could not adopt maize agriculture
from their southern neighbors because the frost-free growing season in their region was shorter
than the four months required for the maize plants to reach maturity. Their environment thus
limited the ability of their culture to evolve in an agricultural direction.
A possibilist stance was also taken by the British historian Arnold Toynbee in his
multivolumed A Study of History (1947), in which he argued that the development of
civilizations could be explained in terms of their responses to environmental challenges. Cultures
located in the benign tropics failed to evolve because they were not sufficiently challenged by
their environment; those in extremely harsh habitats such as the Eskimos in the arctic remained
forever primitive because simply coping with the demands of their environment sapped all of
their creative energies. Only those cultures in environments offering sufficient but not excessive
challenges had the possibility of progressing to higher stages of civilization.
Possibilism suffers from one overriding defect as a scientific theory; it lacks any general
predictive or explanatory power since it is able to explain only why certain developments could
not occur in certain environments. It is totally unable to predict whether or not they would occur
under favorable circumstances. For example, the failure of Eskimos to grow corn is explainable,
but possibilism cannot explain why the English were great seafarers while the Tasmanians were
not. Clearly, the difference in the latter case was due to existence of very different cultural
traditions and bodies of technological knowledge rather than reflecting environmental influences.
In short, as the British anthropologist Daryll Forde concluded in his book, Habitat, Economy and
Society (1934), which was perhaps the last major scientific exploration of possibilism, "between
the physical environment and human activity there is always a middle term, a collection of
specific objectives and values, a body of knowledge and belief: in other words, a cultural
pattern." With this realization, social scientists tended to turn from studying human interactions
with the environment, preferring instead to focus on the seemingly more profitable study of the
internal structure and functioning of cultural and social systems. It was not until the 1950s that
social scientists, acting under the influences of Julian Steward's concept of cultural ecology,
again turned serious attention to the study of human interactions with the environment.