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Environmental Probabilism11/26/2020
Huntingtons work though, led to a subset of environmental determinism, called climatic determinism in the early 1900s.B.A., English and Geography, California State University - Sacramento.
She holds an M.A. Certificate of Advanced Study in Geographic information Systems (GIS). Throughout the study of geography, there have been some different approaches to explaining the development of the worlds societies and cultures. Environmental determinism is the belief that the environment, most notably its physical factors such as landforms and climate, determines the patterns of human culture and societal development. Environmental determinists believe that ecological, climatic, and geographical factors alone are responsible for human cultures and individual decisions. Also, social conditions have virtually no impact on cultural development. The main argument of environmental determinism states that an areas physical characteristics like climate have a substantial impact on the psychological outlook of its inhabitants. These different outlooks then spread throughout a population and help define the overall behavior and culture of a society. For instance, it was said that areas in the tropics were less developed than higher latitudes because the continuously warm weather there made it easier to survive and thus, people living there did not work as hard to ensure their survival. Another example of environmental determinism would be the theory that island nations have unique cultural traits solely because of their isolation from continental societies. Although environmental determinism is a relatively recent approach to formal geographic study, its origins go back to ancient times. Climatic factors, for example, were used by Strabo, Plato, and Aristotle to explain why the Greeks were so much more developed in the early ages than societies in hotter and colder climates. Additionally, Aristotle came up with his climate classification system to explain why people were limited to settlement in certain areas of the globe. Other early scholars also used environmental determinism to explain not only the culture of a society but the reasons behind the physical characteristics of a societys people. Al-Jahiz, a writer from East Africa, for instance, cited environmental factors as the origin of different skin colors. He believed that the darker skin of many Africans and various birds, mammals, and insects was a direct result of the prevalence of black basalt rocks on the Arabian Peninsula. Ibn Khaldun, an Arab sociologist, and scholar was officially known as one of the first environmental determinists. He lived from 1332 to 1406, during which time he wrote a complete world history and explained that the hot climate of Sub-Saharan Africa caused dark human skin. Environmental determinism rose to its most prominent stage in modern geography beginning in the late 19th Century when it was revived by the German geographer Friedrich Rtzel and became the central theory in the discipline. Rtzels theory came about following Charles Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 and was heavily influenced by evolutionary biology and the impact a persons environment has on their cultural evolution. Environmental determinism then became popular in the United States in the early 20th Century when Rtzels student, Ellen Churchill Semple, a professor at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts, introduced the theory there. Like Rtzels initial ideas, Semples were also influenced by evolutionary biology. Another one of Rtzels students, Ellsworth Huntington, also worked on expanding the theory around the same time as Semple.
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