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Effects of Globalization. Last Updated on Thursday, 0. Determinism And Possibilism In Geography Pdf Worksheets On Letters. Determinism and possibilism are two philosophical approaches in human geography. ContentsDeterminismEnvironmental determinismPossibilismNeo-determinism Determinism Philosophy of Determinism is based upon the interaction between primitive human society and strong forces of nature.

GO TO OUR COURSE WEBLINKS. MUCH THERE FOR ANNOTATION AND USE. A body of theories, or perhaps better called perceptions, exists regarding the interactions and affects between human beings and the physical environment.

The debate amongst these ideas centers around the role of the environment: is it deterministic, is it irrelevant, or is it a matter of influence that differs based on a host of mutable factors. Many authors have spent considerable time and political capital debating these ideas, and defending particular positions.

In this Wiki, we should attempt to outline some of these ideas, and include examples that either support or deny these various perspectives. Broadly, we will focus on 3 key issues: • Environmental determinism: the notion that the physical environment has a massive and often controlling (and perhaps never-changing and generationally stable) affect on human beings, in essence dictating their abilities in all realms of life and society. • Possibilism or 'Cultural determinism', two related notions. Cultural determinism is the stronger of the two, in essence a rejection of the environment as a controlling influence.

It claims that cultures are the result of human agency and action, and that the environment is largely a non-issue. Possibilism gives more credence to the environmental role, seeing it more from the position of sizeable influencer. • Probabilism or 'cultural ecology', sometimes seen as a compromise or synthesis of Environmental Determinism and Cultural Determinism, but more rightly seen as a more open-ended treatment of the possibility that sometimes the environment is a key inlfuence, while at other times human actions are more so.

Often tied to this discussion is the notion of cost-benefit analysis of any human actions with relationship to the environment. Please add links, photos, definition and discussions below. Everyone should be posting here! Environmental Determinism is essentially 'the theory that the physical environment (especially climate) controls human character and behavior and consequently human cultures and societies.' (from ) This idea gained popularity from about 1870-1915.

Environmental Determinism emphasizes the fact that the human world is completely affected by the overwhelming power of the natural and physical world. Possibilism or 'Cultural determinism' 'means that the will of man is a basic actor both in his own conduct and in his fundamental activities thus denying the influence, if any, of the natural elements on man.'

A History of Environmental Determinism Environmental determinism's origins go back to antiquity, when the Greek geographer wrote that climate influences the psychological disposition of different races. Similar ideas continued to be propounded into the modern era. Another early adherent of environmental determinism was the medieval writer, who explained how the environment can determine the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of a certain community. He used his early theory of to explain the origins of different, particularly, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black in the northern as evidence for his theory:] '[It] is so unusual that its gazelles and ostriches, its insects and flies, its foxes, sheep and asses, its horses and its birds are all black. Blackness and whiteness are in fact caused by the properties of the region, as well as by the God-given nature of water and soil and by the proximity or remoteness of the sun and the intensity or mildness of its heat.'

Environmental determinism rose to prominence in the late 19th century and early 20th century when it was taken up as a central theory by the discipline of (and to a lesser extent, ). How To Install Cccam In Dreambox. Professor is credited with introducing the theory to the United States after studying with human geographer in.

The prominence of determinism was influenced by the high profile of, although it tended more to resemble the now-discredited rather than. Between 1920 and 1940, environmental determinism came under repeated attacks as its claims were found to be severely faulted at best, and often dangerously wrong. Geographers reacted to this by first developing the softer notion of 'environmental,' and later by abandoning the search for theory and causal explanation for many decades.

Later critics charged that determinism served to justify and. The experience of environmental determinism has left a scar on geography, with many geographers reacting negatively to any suggestion of environmental influences on human society. While this accurately reflects the popular belief and perception in the geographic community towards environmental determinism, the debate was overlaid with hues of gray. Rostlund pointed out in his essay in Readings in Cultural Geography 'Environmentalism was not disproved, only disapproved.' He also points to the fact that the disapproval was not based on inaccurate findings, but rather a methodological process which stands in contrast to that of science, something the geographers have arguably sought to ascribe themselves to. Followed on from this in 1924 when he criticized the premature generalizations resulting from the bias of environmentalism.

He pointed out that to define geography as the study of environmental influences is to assume in advance that such influences do operate, and that a science cannot be based upon or committed to a preconception.' A variant of environmental determinism was popular among. To 's basic model of the ideological and cultural superstructure being determined by the economic base, they added the idea that the economic base is determined by environmental conditions.

For example, Russian geographer argued that the reason his nation was still in the era, rather than having progressed to and becoming ripe for the revolution into, was that the wide plains of Russia allowed class conflicts to be easily diffused. This Marxist environmental determinism was repudiated around the same time as classic environmental determinism. Examples of Cultural Determinism in History While argued that political behavior was universal, he also pointed out that elements of culture, particularly religion, could produce particular political arrangements which were advantageous to those that had them.

Wrote about the relationship between and, arguing that the cultural aspects of religion, including the, were crucial in the emergence of economic arrangements. Had a large element of cultural determinism, drawn from writers such as,, and.

In the context of Romanticism, the geography molded individuals, and over time customs and culture related to that geography arose, and these, being in harmony with the place of the society, were better than arbitrarily imposed laws. In media theory many writers take the position that political arrangements are determined by the mass media images that people see, and that these, by displacing other forms of culture, determine the economic and political arrangements. In modern conservatism, individuals such as commentator and economist Robert Barro argue that cultural norms determine the behavior of political arrangements. However, the cultural determinism of Buchanan and like-minded conservatives is currently a among American conservatives. How the Term 'Cultural Ecology' Was Created Anthropologist (1955) is associated with the term. In his 'Theory of Culture Change; The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution', cultural ecology represents the “.ways in which culture change is induced by adaptation to the environment.

” It is this assertion - that the physical environment affects culture - that had proved controversial, because it implies an element of over human actions. Cultural ecology is, indeed, inflicted with mild environmental determinism, but the approach has value in the types of situations in which it was developed. Less so in connected and globalised societies.

Steward's method was to: 1) document the technologies & methods used to exploit the environment - to get a living from it. 2) look at patterns of human behavior/culture associated with using the environment. 3) assess how much these patterns of behavior influenced other aspects of culture (e.g., how, in a drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patterns meant this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very strongly. This belief system may not appear in a society where good rainfall for crops can be taken for granted, or where irrigation was practiced). Steward's ideas of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism. Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of in the 1960s, as archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of environmental adaptation.

The view that climate change caused the collapse of past civilizations is ideology, not science. Applied to the present, it can undermine radical and democratic movements against the real enemies of nature and humanity. By David Correia David Correia is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. This article is republished, with permission, from, an online magazine of environmental politics in New Mexico Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical environment, including the climate, sets hard limits on human society. Scholars and authors who subscribe to this theory, most notoriously Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond (more on them later), argue that we can look to patterns of environmental change or geographical difference as a way to understand trajectories of human and social development and, by so doing, explain why some societies flourish while others languish in poverty or even collapse. Tread carefully around such arguments. It’s a compelling and seemingly intuitive argument but, like Social Darwinism for example, it is not the science it makes itself out to be.

As geographer Dick Peet has described it, environmental determinism is not rigorous scholarship but rather the “ideology of an imperial capitalism.” Environmental determinism plagued academic disciplines such as anthropology, economics and geography in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where, according to the late geographer Neil Smith, it “had an obvious appeal as a kind of royal shortcut to human science.” Its adherents found success as the willing tools of empire happily explaining away the poverty and misery of imperialism (and its privileges) as a function of natural processes. Cold northern climates produce hardy and thrifty people who therefore flourish. Meanwhile, the unrelenting heat along the equator produces lazy people condemned to forever languish in patterns of poverty as predictable as the trade winds. The theory lost its luster in the early to mid-twentieth century as decolonization scholars launched attack after attack. The intellectual backlash focused on geography, the discipline most closely associated with environmental determinism. Ivy league institutions in particular, embarrassed by such obvious associations with imperialism (they prefer their associations to be less transparent), dropped geography departments en masse.

Chastened, the discipline back peddled, ashamed by geography’s enthusiastic service to imperialism. The embarrassment meant that environmental determinism was largely ignored rather than buried, and as a result it has mounted a surprising comeback in recent years.

Blame Sachs and Diamond for this. Sachs, while an economist at Harvard, repackaged old-fashioned environmental determinism as the “ecology of underdevelopment.” As he wrote in a 1999 article in The Economist, “If it were true that the poor were just like the rich but with less money,” he wrote, “the global situation would be vastly easier than it is. As it happens, the poor live in different ecological zones, face different health conditions and must overcome agronomic limitations that are very different from those of rich countries. Those differences, indeed, are often a fundamental cause of persisting poverty.” Here Sachs, a key advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, makes the crackpot but quintessential environmental determinist argument: the redistribution of wealth won’t resolve global inequality. Because the geographical and unequal distribution of affluence and poverty is not a result of unequal power relations but rather is a function of complex geographic and climatic dynamics that have nothing whatsoever to do with histories of colonial conquest and capitalist expansion.

The argument, of course, relies on a premise that ignores histories of conquest— what Karl Marx, in reference to colonialism, called primitive accumulation. “In times long gone-by,” wrote Marx in Capital, Volume I, in a brilliant parody of determinist apologia, “there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.” For Marx, the unequal distribution of wealth was historically created in ruthless patterns of capitalist accumulation. In addition, as the quote above so sarcastically implies, the social relations that sustain this inequality require elaborate ideologies capable of explaining away plunder as the work of nature. Enter environmental determinism.

And so we get people like Sachs, who see “the poor” as an ecological category living far off in a strange land instead of, as Marx sees it, as a social relation. In Sachs’ world, the poor were always bound to be poor while the rich were bound to be rich. Sachs was able to make this argument because Jared Diamond had more recently parlayed it into a Pulitzer prize in his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Here he argued that we need not look to histories of colonialism to understand “the Fates of Societies,” (his subtitle for the book), but rather we must focus on physical geography and climate if we hope to understand why the world is divided into rich and poor. In his hands Europe’s ability to subjugate and colonize Africa was merely an accident “of geography and biogeography—in particular to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. This is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (p. In a funny way, Diamond is right.

Though his glib reduction of the history of violent colonialism to mere “real estate” is meant to draw the reader’s attention away from history and toward nature, to the careful reader the reference does the opposite. Real estate is not a natural category. It is a thing of value only because it exists as private property. And property, of course, is all about the power to exclude, forever enforcing the unequal distribution of resources as a way to preserve class difference. In a scathing review in the journal Antipode in 2003, a host of prominent human geographers pilloried Diamond’s work.

Andrew Sluyter called it “junk science.” Paul Robbins, more kind than Sluyter, chided Diamond for harnessing “a thoughtful and fascinating body of evidence to an explanatory dead horse.” But Robbins was just being clever. He knew full well that you can’t beat a dead horse. Academics attacked arguments such as those by Sachs and Diamond because the cruel logic of environmental determinism is, unfortunately, anything but dead. And, in a troubling development, it has found purchase recently among climate change scientists. Environmental determinism, it seems, has found a new home.

No longer housed in geography departments, it has taken up residence in geology, environmental science and earth science departments. This new “scientific” version of climate determinism took center stage at last month’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. There researchers from West Virginia University described the results of recent tree ring data from Asia in which, they argued, a particularly wet period in the thirteenth century corresponded to the rise of Ghengis Khan and the spread of the Mongols. According to researchers, wet conditions would have been particularly advantageous to nomadic Mongol herders. Well maybe, but more likely the rise of the Mongols had something to do with the enormous size of Khan’s army.

But no matter, apparently the past is littered with the wreckage of history’s climate victims. A host of recent studies have linked civilization collapse in Asia, South America and Africa to climate change. Just as in the past, we’d best tread carefully around such arguments. For starters there may be a more useful correspondence to consider: the prevalence of claims by climate scientists of a link between climate and the collapse of past civilizations corresponds to the return of environmental determinist explanation in the mid-1990s. In 1995, around the same time that Diamond found success peddling his determinist snake oil, researchers reported in the prestigious journal Nature that population growth and drought was a likely cause of the demise of the Maya civilization. This work kicked off a cottage industry among climate scientists who suddenly found correspondences everywhere they looked: Mesopotamia, west Asia, Egypt, the Maghreb.

The recent raft of historical climate collapse stories are troubling for a number of reasons. First, what many of these studies refer to as “collapse” is in fact a slow population decline over a period of, often, hundreds of years. The “collapse” of the Maya occurred, for example, between 750 AD and 900 AD: hundreds of years of decline (what scientists mean by “decline”, by the way, is rarely defined in the scientific literature) that overlaps with a period of climate change. “Climate change,” like “collapse” also is frequently ill-defined; often these “abrupt” shifts in temperature and precipitation are, in fact, changes that occur over hundreds of years and millions of square miles. In the case of the Maya, the period of dramatic climate change occurred during a two-hundred year period between 800 AD and 1,000 AD—a period that marked the driest in the middle Holocene. In addition, it should be noted that the increase in historical climate collapse research corresponds to the popularization of the wide acceptance of contemporary anthropogenic climate change research. Whether researchers are explicit or not, the rationale for historical work on the link between climate and collapse, particularly among funding agencies and the general public, has everything to do with the current climate crisis.

These are the what’s-in-store-for-us stories peddled in the hope that it may galvanize a broad-based movement to interrupt current patterns of global greenhouse gas emissions. There are two problems with this thinking. First, we may want to ask what kind of contemporary climate politics the rhetoric of collapse engenders. There is, no doubt, a real urgency to the problem posed by climate change. The climate is indeed changing and transforming in ways not conducive to humans and other beings. The idea of a climate catastrophism, however, so prevalent in the rhetoric of historical climate change research, displaces and defers this urgency.

If our fate is apocalypse, after all, what good is grassroots organizing? Moreover, the false panic of apocalyptic rhetoric provides the rationale to ignore the current suffering of the marginalized and the disenfranchised. When we strip away the apocalyptic rhetoric, we can see that we are not all in this together. But apocalyptic rhetoric forecloses the possibility of radical democratic politics. It makes politics, in fact, impossible.

In its place we are forced to entrust our futures to a non-democratic techno-managerial elite, to the apparatuses of state bureaucracies, to the military, and even to the corporations (Kyoto, for example) who profit from climate catastrophism. As a result of this state of affairs, catastrophism research proliferates and finds purchase among a powerful minority who fear the potential of radical and democratic climate change struggle—particularly the possibility that it could challenge existing patterns of class and race privilege. And they can’t have that.

This is silly stuff insofar as it applies to Jared Diamond. One wonders if the author has bothered to read Diamond, in fact. If has has, he knows that out-of-control ruling classes is one of Diamond’s main explanations of why collapses occur. And Diamond is pretty obviously writing what he writes in hopes that we will rise up and act to prevent our own collapse.

He may have a naive view of how that could happen, but he is neither a crude thinker nor a fatalist. Not even close. We Marxists could learn a lot of lessons from his attention to details and contexts. As for “determinist snake oil,” that’s a pretty interesting jibe for a scholar who professes admiration for history’s foremost historical materialist.

David Correia is too much into either-or thinking: either environment controls everything, or people can control everything if they are smart and hardworking enough. A perfect example is where he talks about the Mongols: He says: According to researchers, wet conditions would have been particularly advantageous to nomadic Mongol herders. Well maybe, but more likely the rise of the Mongols had something to do with the enormous size of Khan’s army.

But the wet conditions would have provided the necessary material resources in an agricultural society to build and support an enormous army. So the two causes are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. Everything has multiple causes, and this is especially true in the areas of the environment and society.

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