Environmental Determinism

Environmental determinism, a concept we can trace to Greek and Arabic scholars, rests on the idea that the environment shapes the course of human development across various domains and at scales ranging from the individual to societies. It also figured prominently in the work of many Enlightenment‐era scholars including but not limited to Machiavelli and Montesquieu. During the early part of the twentieth century environmental determinism held a central if not dominant position within geography. Although many geographers accepted its central tenants, the concept is most closely associated with the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel and with two Americans who studied under Ratzel, Ellen Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington. Environmental determinism also held a central place in anthropological theory and has been embraced, although not so vigorously as in geography and anthropology, by several other social science disciplines and, perhaps obliquely, in the work of such prominent historians as Arnold Toynbee. Long abandoned by most geographers, environmental control as an organizing principle has been employed and popularized in development studies, mainly by scholars situated outside geography, a development that has attracted some criticism.