Abstract
“Neo-environmental determinism” has appeared in a number of forms and areas: in the spatial regionalization of human life and activity, in the interpretation of prehistory, in the study of contemporary world patterns of human well-being and economic development, and in the projection of the future consequences of human-induced climate change. Most neo-determinism has developed outside of geography, and critiques of such reasoning by geographers offer valuable caveats and correctives to it.
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Notes
- 1.
Jared Diamond, a biologist by background, later became a geographer through appointment to the department at UCLA.
- 2.
Frenkel (1994) has argued that there are deep-seated contradictions in the fusion of environmental determinism and egalitarianism, for example, the inequalities that must result between the groups occupying bioregions of different physical potential. He did not, though, claim that bioregionalists are aware of the contradiction or are anything but sincere in their political credo.
- 3.
- 4.
The article is described as taken from a forthcoming book, but an examination of the book turns up no documentation for the claims either.
- 5.
At another point, Landes (1998, 38) also wrote that “fragmentation made all the difference.”
- 6.
Sachs and colleagues indeed, and commendably, considered the possibility that poorer health in tropical areas was simply the result of greater poverty and rejected it on the grounds of analyses that showed a disadvantage in health from a tropical location persisting even after the results were controlled for income (Sachs 2001; Gallup et al. 2003, 37–39). Yet they neglect an alternative explanation: this might well be the effect, not of an inherent burden of latitude, but rather of the very process on which Hausmann (2001) placed so much weight in explaining the superior health of the mid-latitudes: the much lower global investment in the study of diseases concentrated in warm climates (the result of the historical developments that had concentrated wealth elsewhere in the world), an effect that would have spilled over even to relatively more affluent individual tropical countries.
- 7.
Asserting that weather and other hazards did more harm in Asia than in Europe, Jones (2003, xxix) wrote: “Large shocks which destroyed capital works as well as numbers of people were commoner than in Europe, although given the nature of historical evidence this is hard to demonstrate statistically.” Then how do we know it?
- 8.
Jones (2003, 147) claimed that as European states grew, public action in response to disasters “achieved economies of scale inaccessible to smaller political units.” But that would imply that the larger Asian empires that he so denigrated vis-à-vis the smaller nation-states of Europe would have been capable of more efficient response still. Indeed, he noted, while discounting, research indicating that into the eighteenth century such may in fact have been the case in China (xix–xx).
- 9.
As Blaut (2000, 96) noted, the argument also implies that Europe’s national borders should be recognizably “natural” boundaries, which is highly questionable.
- 10.
Invited to respond in the journal Antipode to critiques of Guns, Germs, and Steel by geographers, Diamond (2003) confined himself to a brief and petulant-sounding reply, describing the commentaries as uninteresting and choosing not to address in detail a single specific criticism that they or other geographers elsewhere had raised. If they were indeed as empty as he claimed to think, one would have expected him to welcome the proffered opportunity to explain why.
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Meyer, W.B., Guss, D.M. (2017). Neo-Environmental Determinism. In: Neo-Environmental Determinism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54232-4_5
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