Environmental determinism, in its simplest form, argues that human cultural traits
are either determined, or at least strongly influenced, by the physical environment
in which culture originates. It is a theory with strong elements ofethnocentrism.
The foundations of the theory may be found in the writings of many ancient think-
ers, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks. Herodotus, for example, linked the
physical environment of some of the peoples he described to cultural characteris-
tics he (allegedly) observed, and centuries later, Aristotle argued thatclimate
had a strong influence on human character and behavior. The Greek geographer
Strabo, who lived at the beginning of the Christian era, continued this tradition,
suggesting that peoples who lived in warmer climates lacked energy and initiative,
while those who lived in cold latitudes were less intelligent. Nor was the determin-
istic view confined to European thinking—the medieval Muslim geographer Ibn
Khaldun (see sidebar) was convinced that the differing mental and cultural qual-
ities between urban and rural dwellers were due to the “fact” that living in a city
made one more intelligent than living a nomadic existence. During the Enlighten-
ment, perhaps the most influential proponent of environmental determinism was
the French philosopher Charles Montesquieu, who believed that climate greatly
shapes the nature of human society and even proposed that various political sys-
tems were the product of the climate in which they developed. Tropical
climates, in the view of Montesquieu, invariably led to the emergence of despotic
regimes and spawned slavery, while more moderate climates (meaning the climate
of Europe) gave rise to democratic systems. Montesquieu’s ideas were widely
accepted by European scholars of the time and would subsequently influence some
of the most important social scientists of the 19th century.
In the late 19th century, the impact of Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution
and natural adaptation shifted from the natural sciences to the social sciences,
resulting in the collection of theory generally termed Social Darwinism. Leading
proponents of this perspective in history, anthropology, geography, and other
social sciences grounded their thinking in Darwin’s concept of “natural selection.”
These scholars reasoned that if the ability of a species of plant or animal to survive
was determined by that species’ capacity to adapt to changes in the environment,
then the same must hold for human societies. Indeed, according to many of this
school of thought, the very characteristics of human civilizations must be shaped
largely by the natural environment, justas the physical attributes of an animal
were determined by its surroundings, according to Darwinian principles. Exam-
ples of the application of Social Darwinism to geographical scholarship at this
time abound. Rudolf Kjellen, a Swedish political geographer, argued in his most
influential work,The State as an Organism, that the law of natural selection
applies to political states as well as to biological species, and that countries typi-
cally engage in a competition of the “survival of the fittest” in which one state
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