7 billion people living on Earth today, perhaps 10 to 12 billion. As evidence they
cite the fact that technological advances over the past two centuries have led to
consistent advances in food production, and there is no reason to believe that this
will not be true in the future. Regardless of which side is correct, the debate over
population growth is certain to continue for many years to come.Possibilism
A philosophy addressing the relationship between humanity and the environment
that holds that humans have the adaptive ability to modify their responses to the
physical world; in other words, that a wide range of possible responses to environ-
mental stimuli exist. Possibilism stands in direct contrast toenvironmental deter-
minism, which holds that the environment limits, shapes, and even controls the
development of culture. Perhaps the foremost proponent of possibilism was the
French philosopher Lucien Febvre, who argued against theorganic theoryput
forth by Freidrich Ratzel and others of the German school in the late 19th century.
Febvre maintained that there were “no necessities,” and that humanity was in the
“first place” rather than external, physical determinants. In the United States, pos-
sibilism clearly had an influence on the approach of Carl Sauer and the so-called
Berkley School, who presented an alternative to the determinist position in the
form ofsequent occupancetheory and other theoretical approaches that stressed
the ability of humans to modify and adapt to physical conditions. Sauer and his
followers developed a model of relations between humans and their environment
rooted incultural ecologyand that was a direct refutation of the deterministic
approach promoted by geographers at the University of Chicago, where Sauer
had received his doctoral degree. In the United Kingdom one of possibilism’s most
eloquent promoters was Patrick Geddes, a biologist and urban planner, who held
that the spatially constructed environment influenced cultural and social behav-
iors, an early form of “cultural determinism” in direct contrast to environmental
determinism.
The theoretical approach of possibilism has had substantial impact on the phi-
losophy of geography, especially in regard to the epistemological nature of the dis-
cipline. One can find the foundation of possibilism in the reformist movement
known as humanistic geography that arose in the 1970s, whose most prominent
proponent was Yi Fu Tuan. Thequantitative revolutionof the 1960s had redi-
rected the discipline of geography toward the methodological and philosophical
approaches of spatial science. Many human geographers were troubled by what
they viewed as the rigid dominance of a positivistic, empirically based framework262 Possibilism