Abstract
Environmental determinism pervaded American academic geography in its early years, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was largely discarded thereafter. Geographers rejected it much less because of any inherent political slant that it may have possessed—and in fact it seems not to have possessed any—than because of increasing evidence of its inability to explain the facts of nature–society interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
In the three major late-nineteenth century American debates over territorial acquisitions in the tropics (Santo Domingo in 1870–1871, Hawaii in 1898, and the Philippines in 1899–1900), both in and outside of Congress, it was opponents of annexation who emphasized environmentalist arguments and proponents who tended to minimize the factor of tropical location and to argue that, in the words of one: “It is not a question of climate” (Congressional Record, House of Representatives, 55th Congress, 2nd session, 5982).
- 2.
The passage also gives a generous breadth to the term “in short order.” Of the five departments Hausmann listed as examples, four were shut down only in the 1970s and 1980s, hardly close on the heels of World War II (and the fifth, Harvard, did not have the separate department of geography that Hausmann implied it had).
- 3.
In thus treating environmentalist claims on their own terms, we are omitting another important critique: that the more or less natural-science model of causality that they invoke is not a useful one for the human sciences. We do so because internal critique is more effective than external, not because we reject the other position.
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Meyer, W.B., Guss, D.M. (2017). Environmental Determinism: What Was It?. In: Neo-Environmental Determinism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54232-4_3
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