The Idea That Would Not Die
Environmental determinism says the physical environment determines culture, character, and historical outcome. It is very old — Hippocrates had a version, Montesquieu had a version — and it has been discredited, revived, discredited, and revived again, which is worth noticing. Ideas that keep coming back are answering a demand.
The demand is obvious once you say it out loud. Determinism explains inequality without implicating anybody. If the tropics are poor because of the tropics, then nobody did anything. It is an alibi with a map.
Its high-water mark was academically respectable and morally grotesque: Ellsworth Huntington's climatic energy, Ratzel's Lebensraum — a state as an organism requiring space to grow, which fed directly into German Geopolitik and from there into a program of conquest. This is not guilt by association. The theory was doing exactly the work it was built to do.
Possibilism, and Its Limit
Possibilism (Vidal de la Blache) is the corrective: the environment offers possibilities and constraints; culture chooses among them. Same island, two peoples, two outcomes — Norse and Inuit under one Little Ice Age, which is the entire argument in one controlled experiment.
But possibilism, pushed hard, becomes uninformative. "The environment offers possibilities and humans choose" is true and explains nothing — a theory that can never be wrong is not doing work. If geography permits everything, why do we keep finding patterns?
Where This Has Actually Landed
Not in the middle for the sake of the middle, but on a specific and defensible claim: geography acts on institutions and costs, not on people.
- It sets a price list. Terrain, water, and distance make things cheap or expensive, and cost differences compound over centuries into different outcomes.
- It acts through institutions. The persuasive modern work — on the disease environment, on colonial settlement patterns — argues that geography shaped what institutions got built, and the institutions did the rest. The mechanism runs through human arrangements, always.
- It is contingent on technology. Containerization erased laws of economic geography in a generation. A river is an obstacle or a highway depending on whether you have boats — and geography's effects are not fixed because the price list is not fixed.
- It never acts on character. No climate makes a people industrious. This is where determinism always went, and it is where determinism was always empty.
The test that settles it: find two societies in the same environment with different outcomes. If you can, determinism is dead for that case. Greenland hands us this test on a plate — Norse and Inuit, same island, same century, same cold, opposite fates — and the outcome turned on subsistence strategy and cultural commitment, not on temperature. Nature ran the controlled experiment. The determinists lost it.
The Working Formulation
Jared Diamond's continental-axis argument is the honourable modern version, and the right way to hold it is instructive. Its question is excellent: why did the conquest run in that direction rather than the other? Its mechanism is real: an east–west axis lets a domesticate package ride one climate band for thousands of kilometres, which compounds into density, herd animals, and zoonoses. And its problem is that it is a geographic explanation for a chain long enough that human decisions had ten thousand years to intervene — and they did.
So: geography sets the price list. People choose. The choices compound. All three clauses are load-bearing. Drop the first and you cannot explain the patterns; drop the second and you have an alibi with a map; drop the third and you cannot explain why small differences in cost became civilizational differences in outcome. That is not a compromise. It is the answer.