The Place of Environmental Determinism in Racism Behaviour

Environmental determinism, or the thinking that the environment (including geography and climate) determines the persona and attributes of cultural and ethnic groups, was once traditionally used to justify Western colonization. In the article below, Matthew Kearnes reviews the principle of 'environmental determinism' through a discussion of two well-known, twentieth-century texts. Specifically, he explores how racism is entangled with these determinist narratives.

A mainly sturdy lineage that runs through the development of modernist environmental questioning is the concept of environmental determinism “the large claim that environmental stipulations decide the personality and attributes of (geographically distinct) cultural and ethnic groups”. While this deeply frustrating principle has enjoyed a degree of forex in the course of Western philosophical and cultural history, it was once in particular evident in the early part of the twentieth century, shaping the development of the cutting-edge disciplines of region studies, anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.

Civilization and Climate, a ordinary textual content of this technology by using Ellsworth Huntington, is a mainly striking instance of this style of environmental thinking. First posted in 1915 (and reprinted at least ten times), Huntington's textual content opens with possibly the clearest expression of environmental and climatic determinism, arguing that “the races of the earth are like trees. Each in accordance to its sort brings forth the fruit regarded as a civilization”.

Huntington's race idea is clear from the start. If special races can be individual by the sophistication of their culture and civilization, it is a quick step for Huntington to pose his central principle that climatic stipulations impact the cultural sophistication of unique racial and ethnic groups. Perhaps predictably, racial groups residing in temperate climates appear as a substitute positively in Huntington's account, while in comparison the “denizens of the torrid region are slow and backward, and we almost universally agree that this is linked with the damp, steady heat”.  

Huntington's climatic determinism is of route a thin veil for a virulent structure of Euro-centric racism. It is necessary to notice that Huntington's theories of racial superiority are an expression of the emergence of fascist political movements in Europe and America (Huntington was once a noted supporter of eugenics and wrote sympathetically about Hitler and the onset of German National Socialism). They factor to a broader geopolitical discourse of Western colonialism that, in the phrases of Denis Cosgrove, “sought to base political and army approach on what was once viewed as enduring patterns of lands, seas, climates, and resources throughout the terrestrial sphere”. Huntington's specific mode of reasoning, which seeks to set up the causal relations between environment and civilization, is by way of no skill unique to the disciplines of geography and environmental science. The organic method of selection brought on this diploma of freedom. To Smuts, the idea is an organ of wholes with the capability to arrange a social self and social environment, and an ability that consequences in “different ranges of culture” relying on the “level of intellectual way of life and the holistic urge”.

In the same way that Huntington's explicitly racist principle of surroundings sought to establish causal relations between local weather and cultural sophistication and expression, in Smut's ecological imaginative and prescient the entirety (both human and nonhuman) has a unique vicinity in a higher whole. The threat for Smuts used to be when this order was once disrupted, which brought on the initiatives of environmental conservation and racial segregation. In the words of Anker again, ecophilosophy served him as a glorification of white supremacy, with a division of society into excessive and low personalities, whilst nonetheless defending unification of South Africa, the British Empire, and eventually the world thru the League of Nations.

One way of reading these connections is simply that they are an expression of the co-joined histories of colonialism and the contemporary environmental sciences. Might we conclude that the theories of environmental and climatic determinism without a doubt sat alongside the colonial ride however did now not add materially to it? Or might we locate some comfort in the suggestion that the explicitly racist connotations of each theories had been clearly a by-product of the private predilections of their chief proponents? Surely this mode of wondering isn't evident in current environmental politics and practice?

To summarize, of course, in reality, the argument that the colonial race theory, ecological holism, and environmental determinism have been truely accidental bedfellows is a profound misreading of entangled histories of these projects. Several present day pupils have begun to pick out what we may suppose of as a “climatic determinism” in the public dialogue of international warming and climate change. This determinism is characterized by way of pix of climate-induced warfare, conflict, and migration.