Insights
Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes,
incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic factors and by
non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to
geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils,
and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture,
other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people…
The differences between the current economies of North and South Korea… cannot be
attributed to the modest environmental differences between [them]… They are instead due
entirely to the different [government] policies… At the opposite extreme, the Inuit and other
traditional peoples living north of the Arctic Circle developed warm fur clothes but no agriculture,
while equatorial lowland peoples around the world never developed warm fur clothes but often
did develop agriculture. The explanation is straightforwardly geographic, rather than a cultural or
historical quirk unrelated to geography… Aboriginal Australia remained the sole continent
occupied only by hunter/gatherers and with no indigenous farming or herding… [Here the]
explanation is biogeographic: the Australian continent has no domesticable native animal species
and few domesticable native plant species. Instead, the crops and domestic animals that now
make Australia a food and wool exporter are all non-native (mainly Eurasian) species such as
sheep, wheat, and grapes, brought to Australia by overseas colonists.
Today, no scholar would be silly enough to deny that culture, history, and individual choices play
a big role in many human phenomena. Scholars don’t react to cultural, historical, and individualagent explanations by denouncing “cultural determinism,” “historical determinism,” or “individual
determinism,” and then thinking no further. But many scholars do react to any explanation
invoking some geographic role, by denouncing “geographic determinism”…
Several reasons may underlie this widespread but nonsensical view. One reason is that some
geographic explanations advanced a century ago were racist, thereby causing all geographic
explanations to become tainted by racist associations in the minds of many scholars other than
geographers. But many genetic, historical, psychological, and anthropological explanations
advanced a century ago were also racist, yet the validity of newer non-racist genetic etc.
explanations is widely accepted today.
Another reason for reflex rejection of geographic explanations is that historians have a tradition,
in their discipline, of stressing the role of contingency (a favorite word among historians) based
on individual decisions and chance. Often that view is warranted… But often, too, that view is
unwarranted. The development of warm fur clothes among the Inuit living north of the Arctic
Circle was not because one influential Inuit leader persuaded other Inuit in 1783 to adopt warm
fur clothes, for no good environmental reason.
A third reason is that geographic explanations usually depend on detailed technical facts of
geography and other fields of scholarship… Most historians and economists don’t acquire that
detailed knowledge as part of the professional training.
