*Essay submitted for the module 'Climate: Science and Society' at KCL.
Produce a critical account of the history of climatic determinism from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. To what extent is it necessary to be aware of the history of climatic determinism in addressing climate change in the twenty-first century?
Climatic determinism, also called environmental determinism, is the theory elevating the climate to the universal predictor and cause of individual psychology and physiology, and of collective social behaviour and organisation (Hulme, 2011). Throughout history, climatic determinism has been embraced as a defining principle in geography - as a legitimating ideology and a scientific justification for Eurocentrism and imperial expansionism (Livingstone, 2011). The idea of environmental causation has origins in classical times and it is attributed to the Hippocratic text On Airs, Water, Places. The text linked the characteristics of people in places to the influence of environmental factors such as terrain, altitude and humidity. This principle gave support to the idea that frigid zones generate hardiness, warm climates breed passionate people and temperate regions breed intellectual excellence (Glacken,1967). This idea found other supporters. Aristotle argued that inhabitants of extremely cold places are brutish in character, people inhabiting warm regions lack wisdom and that temperate climate produce the most advanced nations. During Middle Ages, the word ‘climate’ predated the notions of nation and state since it described the differences across the planet and saw the world split into different climatic zones (Frewer, 2016). Climatic determinism continued to circulate during the Renaissance. During the 16th and 17th centuries, also medical practitioners carried on their inquiries in dialogue with the Hippocratic tradition (Livingstone, 2011). This essay will produce a critical account of climatic determinism from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century, each section focusing on a different historical period. The scope of this critical assessment is to inform on why we need to be aware of climatic determinism when addressing climate change.
The Eighteenth Century
Despite the theory circulated through time, it was during the Enlightenment that climatic determinism became influential. The merit is owed to Montesquieu’s project The Spirit of the Laws (1748) (Livingstone, 2011) where he allocated to climate the distinctive role of the most powerful of all empires (Livingstone, 2002). He urged to believe that everything from human physiology, religious principles, moral standards and legislative customs were geographically conditioned. Conceiving his ideas from the work of Hippocrates, he argued that environmental conditions brought the law down to earth and governed cultural traits (Livingstone, 2011). He argued that the nervous system is formed by tiny tubules carrying animal spirits and speculated that warm air relaxes and lengthens the fibres while cold air makes the fibres contract stimulating faster flowing in the blood, making inhabitants of cold climates more vigorous (Livingstone, 2002).
Montesquieu’s theory attracted many advocates but also a few critiques. For example, Hume didn’t accept the climatic determinism theory but believed in the idea of the Anthropocene. He speculated that warming temperatures could be caused by human deforestation (Stehr and Von Storch, 2006). However, he maintained that people living between the tropics and beyond the polar circles are inferior to other species (Livingstone, 2002). In 1774, Scotland’s Lord Kames attacked Montesquieu by proposing the idea of multiple human origins and variations. He believed that the fibres on which Montesquieu had constructed his argument varied across humanity as well as skin colour, skeletal structure, cultural mores and so forth. Kames also found support. However, the work of the American moral philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith, whose work was published both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, served to dismantle the theory that humans are not environmental products. He confirmed that physical features were mutable and that racial differences would vanish if people were exposed to different environmental stimuli for a sufficient period (Livingstone, 2011). Smith strongly believed in monogenism because polygenism debased the unity of the human constitution, therefore, the foundations of the duty and morals, and the political authority of religious dominations. He had the purpose of protecting the theory of a universal moral human nature and considered the climate to be the determinant of racial variations (Livingstone, 2002). The idea of monogenism dominated at that time meaning that people believed they could acclimatise and adapt to different climates.
Immanuel Kant, the creator of modern geography, also supported Montesquieu’s idea and implemented it even further (Frewer, 2016). In 1775, he published an essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ where he identified four varieties of human species with different natural dispositions that he called ‘stem genus’. He specified that the greatest creatures that enjoyed sublime feelings were encountered between the 31st and 52nd parallels in the Old World while the opposite was for inhabitants of different zones (Livingstone, 2011). In his posthumously published lectures on Physical Geography, he elaborated a global cartographic in which he exalted the temperate world as the place of human excellence. He observed that:
‘’Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites… The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, and more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons’’ (quoted in Livingstone, 2002, p. 164).
With these ideas, Kant started a racial discourse that propagated across Europe and the colonies. That will be explored in the next section focusing on the practices of the United Kingdom in India.
The Nineteenth Century
Hence, these ideas of climatic determinism became the basis for imperial ideology (Endfield and Mahony, 2018) since climate justified European colonial expansion (Adamson, 2011). In the early nineteenth century, racial philosophy was reproduced through Anthropology. During the Victorian era, the discipline served both as a missionary endeavour and for colonial expansionism. At first, writers spent a long time in colonial settings writing ethnological accounts of the natives. In these anthropological writings emerge themes of moral climatology. In 1820, John Crawfurd, Fellow of the Royal Society and later vice-president of the Ethnological Society of London, published a three-volume History of the Indian Archipelago. In the publication, he connected cultural differences to climatic conditions. While men in colder regions were civilised and independent, inhabitants of warm regions weren’t able to reconcile civilisation and freedom because of the softness of their climate. Furthermore, because of their softness and their poor intellect, they had a certain type of government that impeded them to believe in Christianity. Without Christianity, they were condemned to be morally inferior. Even the precondition for the dissemination of religion was rooted in climatic realities (Livingstone, 2002).
The nineteenth century experienced the rise of polygenism and the belief that it was unlikely that people of different species could adapt to other environments apart from the one they had grown in. Hence, this meant the start of the ‘European race’ and the adaptation of nineteenth-century medical literature to this notion. Acclimatisation was impossible and the European race was considered vulnerable to the tropical climate (Frewer, 2016). As many died of diseases such as malaria, cholera and yellow fever, the tropics were presented as disease-ridden realms of mortal danger (Chowdhury, 2021). The term malaria comes from the French ‘mal aire’ (Crotti, 2005) translating to ‘bad air’. This shows their belief that sicknesses were caused by the climate. From the analysis of the diaries of the two settlers, it emerged that their daily lives and health were impacted by climate. They perceived it as unhealthy and irritable. They were anxious about becoming ‘degenerate’ because they were exposed to tropical climates. One of them complained that during hot seasons and monsoon periods, he would get symptoms like depression and fatigue that were relieved in times of cold weather. To alleviate their symptoms, they sought to re-establish the notion of ‘Englishness’ in India by going on excursions to elevated altitudes (Adamson, 2011). This nostalgia and this interpretation of the natural environment resulted in the planning of hill stations during the British Raj (Kenny, 1995).
It was believed that the tropics didn’t cause moral, cultural and biological degenerations just to Europeans but to all bodies. The climate became an internal determinant that had gone inside the bodies and was transmitted through generations. Different races started being categorised as pathologies and the discourse of the tropics changed from ‘abundant fertility’ to subordinate zones (Frewer, 2016). This change happened when the British Empire shifted from being a trader to a governing colonial power (Adamson, 2011), highlighting the need of finding an excuse to the brutalities committed. During the same period, in New Zealand, settlers started publishing explanations of the weather system in newspapers. The techniques used displaced most of the Maori engagements with weather knowledge (Holland & Williams, 2014) since their conclusions were ‘superior’. By the late nineteenth century, the relationship between the environment and the presence of maladies became to be questioned after the discovery of bacteriology. Despite this bringing hope to white settlers, it did not change the negative perception and the stereotypes of the tropical world (Chowdury, 2021).
The Twentieth Century
The idea of racial ‘progress’ and natural selection was also amplified by the advent of Darwinism and developed through the twentieth century (Livingstone, 2011). In 1911, in America, Ellen Churchill Semple published her book Influences of Geographic Environment. The book was built on a concept of anthrogeography developed in the late nineteenth century by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel. The theory saw the physical environment dictating the distribution and development of human societies. She promoted anthropogeography as an empirical methodology that provided geography with a scientific foundation for the study of societies, their religion, economics, and politics. She asserted that climate also influenced a population’s mental and physical characteristics. The book wasn’t received uniformly, it was both criticised and lauded. Nevertheless, after her book, anthropogeography started circulating in the United States (Keighren, 2010). Together with Albert Perry Brigham and Frederick Jackson Turner, she was a co-founder of a subdiscipline in American geography concerned with the spatial consequences of the intersection between geography and history. Turner’s relationship to the development of the subject was significant since he proposes the theory of the frontier, a theory discussing that the American-style culture was formed on an ongoing frontier process. The theory argued that the West had the geographical qualities to develop democratic values up against the hardship of the East (Block, 1980), differentiating Americans from their European predecessors (Livingstone, 2011).
By the 1920s, Ellsworth Huntington was the climatic determinism’s leading spokesperson in a period in which the theory was subjected to increasing scepticism. Huntington had a background in geology, he was hired as an instructor by Yale University and granted a PhD in 1909. In his publication Civilization and Climate (1924), he discussed two topics: the impact of climate on civilisation and history, and the idea of the perfect climate for human activities. According to him, advanced civilisations developed in places with frequent cyclonic storms while cool and variable temperatures promote the most advanced populations (McGregor, 2004). He argued that climate served as the driver of change between different civilisations and determined their rise and fall as well as mass migrations (Guss and Meyer, 2017). Also contended that development had shifted from Egypt to the Mediterranean, to the Alps to north-western Europe and that cyclonic storms had the same track. Western Europe and North America had the most seasonal and daily variations in weather so they were more advanced (McGregor, 2004). His later works asserted the effects of racial characteristics. In The Character of Races, Huntington wrote:
“Intelligence [is] a wonderful example of the way in which evolution centres in regions of physical extremes and is accelerated by climatic variations… [In] Equatorial regions the mental type of specialization has apparently been slow, largely because there have been no really great changes throughout man’s history’’ (quoted in Livingstone, 2012, p. 575).
Hence, he believed too that climate-induced internal evolutionary modifications rather than just external ones (Livingstone, 2012). Therefore, believed that the colonised were inferior and uncivilised, with irreparable conditions (Chowdury, 2021). Huntington’s work received negative criticism from scholars that saw his work as unscientific contributions to climatology. However, his ideas were popular among the general public (McGregor, 2004).
Climatic determinism was also linked with Nazi race theory in Germany and was debated in the Soviet regime (Livingstone, 2011) until Stalin laid anti-determinism down as a Soviet dogma. Despite the horrors of WW2, followed by a detachment of American geography departments from the idea, the theory continued to circulate during the end of the twentieth century. Figures like David Landes, historian and professor at Harvard, continued to overrate the importance of climatic factors while downplaying others. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1995) (Guss and Meyer, 2017), a strong inclination towards tropical denigration is perceived. Landes found climate an excuse for the practices of slavery because of the impossibility of Europeans working in hot temperatures (Livingstone, 2011). As will be demonstrated within the next section, other similar sentiments found their voice.
The Twenty-first Century
These ideas continue in the twenty-first century. In 2001, Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard development economist published an article called ‘Prisoners of Geography’, with geography meaning the physical environment alone. The climate was described as an important determinant of the well-being of countries. The tropical climate, he discussed, was a disadvantage since it was adverse to agriculture and the health of humans. This argument was developed as a justification to explain why tropical countries are much poorer (Guss and Meyer, 2017). Jared Diamond, biologist and professor of geography at UCLA, has once again contained that human history has been dictated by environmental influences and that those determine who wins and who loses in the struggle for existence. Through patterns of diffusion and migration shaped by ecological-geographical barriers and success in animal and plant domestication, he explained Western dominance over the globe. At the same time, used factors such as energy depletion, pollution, deforestation, desertification and so forth to justify the collapse of cultures (Livingstone, 2011). This theory can be dismantled by a study connecting the paleoclimatic shift in the Holocene to the collapse of past civilisations. Focusing on the Mayan, Akkadian, Egyptian and Moche civilisation, they discussed that it is hard to establish causal linkages and invited to be sceptical of the climatic determinism theory (Barber and Coombes, 2005).
Drawing on an argument developed by Jeffrey Sachs, it is commonly believed that climate change is and will continue to cause the impoverishment of resources of already poor countries. In turn, this will cause refugee flows, climate-induced migrations and a disproportioned number of violent conflicts (Guss and Meyer, 2017). In 2007, also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted this risk in its Fourth Assessment Report (Koubi, 2019). These assertions are reduced and simplified, proliferated and normalised according to a theory contending that climate change will disrupt these systems of livelihoods. It ignores the coping capacities available to populations through government policies, social networks and other non-military opportunities that can alleviate the challenges of climate change (Guss and Meyer, 2017). Once again, climate acts as a convenient excuse for wars. The future of humanity is reduced to a climate-driven destiny that has shifted from being responsible for the collapse of civilisations to determining what countries are to be wealthy in this century (Hulme, 2011). Besides, a study shows that the relationship between climate change and conflict is more complex. According to the research, risks of conflict coexist mostly in countries with socioeconomic problems that are highly dependent on agriculture that already suffering from adverse climatic changes. Since many policymakers and scholars attribute the civil conflict in Syria to occurring after a draught, it takes this conflict as a case point. It argues that if the government implemented better social and economic policies, the conflict wouldn’t have happened. The drought happened also in neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Israel but no war started there (Koubi, 2019). Academics and policymakers should dig deeper to find the intertwined causes of conflicts rather than reducing the issues to climatic determinism.
Conclusion
This essay has illustrated the history of climatic determinism from the Enlightenment till contemporary times and has shown the constant circulation and the capacity for adaptation of such theory (Livingstone, 2012). Through time, it has been used as an excuse for imperialism and Eurocentrism and it continues to manifest today as the determinant of who will survive after climate change. Used in such discourses, it underlies apocalyptic anxieties since it is believed that climate change will continue to shape human history. It has contributed (even if in contradictory ways) to the development of moral philosophy, disease, and mental health and was a subject of university discipline (Livingstone, 2011), it continues to shape our everyday practices and policies. While the theory is weak and inadequate for interpreting human-environment relationships (Guss and Meyer, 2017), it is alive in contemporary scholarship (Livingstone, 2011). Media coverage is not immune from this since it regularly presents island inhabitants as potential climate refugees. It depicted Black Americans moving to another part of the country after Hurricane Katrina as ‘refugees’, a word used to indicate international migrants (Donner, 2020). Refugees are depicted as helpless victims lacking the capabilities to cope with climate change and despite we might not believe in climatic determinism, this is where these rhetorics are coming from. Climate change is only one variable through which refugee migration and wars start and they should be connected to other socioeconomic problems causing the issue. This is one reason why we need to know the history of climatic determinism to avoid making these mistakes that promote racial superiority and inequalities of climate change. On the other hand, the narrative of a climate-shaped destiny is regressive since it offers no other possibilities for the future and no chance for humans to escape (Livingstone, 2012). Instead of speculating on the effects of global warming on people, we have to learn from history, reject both the geographical fatalism and the self-other dichotomy, and start addressing climate change differently. Instead of letting determinist and reductionist theories dominate discourses, we need to build solidarity by bridging ourselves to those that are more in peril by bringing climate change home.
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