Determinism/Environmental Determinism
H. Ernste, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegan, The Netherlands
C. Philo, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Determinism A way of thinking that assumes one
‘thing’ (situation) is determined by logically and
chronologically prior causes, an approach to explanation
with deep theological roots but one that has become
integral to most conventional forms of scientific inquiry.
Environmental Determinism A way of thinking
common in academic geography, if now somewhat
discredited, that supposes human existence and
society, arguably including everything from settlement to
language, to be determined by prior and external natural
environmental conditions.
Possibilism A way of thinking in academic geography
that ‘softens’ the outlines of a strict environmental
determinism, supposing instead that the natural
environment throws up possibilities for shaping human
existence and society (not iron determinations).
Probabilism A claimed ‘third way’ between
environmental determinism and possibilism, one
stressing that the natural environment makes certain
human outcomes more probable than others.
Voluntarism A way of thinking about human existence
and society that supposes that human beings to have
some independent capacity for influencing their own
worlds, rather than being fully determined by controls
from without.
Introduction
Etymologically, ‘determinism’ stems from Latin determi-
nare, meaning ‘to specify’, ‘to determine’. Determinism as
a way of thinking has a very deep ancestry, certainly in
Western thought, not least through entanglement with
theological arguments about the primacy of an all-
powerful, hence all-determining deity, in the face of
whose ‘commandments’ it becomes an issue as to whether
the ‘mere’ things of creation, humans included, possess
any capacity for being and acting in a nondetermined
way. From the ancient scholars, and then continually
recast over centuries in the natural sciences, it has also
become an epistemological strategy at the heart of con-
ventional approaches to scientific explanation. Here it is
assumed that one situation or configuration of phenom-
ena, when subjected to knowable changes such as the
application of particular forces, will automatically and by
102
necessity lead to another situation, with the phenomena
now differently configured. This assumption is the basis
of cause-and-effect thinking, positing that the phenom-
ena of the world consistently ‘obey’ principles or laws of
causal determinism that the researcher believes either to
have been proven or potentially to be provable. As a
corollary, a deterministic epistemology also tends to as-
sume the ready identification, delimitation, measurability,
and computability of the variables comprising the situ-
ations in question. This determinism inevitably stands in
contrast to a statistical or probabilistic position that
allows chance elements to play upon outcomes, a stance
that accepts a measure of nondetermination in the ‘sys-
tems’ under study, although for some scientists the
chance element is conceived less as chance per se and
more what ‘we’ do not as yet understand. It is telling to
realize that in physics itself, with shifts from classical or
Newtonian mechanics to relativity theory, quantum
physics, and accepting ‘uncertainty’ in the calibration and
prediction of certain phenomena, there has now been
some retreat from, or reconceptualizing of, determinism.
Hence, this article concludes with an addendum briefly
reviewing this changing sense of determinism in physics.
Unsurprisingly, the problem of determinism has arisen
most sharply for geographers at the interface, where they
closely relate to the natural sciences of the external en-
vironment, at which point the issue becomes the extent
to which human beings are determined in their consti-
tution, organization, and behavior by the (kinds of) causal
principles reckoned to govern all environmental phe-
nomena. At various points in the history of geographical
inquiry, efforts have been made to specify deterministic
relations controlling whatever might be regarded as
‘geographical phenomena’, and a recurring theme ever
since the labors of the ancient geographers have been in
dispute over whether or not it is appropriate to conceive
of overarching ‘geographical laws’ supposedly governing
the disposition and character of these phenomena. More
specifically though, when geographers think about ‘de-
terminism’, it is usually in the context of debating the
merits and demerits of ‘environmental determinism’, the
name given to a form of geographical study emphasizing
how the natural environment (in the shape of climates,
landforms, rivers, forests, etc.) influences, controls, indeed
determines, how humans organize their lives, potentially
including everything from their agricultural practices to
their religious beliefs. This approach to geography, called
by some ‘the geographical philosophy’, was dominant in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, coinci-
dent with the institutionalization of geography as an
academic discipline in European universities. It does
have deep historical roots, though, with many branches
and variations spreading through into the twentieth
century, and arguably feeding through into more recent
attempts as forging a new ‘environmental geography’ that
(re)centralizes human–environment relations. This art-
icle outlines such roots and branches.
Human geography has been further impacted by de-
terministic reasoning, however, in that, by analogy with
the natural sciences, the social sciences, including
‘human’ geography, often quest for a determinism de-
scribing necessary and sufficient causal relations between
different social situations or events. The core question at
stake becomes how far human behavior is determined in
the same manner as is seemingly true of ‘matter’, dead or
alive, and how much ‘space’ is leftover for human free
will, voluntary choices, and independent agency. In this
respect, it is possible to distinguish between different
interpretations of determinism. On the one hand, there
are the ‘incompatibilists’ who view determinism and free
will as mutually exclusive, and they can be further sub-
divided into those who reject determinism but accept
free will, called ‘libertarians’, and those who believe that
free will is an illusion, called ‘hard determinists’. These
different opinions reflect different interpretation of free
will: sometimes free will is assumed to be a metaphysical
truth, while sometimes it is assumed to be only a ‘feeling
of agency’ that humans experience when they act. On the
other hand, there are the ‘compatibilists’ or ‘soft de-
terminists’ who believe that the two ideas can be co-
herently reconciled.
However framed, though, this social-scientific per-
spective on determinism focuses directly on the prob-
lem of free will, with determinism at one extreme of the
continuum, and ‘voluntarism’ at the other. The latter
term, introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies, the nineteenth-
century German sociologist, describes the assumption
that it is, in the first place, the workings of free will that
determine every theoretical and practical human action.
A prime representative of voluntarism before Tönnies
was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who
compared the will with Immanuel Kant’s Ding an sich
(‘thing-in-itself ’). It is the will that causes things to
appear to the human individual as they do, seemingly
dictating the person’s course of action, and as such will
is identical to, in effect a version of, the ‘things-in-
themselves’ (the noumena of the world, the things in the
world, logically prior to the ‘phenomena’, mere ap-
pearances of things as perceived by the human). Will is
hence a necessity, and exactly identical to what we
otherwise call causality, and yet in human consciousness
‘we’ (humans) can also know and reflect upon, and even
resist, our own will, thereby creating our ‘own’
Determinism/Environmental Determinism 103
determinancy. By this maneuver, the distinctions be-
tween determinism and voluntarism arguably break
down, and yet, in practice, social scientists, including
human geographers, continue to grapple with the ten-
sions between what appear to be ‘determinations’
pressing upon human beings from without – pressures,
demands, exhortations, etc., impelling them to act in a
certain (predetermined) way – and what seem to be
instances of humans acting otherwise, resisting external
determinations, responding instead to inner impulses,
convictions, and deliberations. In the long run of geo-
graphical inquiry, the external determinations have
largely been regarded as environmental, and their de-
gree of control debated, but other, broadly equivalent
determinations have been posited as well. The issues
raised in the last two paragraphs stand in the back-
ground of what is discussed in this article, and is briefly
revisited more explicitly in the final section.
(Environmental) Determinism in
Geography: Roots and Branches
Thinking along the lines of environmental determinism
can easily be traced to the ancient world; it is said that
Strabo, one of the earliest published ‘geographers’, was
‘fond’ of showing how the physical features of a land
clearly influenced the ‘character and history’ of its human
inhabitants. In his epic work from 1967, Traces on the
Rhodian Shore, Clarence Glacken charts the many twists
and turns of environmental thinking from Ancient
Greece through to the likes of the sixteenth-century
French writer Jean Bodin, for whom ‘‘religion, culture,
and morality were all subject to environmental control
and therefore in some degree relative to the particular
geographical circumstances in which they developed’’
(Livingston, 1992: 97).
It is nonetheless in the writings of those celebrated
(European) Enlightenment and the early-nineteenth-
century German ‘geographers’ Alexander von Humboldt
(1769–1856) and Carl Ritter (1779–1859), notably the
latter in the introduction to his Die Erdkunde, that the
outlines of an intellectual environmental determinism
began to be sketched out. Theirs was a complex, holistic
science predicated on seeing in Nature – meaning ‘all’
Nature, the whole panorama of creation – an essential
unity, whereby ‘inorganic’ phenomena (rocks, soil, and
water) were causally linked to ‘organic’ phenomena
(plant, animals, and human beings). For instance, Hum-
boldt observed that:
My attention will ever be directed to observing the
harmony among the forces of nature, to remarking the
influence exerted by inanimate creation upon the animal
and vegetable kingdom. y [T]he geography of organic
beings – of plants and animals – is connected with the
104 Determinism/Environmental Determinism
delineation of the inorganic phenomena of our terrestrial
globe. (Humboldt, 1951: 53–54)
It is vital to appreciate that this was primarily a vision
of the influences running from the inorganic to the or-
ganic, a more expansive vision that one is only concerned
with environmental controls on human beings. In-
triguingly, it was one echoed by the great American
geomorphologist William Morris Davis (1850–1934),
who spoke of geography as the ‘study of relations’
whereby the inorganic shapes the organic: ‘‘any statement
is of geographical quality’’ if it elaborates ‘‘some relation
between an element of inorganic control and one of or-
ganic response’’ (in Johnson, 1909: 10).
This being said, the ingredients of a cruder environ-
mental determinism, basically of positing stark environ-
mental controls on human existence and action, still
surfaced in the writings of Humboldt and Ritter. Again
using Humboldt as an example, he observed that:
Dependent, although in a lesser degree that plants and
animals, on the soil and on the meterological processes of
the atmosphere with which he is surrounded – escaping
more readily from the control of natural forces by ac-
tivity of mind and the advances of intellectual cultivation
y – man [sic] everywhere becomes most essentially
associated with terrestrial life. (Humboldt (in Tatham),
1951: 54)
Despite possessing qualities and powers different from
plants and animals, then, Humboldt did envisage human
beings as shaped in large measure by the properties of
‘terrestrial life’, inorganic, ‘and’ organic, which hence
served to propel humans to the fore as the ‘objects’ to be
explained (seen as determined not just by the inorganic
world but also by its nonhuman organic elements). Ar-
guably, this was a narrowing of the lens, producing what
might be termed a cruder form of environmental deter-
minism that began to hold sway over much of the nine-
teenth- and early-twentieth-century thinking (in the
discipline of geography and beyond).
This blunter form of environmental determinism af-
fected (one might say afflicted) many writers, but an
immediate sense of what was involved can be borrowed
from Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A genius,
pondering over such tricky subject matters as ‘pure rea-
son’, ‘sense perceptions’, and the nature of time and
space, he also gave lectures on geography which could
include the following:
Inhabitants on the coast of New Holland have half-
closed eyes and cannot see to any distance without
bending their heads back until they touch their backs.
This is due to the innumerable flies which are always
flying into their eyes. All inhabitants of hot lands are
exceptionally lazy; they are also timid, and the same two
traits characterize also folk living in the far north. y
Laps, Greenlanders & c. resemble people of hot lands in
their timidity, laziness, superstition and desire for strong
drink, but lack the jealousy characteristic of the latter
since their climate does not stimiate their passions so
greatly. (Kant (in Tatham), 1951: 130)
Extremely simplistic cause-and-effect determinisms
were thus said to run between features of the natural
environment, such as hot or cold climates, as associated
with quite specific attributes, such as the presence of
‘innumerable flies’, and dimensions of human life within
the environments so depicted. As is clear from the above
quote, these determinisms readily teetered on the brink
of deeply troubling negative stereotyping of certain
peoples in certain parts of the world: in a word, the
specters of racism and even a white supremicism were
never far behind. In order to give a further taste of this
really quite ‘crass’ environmental determinism, four dif-
ferent exponents can briefly be mentioned.
A rare woman academic geographer from this period,
and someone who had studied in Germany with Ratzel
(see below), Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932) became
known as a ‘hard-core’ determinist who exerted an
enormous influence in the American and British human
geography. At the outset of her book from 1911, Influences
of Geographic Environment, she made her position un-
mistakably clear:
Man [sic] is a product of the earth’s surface. This means
not merely that he is a child of the earth, dust of her dust;
but that the earth has mothered him, fed him, set him
tasks, directed his thoughts, confronted him with dif-
ficulties that have strengthened his body and sharpened
his wits, given him his problems of navigation or irri-
gation, and at the same time whispered hints for their
solution. She has entered into his bone and tissue, into
his mind and soul. (Semple, 1911: 1)
Another American geographer, Ellsworth Huntington
(1876–1947), had a similar impact with his theses re-
garding the dependency of civilization on climate. He
traveled widely, and in his 1907 book The Pulse of Asia –
revealingly subtitled ‘The geographic basis of history’,
and dedicated to W. M. Davis – he studded a record of his
journeying in Central Asia with a sustained environ-
mental determinist refrain, concluding that ‘geography,’,
as in physical–environmental conditions and changes,
‘‘especially through its influence upon [human] character,
is the basis of history in a way that is not generally
recognized’’ (Huntington, 1907: 402).
Even some years into the twentieth century, similar
tones could be heard. Thomas Griffith Taylor (1880–
1963), a British geographer who spent much of his career

in Australia and Canada, developed ‘‘theories of deter-
minism easier to understand but less subtle than those of
earlier writers’’ (Freeman, 1961: 325). He referred to his
approach as ‘geocratic’ rather than ‘theocratic’, thereby
positioning geography (or the natural environment) as
the driving force behind human existence in a manner
analogous to how religious writers position God. In an-
other guise, he produced maps of ‘future’ white settle-
ment across the globe, identifying regions where climatic
conditions were suitable for white colonization (ir-
respective of who might actually be living there pres-
ently). A less (in)famous geographer advocating a strict
environmental determinism, meanwhile, was another
American, Roderick Peattie (1891–1955), whose 1940 text
Geography in Human Destiny assertively restated an ‘en-
vironmentalist’ perspective in the discipline – he called it
a ‘geographic philosophy’ – and pictured human action as
constrained along three axes (Figure 1) the environ-
mental (y), the genetic (x), and human choice (z). Peattie
then delighted in locating his explanation for just about
everything in the human realm as near to the y-axis, and
as distant from the x- and z-axes, as he could. He also
talked about what he nicely (and one might say appro-
priately!) called ‘catastrophic geography’, discussing
events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and demon-
strating the clear ‘geographic determinism’ that would
result for the humans caught up in such disasters (see
Figure 2).
E F
D B
y
G C
z
X
A O
Figure 1 ‘‘If x is increasing control by inheritance, y the
environmental factor in one’s life, and z the increase of human
choice in any event, any fact relating to man’s [sic] action may be
plotted within the cube.’’ From Peattie, R. (1940). Geography in
Human Destiny. Boston, MA: George W. Stewart.
Determinism/Environmental Determinism 105
Science, Evolutionary Theory, and an
Environmentally Determinist Human
Geography
Weaving through the developments noted above, in part
fueling them but on occasion checking their excesses, was
the effort, from the late nineteenth century, to create a
more convincingly ‘scientific’ version of academic geog-
raphy. At this time, it can be claimed, science became the
new ‘religion’, and the enormous successes of the natural
sciences rendered it a model for all fields of inquiry
striving to be taken seriously as ‘scientific’. At one level,
this meant that there was indeed an imperative to be
deterministic, to be able to excavate causal relations and
underlying deterministic principles, as (supposedly) was
both the goal and the accomplishment of all ‘proper’
sciences (one’s cleaving to a Comtean positivism). At
another level, this meant attempts to translate ideas,
models, and methods from ‘successful’ natural-scientific
fields into as yet less ‘successful’ fields, in which regard
the work of Charles Darwin, the brilliant natural scien-
tist, natural historian, and sometime ‘biogeographer’,
found such a huge resonance. With evolutionary theory,
as codified in Darwin’s 1859 text The Origin of the Species
by Means of Natural Selection, for the first time it seemed
feasible to explain all observable ‘facts’ about the living
world, including human thinking and human behavior,
without having to resort to some supranatural power.
Human being was not the center of the world, nor the
crown on God’s creation anymore, but rather the product
of random effects or of sufficient causes, and the natural
environment was seen as the forcing house of this process
of evolutionary development. Only the environmentally
best-adapted organisms within a species would survive,
and it was this struggle to adapt, and hence to survive,
that was taken to explain the different features of life as
distributed across both the many species and ecological
niches spread across the planet. Putting aside the many
complexities about Darwinism, including its mis-
representation in many quarters, it is entirely un-
surprising that many emerging disciplines – including
the likes of sociology and philosophy, with Herbert
Spencer’s attempts to foster what was to become known
as a ‘social Darwinism’ – sought to acquire, and to secure
legitimacy from, a Darwinian cast.
Given its substantive interest in human–nature re-
lations, academic geography was more plausibly set than
some other disciplines to receive, and to rework, Dar-
winian materials. Environmental determinism was duly
given a productive shot in the arm, a tool in its own
armory, although a more systematic and rigorous bor-
rowing from Darwin might have enabled the discipline to
‘avoid’ some of the worst excesses detailed above (not
least by recognizing, with Darwin, the complicated ‘two-
way’ relationship between organism and environment). A
106 Determinism/Environmental Determinism
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Figure 2 ‘‘Flight diagram of victims of geographic determinism during two tornadoes, showing actual paths through the air of the
victims of the storms.’’ From Peattie, R. (1940). Geography in Human Destiny. Boston, MA: George W. Stewart.
name often mentioned as a translator of Darwin into
geography is that of the German scholar Friedrich Ratzel
(1844–1904), who trained as a zoologist and early started
to recognize the challenge of Darwin’s evolutionary
theory. The historian of the discipline George Tatham
thus suggests that:
Ratzel saw man [sic] as the end-product of evolution, an
evolution in which the mainspring was the natural se-
lection of types according to their capacity to adjust
themselves to the physical environment. y Ratzel ten-
ded to see man as the product of his environment,
moulded by the physical forces that surrounded him, and
succeeding only insofar as he made the correct adjust-
ment to their demands y. (Tatham, 1951: 64)
This being said, Ratzel was conscious that a simple
environmental determinism, which derives the contours of
human life ‘directly’ from the compulsions of physical–
environmental spaces, would be inadequate in itself. In-
stead, following the lead set by Moritz Wagner’s 1868 text
Die Darwinsche Theorie und das Migrationsgesetz der Orga-
nismen, he proposed a less direct relationship. In this view,
‘natural space’ does not directly produce human com-
munities and their cultures, but rather produces a natural
setting for migratory and cultural movements across space,
which then will lead to a spatially differentiated distri-
bution of human activities. Ratzel applied this thinking,
mainly in the field of political geography, where he tried to
explain the emergence of states as an evolutionary ne-
cessity. In analogy with biology, he interpreted the state as
an organism which undergoes (population) growth until
the locally available resources are exhausted, at which
point territorial expansion becomes a necessity for the
state to survive. States need Lebensraum (living space or
‘room’) to exist, which would explain their ‘natural’ ten-
dency toward territorial expansion, a notion that of course
could be, and likely was, mobilized to dubious ends. It is
nonetheless possible to observe a discrepancy between the
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strong theoretical propositions that were made by Ratzel
and the careful, indeed quite nuanced, conclusions that he
drew from them himself. In this context, his followers
seemed to be much more dogmatic than the master
himself, contributing, as with the cruder claims of Semple
et al. as retold above, to the disrepute which began to befall
environmental determinism in the second half of the
twentieth century.
Softening Environmental Determinism
Human geography, in this tradition, tried to show that the
natural environment was the causal determinant of not
only the spatial distribution but also the entire ‘nature’ of
human endeavor: ‘‘Places vary in their natural conditions
and these variations determine what people do there,’’ as
Ron Johnston summed up this tradition. Put like this,
environmental determinism appears as a very plausible,
legitimate, and indeed incontrovertible enterprise, and it
might be argued that in the hands of most geographers and
others (e.g., human ecologists) who have worked within an
environmentalist orbit – laboring hard, if often quite an-
onymously, unlike the standout but controversial figures
mentioned above (i.e., Semple et al.) – a ‘softened’ version
of environmental determinism was what ended up actually
practiced. Indeed, what was sustained of determinism in
human geography was mainly a free and ‘mild’ form of
determinism, more a metaphor and an ad hoc hypothesis
than a rigorous principle, as Gerhard Hard proposed in his
1973 text Die Geographie. Eine wissenschaftstheoretische Ein-
führung. In this rather diffuse way environmental deter-
minism lived on in landscape geography and regional
geography as well as in many school textbooks.
To elaborate, in continental Europe, determinism
early attracted serious criticisms, in both its general and
its specific (i.e., environmental) forms. In Germany, the
philosophy of idealism, with its convictions about both
the freedom of human will and the historicity of

personality, went through a revival, and evidently exerted
an influence upon the country’s geographers. Alfred
Hettner (1859–1941), for instance, proposed that, instead
of talking about necessary and certain (deterministic)
influences of nature on humanity, a more sophisticated
conception might be one stressing how nature merely
restricts the number of opportunities available for how
these lives might be lived. Modifying Kant’s concept of
chorography for the description of all phenomena that
are found in the same place, Hettner coined the term
‘chorology’ as the scientific explanation of ‘all’ causal
relationships between these phenomena. These causal
relationships, in his view, were not unidirectional or
hierarchical, and so nature was not seen as the sole de-
termining or causal power in the making of ‘real’ human
geographies on the ground. The further implication was
that people dwelling in any one environmental context
should be conceived as having a substantial range of
options from which to choose, when seeking to survive
and maybe flourish in that context, suggesting that the
human beings here possess causal powers.
In France, Bergsonian thinking, after Henri Bergson,
gained influence with its focus on the unpredictable élan
vital and the unforeseeable creative activity of human
beings. Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) probably
picked up on this current, and his posthumously pub-
lished 1926 text Principles of Human Geography duly
identified the variety of possible ‘local solutions’ which
people could devise to the ‘problem of existence’ posed
to them by their host natural environments. His approach
came to be known as ‘possibilism’, perhaps most obvi-
ously in the work of the French historian Lucien Febvre.
As summarized in the ‘Foreword’ to Febvre’s 1925 text A
Geographical Introduction to History:
Against the geographical determinism of Ratzel, [Febvre]
sets the possibilism of Vidal de la Blache. ‘There is no
rigid and uniform influence of four or five great geo-
graphical fatalities weighing on historical individualities’.
The true and only geographical problem is that of the
utilization of possibilities. ‘There are no necessities, but
everywhere possibilities. (Barr, in Febvre, 1925: xi).
According to both de la Blache and Febvre, it was
unreasonable to draw boundaries between natural and
cultural phenomena; rather, they should be regarded as
united and inseparable. Each human community adjusts
to prevailing natural conditions in its own way, and the
result of the adjustment is not one-sidedly due to the
natural conditions but the result of a long process of
mutual adaptation.
In practice, then, the terms of a debate were estab-
lished between determinism and possibilism as perhaps
the most deep seated of controversies running through
the early- to mid-twentieth-century academic geography.
Determinism/Environmental Determinism 107
The landmark edited collection from 1951, Geography in
the Twentieth Century, was framed by this debate, and in
the introduction it was stated that ‘‘the authors will take
opposite sides in certain problems, as for instance in the
broad question of Possibilism versus Determinism’’
(Taylor, 1951: 3). Moreover, in this introduction, Taylor
contrasted the deterministic line taken by both a ‘theo-
cratic’ position and his own ‘geocratic’ position (see
above) with the so-called ‘we-ocratic’ position of the
possibilists, one centralizing the role played by ‘we’
humans in shaping our own worlds and destinies. He also
expended much energy here and elsewhere in the vol-
ume to disputing possibilism, and to propounding what
he called a ‘scientific’ or ‘stop-and-go’ determinism, the
basic thrust of which is that the natural environment in a
given region charts out a ‘main road’ along which hu-
manity will inevitably develop in that region, but that the
people involved will be like ‘police officers’ controlling
the ‘traffic’ along this road: that is, allowing it through,
maybe accelerating the overall movement, or stopping it,
decelerating the movement.
In practice, however, enthusiasm for the strict en-
vironmental determinism favored by Taylor was definitely
on the wane by the 1950s, and at the same time the de-
terminism–possibilism debate was itself fading from view,
at least in the terms detailed above. Insofar as geographers
through the later years of the twentieth century and up to
the present have considered where they stand on the de-
terminism–possibilism axis, they would likely admit to
following the softer, modified stance on environmental
determinism indexed by the possibilist positions. One
further contribution of note occurred in contributions from
1952 and 1957 when O. H. K. Spate (1911–2000) proposed
a middle way between environmental determinism and
possibilism, something that he called ‘probabilism’, em-
phasizing that the natural environment makes certain
‘possibilities’ (of how humans in a given environment might
develop through time) more ‘probable’ than others. More
recently, John E. Chappell has sought to recast the debate
in terms of ‘environmental causation’, seeking thereby to
avoid the excesses of an older environmental determinism,
while various geographers – a prominent example is David
Stoddart – have sought to reclaim a stronger sense of the
natural–environmental dimension central to almost all
facets of human existence, not least in a contemporary era
of dramatic global climatic–environmental change (posing
all manner of intractable questions for not just human
flourishing but also maybe the very survival of humanity on
this planet). The name of ‘environmental geography’ has
sometimes been attached to this latter development, not
least in the context of undergraduate textbooks and
teaching, but there is potential for such a rubric to en-
compass a variety of conceptualizations and methodologies,
older and newer, around the axes of humanity and en-
vironment, or nature and culture.
108 Determinism/Environmental Determinism
Determinism, Spatial Science, and
Agency-Structure
As noted, the determinism–possibilism debate, as con-
ducted around issues of ‘environmental’ influence, waned
after c. 1950, not least because a very new set of concerns
began, quite dramatically, to reconfigure all aspects of the
discipline in Anglo-Saxon-speaking lands (and then
spreading globally). These concerns arose with the ad-
vent of geography as spatial science, a quantitatively
literate attempt to forge a properly ‘scientific’ geography
able to specify foundational spatial (or morphological)
laws of how phenomena (physical or human) are dis-
tributed across the Earth’s surface. Other articles in this
encyclopedia provide more detail on this far-reaching sea
change in geographical thought and application, but of
relevance here is how the search for spatial laws, com-
monly conceived through a lens of cause and effect,
clearly committed the discipline to a fresh era of deter-
minism. Revealingly, in one of the founding statements of
spatial science, Ian Burton’s 1963 paper on the ‘quanti-
tative revolution’, environmental determinism is treated
favorably, not for its specific claims, which Burton ba-
sically rejects, but for the ‘ambition’ of identifying de-
terministic, causal, law-like relations when examining
geographical phenomena. There has been sustained ar-
gument over the validity of seeking to convert geography,
particularly ‘human’ geography, into a ‘science’ akin to
other conventional sciences, complete with a strong de-
terministic cast. Such arguments have also continued to
rage over other versions of human geography that have
emerged in opposition to spatial science, notably the
more ‘economistic’ versions of Marxist geography,
wherein deterministic laws of capitalist accumulation are
advanced in the explanation of sociospatial inequalities.
Realist, post-structuralist, and postmodernist geographies
have all questioned conventional deterministic reasoning,
in whatever exact guise it has been prosecuted (en-
vironmental, spatial, or economistic), albeit mounting
their criticisms from rather different bases, with differing
levels of hostility, but not necessarily then endorsing
voluntarism. Other articles in the encyclopedia ably
cover the many and varied problematics involved, and so
little more need be said here.
What can be noted is that several commentators on
disciplinary history detect the same parallels as just
spelled out. Indeed, the likes of Derek Gregory posit an
essential continuity between the environmental deter-
minism of Semple et al., the ‘geometric determinism’ of
the spatial scientists and the ‘economic determinism’ of
certain Marxist geographers, particularly in how they all
end up allowing only scant room for human beings to be
and do, to think and act, in anything other than a fashion
determined for them by external compulsions. Thus, for
the spatial scientists, spatial forms (e.g., a ‘central place’
hierarchy of settlements) are reckoned to be just as
controlling of human behavior as are natural–environ-
mental contexts (e.g., a low-lying, ill-drained valley) for
an environmental determinist. Or, for certain Marxist
geographers, capital logics (e.g., the geographical transfer
of ‘surplus value’) are reckoned to be equivalently con-
trolling of human behavior. Unsurprisingly, alternative
perspectives have been advocated by human geographers
unhappy about the implied negation of human freedom,
free will, or, in a more recent vocabulary, agency. The
result has been, as hinted earlier, the appearance within
human geography of voluntarist conceptions standing in
opposition to, or at least endeavoring to qualify the ex-
cesses of extreme, determinist thinking.
Behavioral and humanistic geographers made the initial
moves, demanding that people ‘as’ people, not as objects
akin to rocks or rivers, nor as unthinking automata re-
sponding soundlessly to the determinations of environment,
space, or economy, be placed center stage in inquiry. In
turn, such moves were themselves criticized for being too
voluntaristic, and for thereby positioning human beings as
simply ‘too’ powerful, too able to shape their own destinies,
when a host of constraining, if not strictly determining,
influences surely did need to be taken more seriously. Here,
therefore, was the fraught terrain of debate over what in-
creasingly became known as ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, where
agency equated with ‘human’ agency (the capacity for ex-
periencing, decision making, acting, etc., of human beings)
and structure with ‘social’ structure (potentially en-
compassing all manner of broader ‘ecological’, economic,
and political imperatives comprising a structural ‘level’
above, below, or behind (the backs of) human being indi-
vidually and collectively). A diversity of theoretical man-
euvers were advanced in order to overcome this so-called
dualism, most obviously drawing from the ‘structurationist’
social theory of Anthony Giddens, an eminent sociologist,
but commonly reworked to incorporate an enhanced
alertness to how the ‘resources’ of time and space un-
avoidably enter into the recursive mediations of agency and
structure (whereby agency ‘makes’ structure ‘makes’ agency,
etc.). Once again, it is enough to reference other articles in
this encyclopedia that chart in more detail the contours of
the agency–structure debate, and how it was supposedly
resolved in structuration theory and structurationist geog-
raphies. Nonetheless, the implications for thinking about
determinism and voluntarism, a theme inevitably swimming
throughout ‘all’ versions of human geography, past and
present, whether or not named as such, should be obvious.
In practice, perhaps akin to how most human geographers
now effectively subscribe to an environmental possibilist (or
maybe probabilist) line, even if rarely expressing their
preference thus, it can be argued that the structurationist
line on the balance between agency and structure, or be-
tween determinism and voluntarism, has now become a
kind of ‘unspoken’ ground zero for many of us.

Determinism in Physics: An Addendum
In classical mechanics, the situation of a system S of n
mass points at time point t0 is fully known if, for each of
the mass points i with 1rirn, their locations (or co-
ordinates) xi(t0) and their impulses (or momentums) pi(t0)
at time t0 are known. Every future situation S at time
t(t0 þ j) as well as every situation in the past (t0  j) can
then be exactly calculated from the situation at t0 with
the help of the Hamiltonian differential equation
@H @H
ẋi ¼ ṗi ¼ 
@pi @xi
in which, the dot denotes the ordinary derivative with re-
spect to time of the functions pi ¼ pi(t) and xi ¼ xi(t) (called
coordinates), taking values in some vector space, and
H ¼ H(pi,xi,t) is the so-called Hamiltonian or (scalar valued)
Hamiltonian function. Therefore, given the situation at t0,
with the help of the above Hamiltonian nomological hy-
pothesis, one can derive situation S through a deductive-
nomological explanation. If one interprets the initial situ-
ation as cause of sufficient ground and every future situ-
ation as effect, then one accepts the theorem of Leibnitz,
according to which every mechanical natural situation is
uniquely determined by sufficient grounds, or that the
same causes will always result in the same effects. This
property, however, is only true under the assumption that
we can measure the situation with infinite exactness, and of
course, no human being has this ability, which can only
reside in some supranatural creature (Laplace’s ‘demon’ or
‘omniscient calculator’). Nevertheless, it is this conception
of mechanical causation, which underpins (virtually) all
conventional scientific understandings of determinism.
What is true for mechanical systems is also true for
electromagnetic fields in combination with the Maxwell–
Lorentz’ equations, while the differential equations of
relativity theory describe a deterministic system. In the
latter, though, the speed of light c is a limiting factor; and
in the Minkowsky space of special relativity theory, two
events (x1, t1) and (x0, t0) can only follow each other in
time if c2(t1  t0)2  (x1  x0)2Z0. Therefore, we can also
distinguish events which cannot be qualified as past or
future events and thus cannot be related with other events
along the time axis required by standard ‘cause’ and ‘effect’
reasoning. Otherwise, however, in relativity theory we are
still dealing with a fully deterministic system.
In contrast, in quantum mechanics, it has been shown,
according to the Heisenberg ‘uncertainty principle’, that for
a single electron ‘not’ all of the variables needed to describe
its situation (location) can ever be measured at the same
time. As a consequence, in the wave mechanics of Schrö-
dinger, the classical description of the situation is replaced
by a c-function, with which the situation of the system is
not described exactly but is expressed in the form of a
Determinism/Environmental Determinism 109
probability distribution of location (xi) and impulse (pi) at
time t. With this mode of description and with the help of
the Schrödinger equations, the c-situation at t can be fully
determined from the c-situation at t0. The physical systems
of quantum mechanics are therefore not deterministic but
only probabilistic. One big implication is that the so-called
‘new’ physics actually departs from conventional scientific
understandings of determinism, acknowledging rather than
denying the role of uncertainty, chance, and the often un-
expected juxtapositional effects of space–time. As Doreen
Massey has explained, this realization is crucial for at least
two reasons: (1) it suggests a more sophisticated version of
natural science than that to which academic geography,
physical and human, has all too often been deferential; (2) it
thereby raises the possibility of geographers being confident
to operate with, and to contribute to formulating, alternative
frameworks for ‘scientific’ inquiry and explanation; and (3) it
also holds open the promise of ‘nondeterministic’ con-
ceptions and methods derived from academic geography
and related (natural and social) sciences, complete with
challenging insights into the character of time–space, be-
coming more widely influential.
See also: Behavioral Geography; Darwinism (and Social
Darwinism); Ecology; Foucauldianism; Humanism/
Humanistic Geography; Positivism/Positivist Geography;
Possibilism; Probabilism; Ritter, C.; Spatial Science;
Structuration Theory; Structurationist Geography.
Further Reading
Beck, H. (1953). Moritz Wagner als geograph. Erdkunde 7, 125--128.
Burton, I. (1963). The quantitative revolution and theoretical geography.
The Canadian Geographer 7, 151--162.
Chappell, J. E. Jr. (1981). Environmental causation. In Harvey, M. E. &
Holly, B. P. (eds.) Themes in Geographic Thought, pp 163--186.
London: Croom Helm.
Claval, P. (ed.) (1993). Autour de Vidal de la Blache: La Formation de
l’école Franc¸aise de Géographie. Paris: Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
Febvre, L. (1925). A Geographical Introduction to History. London (esp.
Foreword by Berr, H, pp v–xx): Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Freeman, T. W. (1961). A Hundred Years of Geography. London: Gerald
Duckworth.
Glacken, C. J. (1967). Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and culture
in Western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth
century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gregory, D. (1981). Human agency and human geography.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6, 1--18.
Hard, G. (1973). Die Geographie. Eine Wissenschaftstheoretische
Einführung. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Hassinger, H. (1930). Über Beziehungen Zwischen der Geographie und
den Kulturwissenschaften. Freiburger Universitäts-Reden. no. 3.
Universtät Freiburg, Freiburg.
Huntington, E. (1907). The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia
Illustrating the Geographic Base of History. Boston, MA: Houghton,
Mifflin.
Johnson, D. W. (ed.) (1907). Geographical Essays by William Morris
Davis. New York: Dover Publications.
Lewthwaite, G. (1966). Environmentalism and determinism: A search
for clarification. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
56, 1--23.
110 Determinism/Environmental Determinism
Livingstone, D. N. (1992). The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the
History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell.
Marsh, W. M. (2005). Environmental Geography: Science, Land Use
and Earth Systems (3rd edn.). London: Wiley Higher Education.
Martin, A. F. (1951). The necessity for determinism. Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 17, 1--12.
Massey, D. (1999). Space-time, ‘science’ and the relationship between
physical geography and human geography. Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 24, 261--276.
Peattie, R. (1940). Geography in Human Destiny. Boston, MA: George
W. Stewart.
Platt, R. S. (1948). Determinism in geography. Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 38, 126--132.
Ritter, C. (1822–1859). Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und
Geschichte des Menschen, oder Allgemeine Vergleichende
Geographie als sichere Grundlage des Studiums und Unterrichts in
Physikalischen und Historischen Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer.
Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig:
Brockhaus.
Schulz, H. D. (1980). Abhandlung des Geographischen Instituts-
Anthropogeographie, Vol. 29: Die Deutschsprachige Geographie
von 1800 bis 1970. Berlin: Geografisches Institut der Freien
Universität.
Semple, E. C. (1911). Influences of Geographic Environment on the
Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthopo-geography. New York: Holt.
Spate, O. H. K. (1957). How determined is possibilism? Geographical
Studies 4, 3--12.
Stoddart, D. R. (1987). To claim the higher ground: Geography for the
end of the century. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 12, 327--336.
Tatham, G. (1951). Environmentalism and possibilism. In Taylor, G. (ed.)
(1953) Geography in the 20th Century, pp128–162. New York:
Philosophical Library.
Tatham, G. (1951). Geography in the nineteenth century. In Taylor, G.
(ed.) Geography in the 20th Century, pp 28–69. New York:
Philosophical Library.
Taylor, G. (1951). Introduction. In Taylor, G. (ed.) Geography in the 20th
Century, pp 3–27. New York: Philosophical Library.
Wagner, M. (1868). Die Darwinsche Theorie und das Migrationgesetz
der Organismen. Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot.
Relevant Websites
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Causal Determinism.