Possibilism - Man changed Environment, Examples
Wednesday, 16 May 2012 20:45 by allinfopedia administrator
The term Possibilism means that the environment only limits the number of choices that a person has. At its heart,
possibilism follows the notion that humans have the commanding power over their environment, albeit within certain limits.
In simple words, Possibilism denies the influence of environmental factors in a human’s life. The man who started the idea
of Possibilism was David Le Da Blanche – a French Geographer. He stated that the environment does not completely
define culture, rather it only limits the number of choices people have. By 1950, Environmental Determinism was
completely replaced by the Environmental Possibilism.
Man Has Changed the Environment – Examples Of Possibilism:
Man has brought changes to the environment by increasing its capacity to meet his needs and demands. The most visible
and common examples in this regard are the:
Industrial Revolution
Agricultural Advancement
Technological revolution
Industrial Revolution:
The industrial revolution began in the 18th century in Great Britain & it truly changed the way people lived. It was not an
overnight phenomenon but rather was the end result of series of inventions. It originated in Great Britain in 1750 and from
there it spread to North America and Europe during the19th century. The invention of the steam engine gave a boost to
the iron and textile industries. The invention of coke further modernized the production means. Now industries have a
share of more than thirty percent in the world’s GDP.
Agricultural Advancement:
The Green revolution, Invention of fertilizers and pesticides, the modern irrigation methods and the organic farming
methods have also contributed to the high output of crops and other products related to agriculture to meet the high food
demands across the world. All these efforts were done by humans to meet their increased demands indicating the
influence of Possibilism.
Technological revolution:
Modern means of communication such as , computers, internet, mobiles, cable TV has changed the world into a global
village. The Nano technology has given birth to revolutionary inventions which have made the life of a person easy and
complicated as well. Now within seconds, you can see and talk to your loved ones who are thousands of miles away from
you. These revolutions have helped humans to make their lives easy and comfortable. These revolutions very clearly
show that human activities affect the natural environment.
Environmental determinism: Does climate control our
destiny?
The view that climate change caused the collapse of past civilizations is ideology, not
science. Applied to the present, it can undermine radical and democratic movements
against the real enemies of nature and humanity.
by David Correia
David Correia is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. This article is republished,
with permission, from La Jicarita, an online magazine of environmental politics in New Mexico
Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical
The theory lost its luster in the early to mid-twentieth
environment, including the climate, sets hard limits on
century as decolonization scholars launched attack after
human society. Scholars and authors who subscribe to this
attack. The intellectual backlash focused on geography, the
theory, most notoriously Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond
discipline most closely associated with environmental
(more on them later), argue that we can look to patterns of
determinism. Ivy league institutions in particular,
environmental change or geographical difference as a way
embarrassed by such obvious associations with imperialism
to understand trajectories of human and social development (they prefer their associations to be less transparent),
and, by so doing, explain why some societies flourish while
dropped geography departments en masse. Chastened, the
others languish in poverty or even collapse.
discipline back peddled, ashamed by geography’s
enthusiastic service to imperialism.
Tread carefully around such arguments.
The embarrassment meant that environmental determinism
It’s a compelling and seemingly intuitive argument but, like
was largely ignored rather than buried, and as a result it
Social Darwinism for example, it is not the science it makes
has mounted a surprising comeback in recent years. Blame
itself out to be. As geographer Dick Peet has described it,
Sachs and Diamond for this. Sachs, while an economist at
environmental determinism is not rigorous scholarship but
Harvard, repackaged old-fashioned environmental
rather the “ideology of an imperial capitalism.”
determinism as the “ecology of underdevelopment.”
Environmental determinism plagued academic disciplines
As he wrote in a 1999 article in The Economist, “If it were
such as anthropology, economics and geography in the
true that the poor were just like the rich but with less
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where, according
money,” he wrote, “the global situation would be vastly
to the late geographer Neil Smith, it “had an obvious appeal
easier than it is. As it happens, the poor live in different
as a kind of royal shortcut to human science.”
ecological zones, face different health conditions and must
Its adherents found success as the willing tools of empire
happily explaining away the poverty and misery of
overcome agronomic limitations that are very different from
those of rich countries. Those differences, indeed, are often
a fundamental cause of persisting poverty.”
imperialism (and its privileges) as a function of natural
processes. Cold northern climates produce hardy and thrifty
Here Sachs, a key advisor to United Nations Secretary-
people who therefore flourish. Meanwhile, the unrelenting
General Ban Ki-Moon, makes the crackpot but
heat along the equator produces lazy people condemned to
quintessential environmental determinist argument: the
forever languish in patterns of poverty as predictable as the
redistribution of wealth won’t resolve global inequality.
trade winds.
Why? Because the geographical and unequal distribution of
affluence and poverty is not a result of unequal power
relations but rather is a function of complex geographic and
Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate” (p.
climatic dynamics that have nothing whatsoever to do with
401).
histories of colonial conquest and capitalist expansion. The
argument, of course, relies on a premise that ignores
In a funny way, Diamond is right. Though his glib reduction
histories of conquest— what Karl Marx, in reference to
of the history of violent colonialism to mere “real estate” is
colonialism, called primitive accumulation.
meant to draw the reader’s attention away from history and
toward nature, to the careful reader the reference does the
“In times long gone-by,” wrote Marx in Capital, Volume I, in
opposite. Real estate is not a natural category. It is a thing
a brilliant parody of determinist apologia, “there were two
of value only because it exists as private property. And
sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all,
property, of course, is all about the power to exclude,
frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their
forever enforcing the unequal distribution of resources as a
substance, and more, in riotous living…. Thus it came to
way to preserve class difference.
pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter
sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And
In a scathing review in the journal Antipode in 2003, a host
from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority
of prominent human geographers pilloried Diamond’s work.
that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but
Andrew Sluyter called it “junk science.” Paul Robbins, more
itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly
kind than Sluyter, chided Diamond for harnessing “a
although they have long ceased to work.”
thoughtful and fascinating body of evidence to an
explanatory dead horse.”
For Marx, the unequal distribution of wealth was historically
created in ruthless patterns of capitalist accumulation. In
But Robbins was just being clever. He knew full well that
addition, as the quote above so sarcastically implies, the
you can’t beat a dead horse. Academics attacked
social relations that sustain this inequality require elaborate
arguments such as those by Sachs and Diamond because
ideologies capable of explaining away plunder as the work
the cruel logic of environmental determinism is,
of nature. Enter environmental determinism.
unfortunately, anything but dead. And, in a troubling
development, it has found purchase recently among climate
And so we get people like Sachs, who see “the poor” as an
change scientists.
ecological category living far off in a strange land instead of,
as Marx sees it, as a social relation. In Sachs’ world, the
Environmental determinism, it seems, has found a new
poor were always bound to be poor while the rich were
home. No longer housed in geography departments, it has
bound to be rich.
taken up residence in geology, environmental science and
earth science departments.
Sachs was able to make this argument because Jared
Diamond had more recently parlayed it into a Pulitzer prize
This new “scientific” version of climate determinism took
in his 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Here he argued
center stage at last month’s annual meeting of the
that we need not look to histories of colonialism to
American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. There
understand “the Fates of Societies,” (his subtitle for the
researchers from West Virginia University described the
book), but rather we must focus on physical geography and
results of recent tree ring data from Asia in which, they
climate if we hope to understand why the world is divided
argued, a particularly wet period in the thirteenth century
into rich and poor.
corresponded to the rise of Ghengis Khan and the spread
of the Mongols. According to researchers, wet conditions
In his hands Europe’s ability to subjugate and colonize
would have been particularly advantageous to nomadic
Africa was merely an accident “of geography and
Mongol herders.
biogeography—in particular to the continents’ different
areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species.
Well maybe, but more likely the rise of the Mongols had
This is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and
something to do with the enormous size of Khan’s army.
But no matter, apparently the past is littered with the
In addition, it should be noted that the increase in historical
wreckage of history’s climate victims. A host of recent
climate collapse research corresponds to the popularization
studies have linked civilization collapse in Asia, South
of the wide acceptance of contemporary anthropogenic
America and Africa to climate change.
climate change research. Whether researchers are explicit
or not, the rationale for historical work on the link between
Just as in the past, we’d best tread carefully around such
climate and collapse, particularly among funding agencies
arguments.
and the general public, has everything to do with the current
For starters there may be a more useful correspondence to
consider: the prevalence of claims by climate scientists of a
link between climate and the collapse of past civilizations
corresponds to the return of environmental determinist
climate crisis. These are the what’s-in-store-for-us stories
peddled in the hope that it may galvanize a broad-based
movement to interrupt current patterns of global
greenhouse gas emissions.
explanation in the mid-1990s.
There are two problems with this thinking.
In 1995, around the same time that Diamond found success
First, we may want to ask what kind of contemporary
peddling his determinist snake oil, researchers reported in
climate politics the rhetoric of collapse engenders. There is,
the prestigious journal Nature that population growth and
no doubt, a real urgency to the problem posed by climate
drought was a likely cause of the demise of the Maya
change. The climate is indeed changing and transforming in
civilization. This work kicked off a cottage industry among
ways not conducive to humans and other beings. The idea
climate scientists who suddenly found correspondences
of a climate catastrophism, however, so prevalent in the
everywhere they looked: Mesopotamia, west Asia, Egypt,
rhetoric of historical climate change research, displaces and
the Maghreb.
defers this urgency. If our fate is apocalypse, after all, what
The recent raft of historical climate collapse stories are
troubling for a number of reasons.
First, what many of these studies refer to as “collapse” is in
fact a slow population decline over a period of, often,
hundreds of years. The “collapse” of the Maya occurred, for
example, between 750 AD and 900 AD: hundreds of years
of decline (what scientists mean by “decline”, by the way, is
rarely defined in the scientific literature) that overlaps with a
period of climate change.
good is grassroots organizing?
Moreover, the false panic of apocalyptic rhetoric provides
the rationale to ignore the current suffering of the
marginalized and the disenfranchised. When we strip away
the apocalyptic rhetoric, we can see that we are not all in
this together. But apocalyptic rhetoric forecloses the
possibility of radical democratic politics. It makes politics, in
fact, impossible. In its place we are forced to entrust our
futures to a non-democratic techno-managerial elite, to the
apparatuses of state bureaucracies, to the military, and
“Climate change,” like “collapse” also is frequently ill-
even to the corporations (Kyoto, for example) who profit
defined; often these “abrupt” shifts in temperature and
from climate catastrophism.
precipitation are, in fact, changes that occur over hundreds
of years and millions of square miles. In the case of the
Maya, the period of dramatic climate change occurred
during a two-hundred year period between 800 AD and
1,000 AD—a period that marked the driest in the middle
Holocene.
As a result of this state of affairs, catastrophism research
proliferates and finds purchase among a powerful minority
who fear the potential of radical and democratic climate
change struggle—particularly the possibility that it could
challenge existing patterns of class and race privilege. And
they can’t have that.
The Geography of Poverty and Wealth
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Andrew D. Mellinger, and John L. Gallup
Why are some countries stupendously rich and others horrendously poor? Social theorists have been
captivated by this question since the late 18th century, when Scottish economist Adam Smith addressed the
issue in his magisterial work The Wealth of Nations. Smith argued that the best prescription for prosperity is
a free-market economy in which the government allows businesses substantial freedom to pursue profits.
Over the past two centuries, Smith's hypothesis has been vindicated by the striking success of capitalist
economies in North America, western Europe and East Asia and by the dismal failure of socialist planning
in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Smith, however, made a second notable hypothesis: that the physical geography of a region can influence
its economic performance. He contended that the economies of coastal regions, with their easy access to
sea trade, usually outperform the economies of inland areas. Although most economists today follow Smith
in linking prosperity with free markets, they have tended to neglect the role of geography. They implicitly
assume that all parts of the world have the same prospects for economic growth and long-term
development and that differences in performance are the result of differences in institutions. Our findings,
based on newly available data and research methods, suggest otherwise. We have found strong evidence
that geography plays an important role in shaping the distribution of world income and economic growth.
Coastal regions and those near navigable waterways are indeed far richer and more densely settled than
interior regions, just as Smith predicted. Moreover, an area's climate can also affect its economic
development. Nations in tropical climate zones generally face higher rates of infectious disease and lower
agricultural productivity (especially for staple foods) than do nations in temperate zones. Similar burdens
apply to the desert zones. The very poorest regions in the world are those saddled with both handicaps:
distance from sea trade and a tropical or desert ecology.
A skeptical reader with a basic understanding of geography might comment at this point, "Fine, but isn't all
of this familiar?" We have three responses. First, we go far beyond the basics by systematically quantifying
the contributions of geography, economic policy and other factors in determining a nation's performance.
We have combined the research tools used by geographers – including new software that can create
detailed maps of global population density – with the techniques and equations of macroeconomics.
Second, the basic lessons of geography are worth repeating, because most economists have ignored them.
In the past decade the vast majority of papers on economic development have neglected even the most
obvious geographical realities.
Third, if our findings are true, the policy implications are significant. Aid programs for developing countries
will have to be revamped to specifically address the problems imposed by geography. In particular, we have
tried to formulate new strategies that would help nations in tropical zones raise their agricultural productivity
and reduce the prevalence of diseases such as malaria.
The Geographical Divide
The best single indicator of prosperity is gross national product (GNP) per capita – the total value of a
country's economic output, divided by its population. A map showing the world distribution of GNP per
capita immediately reveals the vast gap between rich and poor nations [see map on page 74]. Notice that
the great majority of the poorest countries lie in the geographical tropics – the area between the tropic of
Cancer and the tropic of Capricorn. In contrast, most of the richest countries lie in the temperate zones.
A more precise picture of this geographical divide can be obtained by defining tropical regions by climate
rather than by latitude. The map on page 75 divides the world into five broad climate zones based on a
classification scheme developed by German climatologists Wladimir P. Köppen and Rudolph Geiger. The
five zones are tropical-subtropical (hereafter referred to as tropical), desert-steppe (desert), temperate-snow
(temperate), highland and polar. The zones are defined by measurements of temperature and precipitation.
We excluded the polar zone from our analysis because it is largely uninhabited.
Among the 28 economies categorized as high income by the World Bank (with populations of at least one
million), only Hong Kong, Singapore and part of Taiwan are in the tropical zone, representing a mere 2
percent of the combined population of the high-income regions. Almost all the temperate-zone countries
have either high-income economies (as in the cases of North America, western Europe, Korea and Japan)
or middle-income economies burdened by socialist policies in the past (as in the cases of eastern Europe,
the former Soviet Union and China). In addition, there is a strong temperate-tropical divide within countries
that straddle both types of climates. Most of Brazil, for example, lies within the tropical zone, but the richest
part of the nation – the southernmost states – is in the temperate zone.
The importance of access to sea trade is also evident in the world map of GNP per capita. Regions far from
the sea, such as the landlocked countries of South America, Africa and Asia, tend to be considerably poorer
than their coastal counterparts. The differences between coastal and interior areas show up even more
strongly in a world map delineating GNP density – that is, the amount of economic output per square
kilometer [see illustration on pages 70 and 71]. This map is based on a detailed survey of global population
densities in 1994. Geographic information system software is used to divide the world's land area into fiveminute-by-five-minute sections (about 100 square kilometers at the equator). One can estimate the GNP
density for each section by multiplying its population density and its GNP per capita. Researchers must use
national averages of GNP per capita when regional estimates are not available. To make sense of the data,
we have classified the world's regions in broad categories defined by climate and proximity to the sea. We
call a region "near" if it lies within 100 kilometers of a seacoast or a sea-navigable waterway (a river, lake or
canal in which oceangoing vessels can operate) and "far" otherwise. Regions in each of the four climate
zones we analyzed can be either near or far, resulting in a total of eight categories. The table on the next
page shows how the world's population, income and land area are divided among these regions.
The breakdown reveals some striking patterns. Global production is highly concentrated in the coastal
regions of temperate climate zones. Regions in the "temperate-near" category constitute a mere 8.4 percent
of the world's inhabited land area, but they hold 22.8 percent of the world's population and produce 52.9
percent of the world's GNP. Per capita income in these regions is 2.3 times greater than the global average,
and population density is 2.7 times greater. In contrast, the "tropical-far" category is the poorest, with a per
capita GNP only about one third of the world average.
Interpreting the Patterns
In our research we have examined three major ways in which geography affects economic development.
First, as Adam Smith noted, economies differ in their ease of transporting goods, people and ideas.
Because sea trade is less costly than land- or air-based trade, economies near coastlines have a great
advantage over hinterland economies. The per-kilometer costs of overland trade within Africa, for example,
are often an order of magnitude greater than the costs of sea trade to an African port. Here are some
figures we found recently: The cost of shipping a six-meter-long container from Rotterdam, the Netherlands,
to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania – an air distance of 7,300 kilometers – was about $1,400. But transporting the
same container overland from Dar-es-Salaam to Kigali, Rwanda – a distance of 1,280 kilometers by road –
cost about $2,500, or nearly twice as much.
Second, geography affects the prevalence of disease. Many kinds of infectious diseases are endemic to the
tropical and subtropical zones. This tends to be true of diseases in which the pathogen spends part of its life
cycle outside the human host: for instance, malaria (carried by mosquitoes) and helminthic infections
(caused by parasitic worms). Although epidemics of malaria have occurred sporadically as far north as
Boston in the past century, the disease has never gained a lasting foothold in the temperate zones,
because the cold winters naturally control the mosquito-based transmission of the disease. (Winter could be
considered the world's most effective public health intervention.) It is much more difficult to control malaria
in tropical regions, where transmission takes place year-round and affects a large part of the population.
According to the World Health Organization, 300 million to 500 million new cases of malaria occur every
year, almost entirely concentrated in the tropics. The disease is so common in these areas that no one
really knows how many people it kills annually – at least one million and perhaps as many as 2.3 million.
Widespread illness and early deaths obviously hold back a nation's economic performance by significantly
reducing worker productivity. But there are also long-term effects that may be amplified over time through
various social feedbacks.
For example, a high incidence of disease can alter the age structure of a country's population. Societies
with high levels of child mortality tend to have high levels of fertility: mothers bear many children to
guarantee that at least some will survive to adulthood. Young children will therefore constitute a large
proportion of that country's population. With so many children, poor families cannot invest much in each
child's education. High fertility also constrains the role of women in society, because child rearing takes up
so much of their adult lives.
Third, geography affects agricultural productivity. Of the major food grains – wheat, maize and rice – wheat
grows only in temperate climates, and maize and rice crops are generally more productive in temperate and
subtropical climates than in tropical zones. On average, a hectare of land in the tropics yields 2.3 metric
tons of maize, whereas a hectare in the temperate zone yields 6.4 tons. Farming in tropical rain-forest
environments is hampered by the fragility of the soil: high temperatures mineralize the organic materials,
and the intense rainfall leaches them out of the soil. In tropical environments that have wet and dry
seasons–such as the African savanna–farmers must contend with the rapid loss of soil moisture resulting
from high temperatures, the great variability of precipitation, and the ever present risk of drought. Moreover,
tropical environments are plagued with diverse infestations of pests and parasites that can devastate both
crops and livestock.
Many of the efforts to improve food output in tropical regions–attempted first by the colonial powers and
then in recent decades by donor agencies–have ended in failure. Typically the agricultural experts blithely
tried to transfer temperate-zone farming practices to the tropics, only to watch livestock and crops succumb
to pests, disease and climate barriers. What makes the problem even more complex is that food
productivity in tropical regions is also influenced by geologic and topographic conditions that vary greatly
from place to place. The island of Java, for example, can support highly productive farms because the
volcanic soil there suffers less nutrient depletion than the non-volcanic soil of the neighboring islands of
Indonesia.
Moderate advantages or disadvantages in geography can lead to big differences in long-term economic
performance. For example, favorable agricultural or health conditions may boost per capita income in
temperate-zone nations and hence increase the size of their economies. This growth encourages inventors
in those nations to create products and services to sell into the larger and richer markets. The resulting
inventions further raise economic output, spurring yet more inventive activity. The moderate geographical
advantage is thus amplified through innovation.
In contrast, the low food output per farm worker in tropical regions tends to diminish the size of cities, which
depend on the agricultural hinterland for their sustenance. With a smaller proportion of the population in
urban areas, the rate of technological advance is usually slower. The tropical regions therefore remain more
rural than the temperate regions, with most of their economic activity concentrated in low-technology
agriculture rather than in high-technology manufacturing and services.
We must stress, however, that geographical factors are only part of the story. Social and economic
institutions are critical to long-term economic performance. It is particularly instructive to compare the postWorld War II performance of free-market and socialist economies in neighboring countries that share the
same geographical characteristics: North and South Korea, East and West Germany, the Czech Republic
and Austria, and Estonia and Finland. In each case we find that free-market institutions vastly outperformed
socialist ones.
The main implication of our findings is that policymakers should pay more attention to the developmental
barriers associated with geography–specifically, poor health, low agricultural productivity and high
transportation costs. For example, tropical economies should strive to diversify production into
manufacturing and service sectors that are not hindered by climate conditions. The successful countries of
tropical Southeast Asia, most notably Malaysia, have achieved stunning advances in the past 30 years, in
part by addressing public health problems and in part by moving their economies away from climatedependent commodity exports (rubber, palm oil and so on) to electronics, semiconductors and other
industrial sectors. They were helped by the high concentration of their populations in coastal areas near
international sea lanes and by the relatively tractable conditions for the control of malaria and other tropical
diseases. Sub-Saharan Africa is not so fortunate: most of its population is located far from the coasts, and
its ecological conditions are harsher on human health and agriculture.
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two international agencies that are most
influential in advising developing countries, currently place more emphasis on institutional reforms–for
instance, overhauling a nation's civil service or its tax administration–than on the technologies needed to
fight tropical diseases and low agricultural productivity. One formidable obstacle is that pharmaceutical
companies have no market incentive to address the health problems of the world's poor. Therefore,
wealthier nations should adopt policies to increase the companies' motivation to work on vaccines for
tropical diseases. In one of our own initiatives, we called on the governments of wealthy nations to foster
greater research and development by pledging to buy vaccines for malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis from
the pharmaceutical companies at a reasonable price. Similarly, biotechnology and agricultural research
companies need more incentive to study how to improve farm output in tropical regions.
The poorest countries in the world surely lack the resources to relieve their geographical burdens on their
own. Sub-Saharan African countries have per capita income levels of around $1 a day. Even when such
countries invest as much as 3 or 4 percent of their GNP in public health–a large proportion of national
income for a very poor country–the result is only about $10 to $15 per year per person. This is certainly not
enough to control endemic malaria, much less to fight other rampant diseases such as HIV/AIDS,
tuberculosis and helminthic infections.
A serious effort at global development will require not just better economic policies in the poor countries but
far more financial support from the rich countries to help overcome the special problems imposed by
geography. A preliminary estimate suggests that even a modest increase in donor financing of about $25
billion per year–only 0.1 percent of the total GNP of the wealthy nations, or about $28 per person–could
make a tremendous difference in reducing disease and increasing food productivity in the world's poorest
countries.
After reading the article, answer the following in a couple of sentences.
1. What is the authors thesis or argument?
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2. What do the authors use to support their thesis? Use specific examples of evidence.
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3. Do you agree? Why or why not?
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