Environmentalism Versus Geography

The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies

“…For complicated historical reasons, including the fact that many early modern geographers were trained in the natural sciences, researchers spent more of their efforts examining the active and variegated environmental drivers than the complications of the social responses. As a result, as Platt (1948) points out, determinists ignored extensive counter-evidence showing that the social characteristics of a people could vary greatly within the same environment. Nor were determinists capable of explaining why people hold on to certain habits long after they have changed their environments.…”

Not as natural as it seems: the social history of the environment in American sociology

“…The appeal of environmentalist explanations was also due to the fact that they made sense of travellers' accounts of foreign lands (Platt, 1948), going back to the Enlightenment and even to antiquity. These voyages of discovery were, in turn, linked to the imperial and colonial expansion of western powers.…”

Jim Blaut: Radical Cultural Geographer

“…It is perhaps significant that Robert Platt (1948aPlatt ( , 1948b was campaigning against determinism in geography at the time Blaut entered Chicago. As Platt (1948a:126) admits, ''extreme environmentalism'' in geography had been largely discredited, but other forms had not been rooted out.…”

“…Through his innovative and extensive fieldwork in the 1920s and 1930s in Latin America he demonstrated that regional studies could be informed by and, in turn, used to test questions of theory and method in geography (Platt 1942). Wartime work added political geography to his interests, and during the post-World War II period he authored two attacks on environmentalism and determinism in geography (Platt 1948a(Platt , 1948b. A few years later he wrote a overview on ''The rise of cultural geography in the United States' ' (1952).…”

“…It appears that one of the main impetuses inspiring Blaut's distinctive articulations of cultural geography was his principled opposition to determinisms, whether environmental, economic, developmental (at scales from individual children to nation states), historical (particularly in his campaign to expose and counter teleological Eurocentrism in all its ideological manifestations), or cultural (Blaut's early adherence to the precepts of an emerging cultural ecology marked his distance from facile forms of culturalism found in some cultural geography). It is perhaps significant that Robert Platt (1948aPlatt ( , 1948b was campaigning against determinism in geography at the time Blaut entered Chicago. As Platt (1948a:126) admits, ''extreme environmentalism'' in geography had been largely discredited, but other forms had not been rooted out.…”