Page #70
Page #70
About this Page: Greetings! Page 70 is largely made possible by my illustrator, Dan Harris. Text, background, and foliage appear to be the limit of my illustration abilities.
In making this page, I fondly remember a master’s historiography class that I took (easily one the most difficult courses I’ve ever taken). The professor gave us some early journal articles where historians were using maps to justify more developed and less developed countries. It might have been a piece that used Ellen Churchill Semple’s maps of the Philippines.
“…where man has remained in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child.” – Ellen Semple.
Anyway, I was the first to speak up during our discussion and proclaimed that it was racist and has the Devil’s stamp of environmental determinism (some added dramatic language there). The professor was impressed for a moment that I knew what environmental determinism was (thank you master’s of geography), but then she quickly shut me down and told me to respect the pioneers of our practice.
And for the most part, I think she is right. I never really thought of it in that way before, but she was trying to show us the foundations of contemporary Western social sciences and I was set on tearing it down. The thing is, what contemporary education affords us, is the ability to know what can happen with deterministic thought. Things that lead to Ratzel and Hitler. For those reasons, I quickly dismissed the concept without paying my respects. I was humbled.
Unfortunately, without these people to test these theories, and summarily have them debunked, there is no advancement of thinking. To test a theory and expose its fallacies is what education and the social sciences are all about.
So I’ve come to appreciate our early founders (Ritter, Humboldt, Huntington, Semple). If it weren’t for them, environmental determinism might still be mainstream, and I can’t say that would be a great thing. Carry on then.
