William B. Meyer’s research while affiliated with Colgate University and other places

The decision of the New York Court of Appeals in Riggs v. Palmer (1889) is remarkable for the mass of discussion about a variety of fundamental issues that it has generated. Elmer Palmer was convicted of murdering his grandfather Francis, and the court refused to let him inherit under Francis’s will despite the absence of any explicit statutory grounds for voiding the legacy. An exercise in legal archaeology uncovering details that are stated only obliquely (or not at all) in the majority and dissenting opinions corrects a number of errors often made about the case. More speculatively, it suggests a new explanation of the result, one supported by a review of similar cases in other states in the same era and of the composition of the Court of Appeals in 1889: that the decision in Riggs is best understood as an ad hominem one, provoked by the unusually light punishment that Elmer had received for his crime and rationalized by an appeal to legal principles. If it was, much of what has been written about the decision and its significance is called into question.

The thesis of first effective settlement, stated by Wilbur Zelinsky in 1973 and by several of his contemporaries under other labels, has been an important one in academic research examining the role of early occupance in shaping the later characteristics of places and communities. Essentially the same idea was a commonplace in American discussions during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries regarding such topics as missionary work on the western frontier, the uses and value of local history, and the status of slavery in the national territories. It represents a case of an idea that arose and flourished independently in two different periods in lay and academic settings. In both settings, it reflected the outlook of its authors in depicting social change as largely exogenous rather than endogenous.

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of stature from the late seventeenth century onward had discussed the same phenomenon under other names, often that of a “capital” or its cognates in other languages. Their work attests to the wide currency that the concept enjoyed and offered many important suggestions regarding urban primacy's causes and consequences. Jefferson nonetheless remains a central figure in the history of the idea for having inaugurated the coordinated academic study of the topic. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

To say that the environment does not operate on human societies in a deterministic way is by no means to say that it does not matter for them. Geographers since the 1920s have emphasized, though, that how it matters cannot be understood apart from an understanding of the societies themselves. “Natural hazards” and “natural resources,” for example, are not natural factors external to society, but co-creations of natural and social processes.

Environmental determinism pervaded American academic geography in its early years, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was largely discarded thereafter. Geographers rejected it much less because of any inherent political slant that it may have possessed—and in fact it seems not to have possessed any—than because of increasing evidence of its inability to explain the facts of nature–society interaction.

Environmental determinism can be defined in two ways: as treating the environment as a factor influencing human affairs independently and from the outside, and as an overriding emphasis on the environmental elements in a situation of nature–society interaction. A claim may be determinism without being fatalism (i.e., seeing an environmental factor as always and necessarily producing a certain outcome), and it may be environmental determinism even if the environmental feature in question itself stems in part or whole from human actions.

“Neo-environmental determinism” has appeared in a number of forms and areas: in the spatial regionalization of human life and activity, in the interpretation of prehistory, in the study of contemporary world patterns of human well-being and economic development, and in the projection of the future consequences of human-induced climate change. Most neo-determinism has developed outside of geography, and critiques of such reasoning by geographers offer valuable caveats and correctives to it.

One critique of neo-determinism, which emphasizes the role of social institutions over what it mislabels “geography,” errs on the opposite side by disregarding the important role often—though not independently—played by the environment. Both the “institutions” and the “geography” approaches seek an exogenous variable that can be treated as a first cause and fail to find it, because environment and society, as geographers would stress, are interdependent and co-evolving.

“This book provides a unique, cogent, engaging account of environmental determinism that has long been much needed in the classroom and beyond.” -- Andrew Sluyter, Associate Professor, Louisiana State University, USA This book pulls together major critiques of contemporary attempts to explain nature-society relations in an environmentally deterministic way. After defining key terms, it reviews the history of environmental determinism’s rise and fall within geography in the early twentieth century. It discusses the key reasons for the doctrine’s rejection and presents alternative, non-deterministic frameworks developed within geography for analyzing the roles played by the environment in human affairs. The authors examine the rise in recent decades of neo-deterministic approaches to such issues as the demarcation of regions, the causes of civilizational collapse in prehistory, today’s globally uneven patterns of human well-being, and the consequences of human-induced climate change. In each case, the authors draw on the insights and approaches of geography, the academic discipline most conversant with the interactions of society and environment, to challenge the widespread acceptance that such approaches have won. The book will appeal to those working on human-environmental research, international development and global policy initiatives. William B. Meyer is Associate Professor of Geography at Colgate University, USA. He is the author of several previous books, including Human Impact on the Earth, Americans and Their Weather: A History, and The Progressive Environmental Prometheans. His research interests include urban geography, environmental history, and the history of environmental thought. Dylan M.T. Guss works in the technology investment sector.