Influences of Geographic Environment / On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography

by Ellen Churchill Semple

Such colonists in a remote country were necessarily few and could not be readily reinforced from home. Their new and isolated geographical environment favored variation. Heredity passed on the characteristics of a small, highly selected group. The race was kept pure from intermixture with the aborigines of the country, owing to the social and cultural abyss which separated them, and to the steady withdrawal of the natives before the advance of the whites. The homogeneity of island peoples seems to indicate that individual variations are in time communicated by heredity to a whole population under conditions of isolation; and in this way modifications due to artificial selection and a changed environment become widely spread.

Nor is this all. The modified type soon becomes established, because the abundance of land at the disposal of the colonists and the consequent better conditions of living encourage a rapid increase of population. A second geographic factor of mere area here begins to operate. Ease in gaining subsistence, the greater independence of the individual and the family, emancipation from carking care, the hopeful attitude of mind engendered by the consciousness of an almost unlimited opportunity and capacity for expansion, the expectation of large returns upon labor, and, finally, the profound influence of this hopefulness upon the national character, all combined, produce a social rejuvenation of the race. New conditions present new problems which call for prompt and original solution, make a demand upon the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the individual, and therefore work to the same end as his previous removal from the paralyzing effect of custom in the old home country. Activity is youth and sluggishness or paralysis is age. Hence the energy, initiative, adaptability, and receptivity to new ideas—all youthful qualities—which characterize the Anglo-Saxon American as well as the English Africander, can be traced back to the stimulating influences, not of a bracing or variable climate, but of the abundant opportunities offered by a great, rich, unexploited country. Variation under new natural conditions, when safe-guarded by isolation, tends to produce modification of the colonial type; this is the direct effect of a changed environment. But the new economic and social activities of a transplanted people become the vehicle of a mass of indirect geographic influences which contribute to the differentiation of the national character.

General importance of indirect effects.

The tendency to overlook such links between conspicuous effects and their remote, less evident geographic causes has been common in geographic investigation. This direct rather than indirect approach to the heart of the problem has led to false inferences or to the assumption that reliable conclusions were impossible. Environment influences the higher, mental life of a people chiefly through the medium of their economic and social life; hence its ultimate effects should be traced through the latter back to the underlying cause. But rarely has this been done. Even so astute a geographer as Strabo, though he recognizes the influence of geographic isolation in differentiating dialects and customs in Greece,[25] ascribes some national characteristics to the nature of the country, especially to its climate, and the others to education and institutions. He thinks that the nature of their respective lands had nothing to do with making the Athenians cultured, the Spartans and Thebans ignorant; that the predilection for natural science in Babylonia and Egypt was not a result of environment but of the institutions and education of those countries.[26] But here arise the questions, how far custom and education in their turn depend upon environment; to what degree natural conditions, molding economic and political development, may through them fundamentally affect social customs, education, culture, and the dominant intellectual aptitudes of a people. It is not difficult to see, back of the astronomy and mathematics and hydraulics of Egypt, the far off sweep of the rain-laden monsoons against the mountains of Abyssinia and the creeping of the tawny Nile flood over that river-born oasis.

Indirect political and moral effects.

Plutarch states in his "Solon" that after the rebellion of Kylon in 612 B.C. the Athenian people were divided into as many political factions as there were physical types of country in Attica. The mountaineers, who were the poorest party, wanted something like a democracy; the people of the plains, comprising the greatest number of rich families, were clamorous for an oligarchy; the coast population of the south, intermediate both in social position and wealth, wanted something between the two. The same three-fold division appeared again in 564 B.C. on the usurpation of Peisistratus.[27] Here the connection between geographic condition and political opinion is clear enough, though the links are agriculture and commerce. New England's opposition to the War of 1812, culminating in the threat of secession of the Hartford Convention, can be traced back through the active maritime trade to the broken coastline and unproductive soil of that glaciated country.

In all democratic or representative forms of government permitting free expression of popular opinion, history shows that division into political parties tends to follow geographical lines of cleavage. In our own Civil War the dividing line between North and South did not always run east and west. The mountain area of the Southern Appalachians supported the Union and drove a wedge of disaffection into the heart of the South. Mountainous West Virginia was politically opposed to the tidewater plains of old Virginia, because slave labor did not pay on the barren "upright" farms of the Cumberland Plateau; whereas, it was remunerative on the wide fertile plantations of the coastal lowland. The ethics of the question were obscured where conditions of soil and topography made the institution profitable. In the mountains, as also in New England, a law of diminishing financial returns had for its corollary a law of increasing moral insight. In this case, geographic conditions worked through the medium of direct economic effects to more important political and ethical results.

The roots of geographic influence often run far underground before coming to the surface, to sprout into some flowering growth; and to trace this back to its parent stem is the necessary but not easy task of the geographer.