Environmental Determinism: What Is It?

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.