Jared Diamond Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Jared Diamond is Professor of Physiology and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an important academic, both in his own right and as a lightening rod for renewed debate over the merits and dangers of what is most commonly called environmental determinism. Jared Diamond was trained as a physiologist, but is well known for his ecological investigation of avian evolution in Papua-New Guinea and more recently for his work as an environmental scientist, historian, and geographer. He is probably most popularly known for his 1997 book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Both the arguments in the book and its success make it important for an understanding of contemporary environment-society relations.

The argument is simple: Diamond attributes the enormous differences worldwide in income, welfare, and stability to a single ultimate cause: environmental conditions. He argues that “[three] factors-time of onset of food production, barriers to diffusion, and human population size-led straightforwardly to the observed intercontinental differences in the development of technology.”

Diamond positions his argument as a denial of genetic or cultural explanations for the differences between contemporary societies. Instead, the societies with greatest access to cultivable food supplies and domesticable animals were able to develop powerful military tools (namely, steel tools, weapons, and deadly germs) that enabled them to conquer the world. Diamond called the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture the greatest mistake human society ever made.

There have been many critiques of Diamond’s work, but the best is by geographer Jim Blaut, who argues that Diamond’s science is inaccurate and marshaled selectively, particularly with regard to Asia. In addition to critiques of his science, Blaut (and others) challenge Diamond’s understanding of the relationship between history, culture, and the environment. The environment is clearly an important historical actor, but it works in conjunction with economic relations, politics, cultural beliefs, and even historical contingency. Within geography, the most severe critiques of environmental determinism (generally pre-dating Diamond) are to be found in the subfield of political ecology.

Environmental Determinism

Aside from the specifics of Diamond’s science, the success of Guns, Germs, and Steel is important in the context of a revived environmental determinism. Several prominent academics such as Jeffrey Sachs, David Landes (1998), and Ricardo Hausmann (2001) have criticized geography for casting aside explanatory models that causally link the environment and economic development. They have articulated a sort of “politically correct” environmental determinism in which poverty is not a product of history, culture, or politics-it’s a case of “bad latitude.”

There are several factors that facilitate the revival of this determinism: first, the failure of development economics to deal with inequalities between human societies has transformed the optimism of the early post-war period into a certain fatalism; second, the possibility of multiple superpowers has gradually been replaced by the military and economic dominance of a small handful of countries-primarily those European countries blessed with the most “favorable” environment; third, there is a new awareness of-and respect for-the ability of the environment to effect not only localized conditions, but the well-being of human life on this planet.

Bibliography:

Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (Methuen, 1985);
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997);
L. Gallup, J.D. Sachs, and A.D. Mellinge, “Geography and Economic Development,” International Regional Science Review (22(2), 1999);
Ricardo Hausmann, “Prisoners of Bad Geography,” Foreign Policy (122, 2001);
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998);
Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 2003).