Worldcon panel: Culture and geography

An old, partially discredited school of thought called "geographical determinism" proposed that culture is determined by geography. It's easy to see how this notion got started, since the two are clearly related; we Canadians tend to be far more into snow sports than (say) Jamaicans, the famous Jamaican bobsled team notwithstanding, simply because we have a serious winter every year, and spending so much time practicing winter sports—indeed, having sports facilities provided automatically by nature at least 3 months per year—gives us a bit of an edge over cultures in warmer regions.

The problem with this philosophy is that geography and culture are not inextricably entangled, and failing to think through the connection can lead to geographical racism—the kind of thing you see if you carry the logic in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel too far and assume that what Diamond describes represents a deterministic law of nature rather than (as he claims) his attempt to explain what happened in one particular history. The failure to examine the underlying assumptions is why we end up with swarms of black-skinned pirates who are inevitably found hovering around the equator in so much old fiction.

As fiction writers, a more reasonable approach for us to adopt is what might be called environmental probabilism. In this approach, you can still have your black-skinned human pirates near the equator if you're writing about a people who evolved there; at the equator of a sunny world, a typical evolutionary process might indeed favor people with genes for strong melanin production. (But it's never quite that simple. This might also occur in a world that is largely overcast, as in the case of the many dark-skinned peoples who live in African rainforests, but here you're on shakier ground; nobody seems to be quite sure why this particular combination evolved.)

Similarly, you could propose that white-skinned human peoples would evolve closer to the poles, or on a planet with perpetual cloud cover; here, peoples with reduced melanin production would have an advantage because their skins would block less sunlight and therefore let them synthesize more vitamin D. Needless to say, but therefore doubly worth saying, that only applies to humans. If you're writing about aliens, all bets are off.

But that's just a starting point. A glance at the polychromatic population of Canada (and of any warm part of the world where white-skinned folks migrate during the winter season) would quickly reveal why we can't stop with probabilism: it's far too simplistic. People move around, and the more technology they possess, the more they move. (Not that high technology is required for long-distance movements, as the Polynesians have convincingly shown.)

It's human to move around a lot, and when we do, we tend to bring our culture with us and force our environment to adapt; the refusal to abandon crops that require large amounts of water is one reason why China is experiencing such severe problems in its arid lands. It's also why many of its massive reforestation projects are failing: trees that do a great job of stabilizing soils and maintaining soil water work well in environments with moderate to high levels of precipitation, but fare poorly in areas with little rainfall.

Europeans provide an interesting counterexample, because the European cultures that have spread around the world have most often been farmers or pastoralists, and wherever such cultures go, they immediately start chopping down the forests so they can plant crops or grow grasses to feed their livestock. This kind of environmental modification becomes a default assumption in most stories about the colonization of new worlds—indeed, the mere notion of terraforming (remaking a planet so that it is more suitable for our needs) tends to assume a European model of forcing Nature to adapt to us rather than finding ways to adapt ourselves to Nature. Would an Amazonian tribe forcibly relocated to another planet immediately begin trying to plant trees and recreate forest? What kind of culture would move to a new planet and, instead of immediately setting about remaking it in their own image, would set about adapting themselves to their new environment? The interaction between historical cultural patterns and new environments provides much room for thought and for interesting fiction.

Moving around is another example of how geographical determinism can lead us astray. Desert dwellers (who, by the way, are often swarthy but not Black, despite living near the equator), are traditionally portrayed as nomads. There's some justice to this, based on historical precedents such as the Bedouins. The nomadic lifestyle may be forced upon those who live in desert areas simply because there's insufficient water and other resources to support large sedentary populations in a single place, but we should remember that deserts aren't inevitably found at the equator. Contrast, for example, the lush tropical vegetation of Central America and northern South America with the more arid regions of northern Africa.

Wherever we choose to locate a desert people, near the equator or in a high altitude desert relatively far from the equator such as the Atacama desert, why must they be "highwaymen"? A significant counterexample is provided by the Chinese farmers who cluster around desert oases in northwestern China, using the supply of permanent water to permit crop cultivation. More significantly, in the long term, any desert culture with access to abundant water and other resources can do better serving as a trade center and source of resupply for caravans than it possibly could from banditry.

A useful touchstone, as in all efforts to create realistic fiction, would be to focus on an area's environmental and geographical constraints, such as the distribution of resources, and then wonder what effects those constraints would have on the peoples who live in an area. Resources can be physical, as in the example of water near oases and minerals such as salt in areas with high evaporation, or intangible, such as location (e.g., the only oasis within 1 day's travel of the last supply of water). These resources determine what activities are possible, impossible, and necessary, and those activities in turn, can strongly shape culture. And when a culture has existed somewhere for long periods of time, the concept of "place" develops tremendous cultural significance.

Geographical determinism is clearly a much more interesting topic than most writers have considered.