ABSTRACT
“The sterility of the soil in Attica,” wrote Montesquieu, “established a popular government there, and the fertility of Lacedaemon an aristocratic one.” We are not convinced. Yet the statement is characteristic of a main intellectual legacy in the ecological study of culture, environmental determinism, that ancient idea of “a mechanical action of natural forces upon a purely receptive humanity.” From more recent forebears, notably including American field anthropologists of this century, we are heir to an opposed position, environmental possibilism, which holds that cultures act selectively, if not capriciously, upon their environments, exploiting some possibilities while ignoring others; that it is environment that is passive, an inert configuration of possibilities and limits to development, the deciding forces of which lie in culture itself and in the history of culture.
