It is one position in a wider series of literatures that examine the relationship between humanity and the global environment, forming part of the evolving corpus of several disciplines, including geography, history, archaeology, anthropology, and economics.

Environmental determinism argues that both general features and regional variations of human cultures and societies are determined by the physical and biological forms that make up the earth’s many natural landscapes. This article provides an outline of the intellectual history of the concept of “environmental determinism,” and its critics, and of alternative understandings of the relationship between nature and humanity.

Recent Commentary on Climate Change and the Humanities.Recent Overviews of the New Climate History.Climate Change, Climate Science, and the New Climate History in the 21st Century.Neo-Environmental Determinism: Jared Diamond and the Economists since 1997.The Environmental Impact of Advanced Industrial Society.The Global Environment and Modern Humanity.Earth-Systems Analysis and Plio-Pleistocene Hominin-Human Evolution.The New Lamarckism: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Niche Construction, and Epigenetics.The New Geology and Punctuated Equilibria.Earth Systems and New Directions in Evolutionary Theory, 1930s to Present.Environmental History, 1970–Present: A Struggle over the Terms of Cultural Ecology.The New or Processual Archaeology: The Cultural Ecology of Ancient Societies.Julian Steward and the Rise of Cultural Ecology.Environmental Probabilism and Cultural Ecology, 1940s to the Present.American Environmental History: The Early Decades.English Local History and the Cambridge Group.Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Determinism.Environmental Possibilism and Cultural Determinism, 1920–1940s.Wittfogel and his Critics: Hydraulic Thesis and the Early State.

Marxism, Environmental Determinism, and Historical Geographic Materialism.

Migration and Diffusion Theory in Archaeology.

American and British Environmental Determinism, 1890–1920.

German Environmental Determinism: Ritter, Haeckel, and Ratzel.

Key Determinist Statements in the Age of Darwin.

Lamarckism and Environmental Determinism at the Turn of the 20th Century.

Environmental Determinism in Classical and Enlightenment Thought.

What is probabilism in geography