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Environmental determinism and environmental possibilism are two concepts that are related to environmental perception. Environmental determinism, a theory that dates back to the early twentieth century, is the belief that the environment of a region shapes the culture of the people who inhabit that region. Inherent in environmental determinism is the idea that humans must be in a constant state of reaction to their environment. An individual in a cold and dreary environment must expend more energy to overcome those conditions than an individual in a warm, lush, environment. Environmental determinists believed, therefore, that people living in more tropical areas of the world (places such as Africa, South America, and South Asia) were lazy because they seemingly did not have to work as hard at survival as people living in cooler European climates. The logical conclusion to this theory was that European and American colonialism in these areas is justified, as the native people were incapable of achieving Western-style progress on their own. Thomas Griffith Taylor, one of the leading proponents of environmental determinism, wrote in Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement and Status of the Races of Man (Oxford University Press, 1927) that

[i]t cannot be too greatly stressed that the feeling of superiority which dominates the so-called “white” races is a growth of the last few centuries…. It would seem to be clear that the centre of the white races must move to the lands discovered since Pre-Columbian days (Isern, 1999).

As scholars began to reject the inherently racist tenets of environmental determinism, a new theory—environmental possibilism—came into favor. Your textbook defines environmental possibilism as “the belief that humans always had a range of opportunities for cultural expression and economic activity in any given environment.” Although environmental possibilism acknowledges the limits that environment places on human development, it does not go so far as to say that human influences are secondary to environmental ones. It is a more flexible framework for describing human-environment interactions, and this approach is still used today in geography and social science in general.

Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism, environmentalism, or the geographic factor, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate.