Chapter Content
Okay, so, let's talk about geology and geography, and how they kind of, like, shape our destinies. When you hear the term "space-time," it, like, immediately makes you think of Einstein and, you know, super complicated physics stuff. But, really, it's a pretty useful way to think about our lives. It's basically saying that where and when something happens is just as important as what actually happens. You know, unlike flipping a coin, which is always the same no matter where you are, a lot of things in our world change depending on the location and the timing.
But before we get into the whole timing thing, we need to, like, really grapple with something kind of crazy: the earth's tectonic plates can really, really shake up the paths our lives and societies take.
Think about Britain and the United States, right? Britain became an island because of this huge landslide in Norway, which caused a tsunami. It cut them off from Europe. And you know what? Becoming an island was probably the most important thing that ever happened to Britain, even though it's, like, never really mentioned in history books. Because, let's be real, the fact that they were an island shaped everything that came after, especially the whole building-an-empire-with-a-massive-navy thing.
And navies? Well, they need ships, and ships need a ton of timber, right? The Royal Navy? By the end of the 1700s, they had like, three hundred ships, built from over a million trees! So they were chopping down forests left and right, completely changing the landscape of Britain. And as they started running out of good trees, they were getting desperate.
That's where America comes in, right? A huge continent of untouched forests! The king wanted all those trees for the Royal Navy. So, his guys would go around marking the best trees with the King's mark, this "broad arrow." But of course, people started illegally cutting them down.
Then, in 1772, this royal surveyor found six sawmills that were processing marked wood, and he arrested the owners. The townspeople were NOT happy. They saw it as a major injustice, so, they got a mob together, went to the tavern where the surveyor was sleeping, and whipped him with branches for every tree he’d taken for the Crown!
This event, known as the Pine Tree Riot, was, like, a catalyst for the American Revolution. The king was afraid that punishing the mob too harshly would cause an uprising, so he let them off easy. And that just, like, emboldened the colonists. They were already fed up with British rule, so the Pine Tree Riot, and, by extension, the American Revolution and independence. So basically, tall trees were a HUGE, but forgotten, part of the founding of America. And the new American Navy sailed under a flag of a pine tree.
So, people say "geography is destiny," right? That's probably too strong. It kind of makes it sound like humans have no say in their own story, but geography definitely provides the framework. Our lives are influenced by the physical environment. We usually only pay attention to the human side of things, but the natural world is constantly driving huge changes. We like to think that we are separate from geography, but it shapes us a lot. We're part of the earth, and it's part of us.
Even our bodies were shaped by the environment. A couple million years ago, our ancestors slept in trees. Fingerprints could be leftovers from this era. Even though fingerprints worsen your grip on smooth things, they help you grip branches in wet conditions. Roland Ennos says that our early tree-dwelling provides an origin story for our fingernails. They no longer needed claws, so claws became fingernails.
Plate tectonics even determined which kind of ape we evolved from! Twenty million years ago, two plates crashed together and created the Tibetan Plateau. This dried out East Africa. This led to ape populations dividing into African and Asian apes. The African apes eventually became us.
The earth probably even shaped our intelligence. Our ape ancestors lived in the Rift Valley in East Africa, which had a volatile climate and varied landscape. They needed to adapt, so that put pressure on them to evolve better intellects. Apparently, when there were big shifts in climate, the brains of the hominins got bigger. Also, humans invented more advanced tools during periods of extreme climate changes. Some scientists think that intelligence evolved to cope with these shifts, since intelligence helped survival. So, it could be that a chaotic climate made us smart.
Later, when Homo sapiens came out of Africa, likely due to another climate shift, they moved across Eurasia and found new homes. Take a look at a map of major ancient civilizations and put it on top of the earth's tectonic plates. Persia and Assyria are located near the Arabian and Eurasian plate border. The ancient Greeks built their city-states near tectonic boundaries. It seems that ancient empires were guided by hidden fault lines.
And, how the Greeks made their city-states was based on their geography. They had, like, a thousand city-states, separated by the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean Seas. It was hard to unify the mountainous landscape, so many independent city-states developed. Each one tested new ways to organize society. The political diversity led to disagreement, and that led to innovation. So, would the modern West have been so influenced by ancient Greece if Athens had existed on a steppe?
The problem is, explanations of social change rarely mention geography or geology. Economists and political scientists make models that, like, completely ignore it. It's as if we live in a flat, uniform world. We think so much about how we shape history, and so little about how the earth shapes us.
So, to understand the role of geology and geography, we need a few concepts. First is "the lottery of earth." This is the random characteristics of the environment we're in, which are mostly unchanging, at least in history terms. It's important that Britain is an island, or that the United States doesn't have an inland sea, and those are static facts.
Second is "path dependency." Past decisions limit future ones. Going down one path might close off other paths in the future. And some of those paths aren't easily reversible. You can get stuck on a trajectory. How humans interacted with the environment can alter societies, and even dictate lives.
I live in Winchester, England, and it's, like, impossible to ignore how the environment changes things. I walk my dog on a hill near the city. Thousands of years ago, Iron Age settlers thought that it was a good defense. They built a fort there, so they anchored Winchester to that spot. The Romans then moved in, then the Anglo-Saxons, then the Normans, on and on to the present. So, my life and even my dog walks were determined thousands of years ago by an Iron Age settler finding a defensible hill. That's geographical path dependency.
Path dependency can make it harder to change. For example, railroads use a standard gauge width. If you start building a rail network and have trains for it, then changes would be expensive, since you'd need to change everything. Also, it can come from outside of the system, since some countries have gauges from decisions made in other countries, so their trains can keep running. A single human choice about how to interact with the environment can make a trajectory that future generations follow. But, it's often impossible to tell when a decision will create path dependency. Most Iron Age settlers had no impact on modernity. We only notice things looking back.
And third is "human space-time contingency." Geographical or geological facts matter more, or less, over time, only becoming drivers of change when they interact with humans in contingent ways. Take oil for example. Oil was beneath Saudi Arabia for millions of years, but it only mattered when the internal combustion engine was invented. Oil was discovered in 1938. The wheel wasn't used much there, and most transport was done by camel. Saudi Arabia was one of the poorest countries on the planet. Today, it's one of the richest. This can't be explained with just geological or human factors, but by the interaction between them.
So, it's obvious that our interactions with the environment cause flukes. But it has fallen out of favor. Why is this? Well, in the past, thinkers used geographical explanations for bad purposes, so even similar ideas are seen as bad.
These days, "geographic determinism" and "environmental determinism" are insults in history and social science. The idea that geography shapes outcomes has been used to justify racism for years. Guan Zhong said that those living near rivers were greedy and warlike. Hippocrates said that the Scythians lived on a barren landscape, so they were impotent. Ibn Khaldun said darker skin came from hotter climates and that the environment determined whether people were nomadic or sedentary. Centuries later, these theories influenced Montesquieu, who put Europeans at the top. Then, geographical racism became part of the justifications for colonialism. So, there's good reason to be skeptical of these ideas.
But, the environment is a factor that determines human history, even though thinkers have perverted it for racist reasons. There's a difference between theories that claim that the environment makes people inferior and theories that show that environmental factors limit choices and create paths that societies are more likely to follow. Also, geography isn't destiny, but it matters.
Environmental or geographical determinism was largely removed from social theories. It was seen as a sin to consider if some things were determined by geological chance, not choice.
In the late 1990s, Jared Diamond brought geographic determinism back. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel revived ideas that had long ago been relegated to the intellectual fringe. Diamond argued that modern inequalities come not from intellectual capacity or cultural strength, but from geographical endowments that made it harder for some societies to thrive, while others got lucky. The earth doesn't fairly distribute resources, predators, or diseases across space, and those variations have manifested in a profoundly unequal modern world.
Diamond said that history was influenced by the shape of continents, called the continental axis theory. Climate, habitat, vegetation, soil, and wildlife are mostly dictated by latitude, not longitude. Move north or south, and the climate drastically changes, but if you move east or west, you can travel thousands of miles and still be in the same biome. This means that people, ideas, trade, and empires had an easier time spreading east to west rather than north to south. This gave advantages to Eurasia. Sure enough, when historians tested the spread of empires, they followed an east/west pattern. Warm armies don't do well in cold weather, and mountain armies don't do well in deserts. So, climate, terrain, and the geology of soils have shaped who we are and how our history has unfolded.
Critics have said that Guns, Germs, and Steel brought back the racism of previous explanations for global inequality. Diamond denies racism. Some pointed to factual errors in parts of the book. But others dismissed the premise and lumped Diamond in with bad thinkers.
Diamond has faced so much criticism that he has posted a response on his website. “Whenever I hear the words ‘geographic determinism,’ I know that I am about to hear a reflex dismissal of geographic considerations, an opinion not worth listening to or reading, and an excuse for intellectual laziness.”
So, some right-wing thinkers blame the poor for inequality, often with racism. They say the cultures in poor countries are deficient, or that they haven't worked hard enough, or that their religion doesn't foster a "Protestant work ethic." This is the "it's their fault" view.
On the left, some blame inequality on oppression, such as colonialism, with a "they were victims" view. Colonialism caused inequality. So, Diamond's argument was seen as letting colonialism off the hook.
But explanations that only mention victimhood don't go far enough. Even if we accepted that colonialism caused modern inequalities, then why were powerful nations able to victimize weaker societies in the first place? We still need to explain why Europe colonized Africa instead of the other way around.
The critics have it backward. The idea that some inequalities are made more likely by geographical and environmental factors is not racist, but anti-racist. Dismissing this disarms anti-racists, for if geography is meaningless, then some thinkers will be tempted by myths of racial essentialism. Colonialism is a factor in explaining modern inequalities, but there are also other nonhuman factors. Geography isn't destiny, but it matters.
The world has variations that affect human prosperity. Fresh water is needed for survival and irrigation. Some places have it, and some don't. The growing season is affected by latitude, soil type, minerals, rainfall patterns, the climate, even the angle of the sunlight. Some regions are fertile, while some are barren. Some regions face predators and diseases, while some don't. The earth has a geographic lottery.
Imagine an earth without humans. Then, humans are placed in three random places. One group ends up in France's Loire Valley, with water, fertile soil, and a temperate climate. Another group ends up in the Australian outback. The third group is placed in Antarctica. So, geography, geology, and climate will determine the groups' fates. Geography influences trajectories and inequality. That doesn't negate bad things in history or human decisions.
Our world has been shaped by flukes from magma and the crust. If the world was uniform, then there'd be little trade and little reason to migrate. Cultures would converge. Tectonic plates have created a fascinating place to live. We should be grateful, while working to fix the inequalities that have been inflicted by historical injustices and the earth's crust.
Well, to give an example, Trump's loss in the 2020 election can be partly traced back to ancient geology.
During the Cretaceous period, when there were velociraptors, an inland sea covered America's Great Plains and most of the Deep South. Microscopic phytoplankton thrived in that sea. When they died, they sank to the bottom and turned into a chalk layer of rock. Eventually, the sea receded, revealing the land of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. The chalk turned into rich dark soil.
A few hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, as new tools were invented to spin cotton. The best place to grow cotton was in the American South, on plantations in the Black Belt, named for its rich dark soils from the inland sea during the time of the dinosaurs. When Europeans enslaved Africans and brought them to North America, they forced them to live and toil where cotton thrived.
Then, the soil changed trajectories in the 2020 election. Trump lost due to a loss in Georgia. Moreover, control of the Senate hinged on Democratic victories in Georgia. The margins for that victory were racked up on that Cretaceous coastline. If you look at county-level results, you can see the coastline, not in rock, but in voting patterns. Descendants of enslaved ancestors still live near former cotton plantations. In most U.S. elections, roughly nine out of ten African Americans support Democrats. Trump's defeat and Democratic control of the Senate was partly caused by phytoplankton in an ancient sea.
It’s contingency all the way down. Our lives are shaped by humans, both alive and dead, and the lottery of earth.