Ellen Churchill Semple
Topic: Human Geography: Nature, Scope and Approaches · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 1 "Human Geography: Nature and Scope"
Meaning
Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932) was an American geographer and a follower of Friedrich Ratzel. She defined human geography as the study of "the changing relationship between the unresting man and the unstable earth". Her keyword is dynamism: both people and the earth keep changing, so the link between them also keeps changing. Her book Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) made her a leading voice of environmental determinism in the USA. Environmental determinism is the idea that nature, especially climate and relief, controls human life.
Example
On Majuli, a river island in the Brahmaputra in Assam, floods and shifting channels keep changing the land. People keep moving homes and changing how they farm. This is Semple's "unresting man" living on an "unstable earth".
Don't confuse with
- Friedrich Ratzel: Ratzel's keyword is synthesis, and his definition talks about a "synthetic study". Semple's keyword is dynamism, and her definition talks about a "changing relationship".
- Paul Vidal de la Blache: his keyword is interrelationship, and he is linked with possibilism, not determinism.