Naturalisation of humans and environmental determinism

Detail

1. Technology: how humans deal with nature

• The key question: NCERT says the important thing is not what people produce. It is "with the help of what tools and techniques" they produce it.
• Technology shows a society's cultural development. A society with better tools has gone further in its cultural growth.
• Technology rests on understanding natural laws. People first learn how nature works, and then they use that knowledge.

Natural law understood	Technology that came from it
Friction and heat	Fire
DNA and genetics	Ways to conquer diseases
Aerodynamics (how air moves around objects)	Faster planes

• "Technology loosens the shackles of environment": with every new tool, nature controls people a little less.
• More technology → more choices → humans become free of some of nature's limits.
• Less technology → fewer choices → nature decides how people live.

2. Naturalisation of humans

• Naturalisation of humans means the early stage of human history when technology was very low, so people had to adjust to nature's demands.
• Cause: very simple tools and a primitive social development.
• Process: people could not change nature, so they followed what it allowed.

• Result: they obeyed nature, feared its fury and worshipped it.

• NCERT calls a person at this stage the "naturalised human".

• NCERT links this stage to environmental determinism, the idea that nature controls human life.
• The other side (covered in the next section of this topic): as technology grows, people change nature. NCERT calls this the humanisation of nature.

3. Benda's story: a naturalised human in India

• Where Benda lives: Abujhmarh (Abujh Maad), a hilly, forested area in Narayanpur district, southern Chhattisgarh.
• It lies between the Indravati river (a tributary of the Godavari) and the Bastar plateau.

• It is the home of the Abujh Maria, a Gond group.

• Settlement: Benda's village has just three huts, deep in the forest.

• Farming: his people practise shifting cultivation, a type of farming where people clear and burn a patch of forest, grow crops for a few years, and then move to a new patch.
• Benda and his family burn small patches of the penda (forest).
• The ash makes the soil fertile.

• They grow crops there and later move on.

• Religion: before drinking from a stream, Benda thanks Loi-Lugi, the forest spirit.

• Trade: he looks for the herbs Gajjhara and Kuchla. He barters them at the madhai (tribal fair). Barter means swapping goods without money.
• Vegetation: mahua, palash and sal trees grow around him. These are typical trees of the tropical dry deciduous forests of central India.
• Contact with outsiders: he melts into the forest when outsiders come.
• NCERT's lesson:
• People like Benda depend directly on nature for food, water, medicine and trade.

• For them, nature is "Mother Nature", worshipped and protected.

• The Abujh Maria today (beyond NCERT):

• The Abujh Maria are listed as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) under Madhya Pradesh, which included Chhattisgarh when the list was made. PVTGs are the most vulnerable tribal communities [2].
• India has 75 PVTGs in 18 states and 1 Union Territory [2][3].
• The four criteria for PVTG status are:
  • a pre-agricultural level of technology
  • a low level of literacy
  • economic backwardness
  • a declining or stagnant population [2][3]
• PVTGs live in isolated, remote and difficult areas in small, scattered hamlets [2].

• The government replaced the name "Primitive Tribal Group" (PTG) with PVTG, because people complained that the word "primitive" judges people [3].

• Map practice: mark Narayanpur in southern Chhattisgarh. Draw the Indravati river south of it, flowing west to the Godavari. Draw the Bastar plateau around it. Abujhmarh is the forested hill block between them.

4. Environmental determinism as a school (beyond NCERT)

• Environmental determinism is the school of thought that says the physical environment, especially climate and relief, controls human life and culture.
• It says differences between peoples come from climate and landscape, not from inborn qualities [4].

• Relief means the height and shape of the land, such as mountains, plateaus and plains.

• Early roots: Hippocrates, Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun and Montesquieu all linked climate and place to people's nature and way of life.

• How it became an academic school:

Thinker	Main work	Key idea
Friedrich Ratzel (German)	Anthropogeographie; Politische Geographie (1897)	Used Darwin's ideas to treat the nation-state as an organism that struggles for land. Only the strongest states can grow [6][4]
Ellen Churchill Semple (American)	Influences of Geographic Environment (1911)	The physical environment decides human history and culture. She studied under Ratzel at Leipzig and kept his methods and ideas for life [5]
Ellsworth Huntington (American, 1876–1947)	Civilization and Climate (1915; revised edition 1924); The Human Habitat (1927); Mainsprings of Civilization (1945)	Climate controls human energy and the rise of civilisations [7]

• Together these three geographers stressed that societies grew strong in the temperate zones because of climate [10].
• Anthropogeography was Ratzel's term for human geography: the study of how people relate to the land they live on.

5. Critique of determinism

• It ignores human choice and technology.
• Benda and a farmer in Punjab live in different places. They also have very different tools.

• Determinism looks only at the place and forgets the tools.

• It treats correlations as causes. A correlation means two things happen together. That does not prove one causes the other.

• Example: hot regions and poverty may appear together.

• But colonial rule, trade and technology also shape wealth.

• It was used to justify colonialism and racial ranking.

• Thinkers claimed that people in hot lands were naturally lazy. This is the "tropical laziness" myth.

• Colonial powers used it to claim that temperate peoples should rule tropical ones.

• It was replaced: Semple's determinism caused much controversy. Later approaches that rejected determinism took its place [5]. These were possibilism, then neo-determinism (Griffith Taylor's "stop-and-go determinism").

6. Lebensraum: from geography to conquest

• Lebensraum means "living space" in German. Ratzel used it to connect human groups to the land areas where they grow [6].
• Ratzel's idea: the state is an organism. Like a living thing, it needs land to grow.

• Sources: Politische Geographie (1897) and the essay Lebensraum (1901) [6].

• How the idea was misused:

• Ratzel only said that states tend to grow or shrink according to what they are able to do [6].
• The Nazi misuse came mainly from the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén's reading of Ratzel [6].
• Karl Haushofer, a German geopolitician, used Mackinder's Heartland idea in his plan to control the "World Island" (Eurasia and Africa) [9].
  • The Heartland is the inner core of Eurasia.

• Hitler, in Mein Kampf, wrote that Germany's Lebensraum lay in Ukraine and the lands of eastern Europe. He said this land should be conquered because Slavs lived there, whom he called Untermenschen ("subhumans") [8].

• Lesson: a theory that says nature decides human fate can be bent to justify war and racism. See Section 9 for geopolitics.

Prelims Hooks

• "Naturalised human" means a person in a society with low technology, who obeys, fears and worships nature. NCERT links this stage to environmental determinism.
• NCERT's three pairs of a natural law and the technology it gave: friction and heat → fire; DNA → conquering disease; aerodynamics → faster planes.
• Abujhmarh is in Narayanpur district, Chhattisgarh, between the Indravati river and the Bastar plateau. It is home to the Abujh Maria, a Gond group listed as a PVTG [2].
• Benda's terms: penda = forest (where shifting cultivation is done); madhai = tribal fair; Loi-Lugi = forest spirit; Gajjhara and Kuchla = herbs he barters.
• PVTGs: 75 groups in 18 states and 1 UT. The four criteria are pre-agricultural technology, low literacy, economic backwardness, and a stagnant or declining population [2][3].
• Book–author pairs: Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) – Semple; Civilization and Climate (1915) – Huntington; Politische Geographie (1897) – Ratzel [5][6][7].
• Semple was Ratzel's student at Leipzig. This is how determinism spread to the USA [5].
• Trap: Ratzel coined Lebensraum. But the Nazi misuse came mainly through Kjellén and Haushofer, not from Ratzel himself [6][9].
• Order in time: environmental determinism → possibilism → neo-determinism (Griffith Taylor) → the quantitative, radical, behavioural and humanistic schools.

Mains Points

• Technology sets how much nature controls people. Communities like the Abujh Maria still live close to "naturalisation".
• They depend directly on forests and practise shifting cultivation.
• Their PVTG status shows the cost: isolation, low literacy and a stagnant population [2].

• So development policy must respect their link to the forest and still bring services to them.

• Shifting cultivation is both an adaptation and a problem.

• With low population, the burnt land has time to grow back, so the forest stays healthy.
• When population rises, people return to the same patch too soon. This leads to soil loss and forest damage in central and north-east India.

• Possible responses include forest rights, help with settled farming, and land-use plans for each habitat.

• Critique of determinism (GS-I):

• It ignored human agency and treated correlations as causes.
• Colonial powers used it, through ideas like "tropical laziness".
• Lebensraum was twisted into Nazi expansion into eastern Europe [6][8].

• These are the reasons geography moved to possibilism and neo-determinism.

• Today's lesson: nature's limits are real, as climate change shows. But societies respond very differently to the same environment. This supports a middle path, Griffith Taylor's "stop-and-go determinism", over strict determinism.