by Zack Beauchamp
Ed Carr pours cold water all over the "weather oscillations cause violence" paper I looked at last week:
This paper is a mess. But it got into print and made waves in a lot of popular outlets (for example, here and here). Why? Because it is reviving the long-dead corpse of environmental determinism…people really want the environment to in some way determine human behavior (we like simple explanations for complex events), even if that determination takes place via influences nuanced by local environmental variation, etc.
Environmental determinism fell apart in the face of empirical evidence in the 1930s. But it makes for a good, simple narrative of explanation where we can just blame conflict on climate cycles that are beyond our control, and look past the things like colonialism that created the foundation for modern political economies of conflict. This absolves the Global North of responsibility for these conflicts, and obscures the many ways in which these conflicts could be addressed productively.
The Dish 