Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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While people of the same latitude live approximately under the same temperature conditions, those of contrasted zones are subjected to markedly different influences. They develop different degrees of civilization, wealth, economic efficiency, and density of population; hence they give rise to great historical movements in the form of migration, conquest, colonization, and commerce, which, like convection currents, seek to equalize the differences and reach an equilibrium. Nature has fixed the mutual destiny of tropical and temperate zones, for instance, as complementary trade regions. The hot belt produces numerous things that can never grow in colder countries, while a much shorter list of products, coupled, however, with greater industrial efficiency, is restricted to the Temperate Zone. This explains the enormous importance of the East Indian trade for Europe in ancient and medieval times, the value of tropical possessions for commercial countries like England and Holland. It throws light upon the persistence of the tropical plantation system in the Dutch East Indies and republican Mexico, as formerly in the sugar and cotton fields of the Southern States, with its relentless grip upon the throat of national life in hot lands.
Tropical regions, however, may profit by the fact that their mountains and plateaus permit the cultivation of temperate crops. India during the last century has introduced tea culture extensively on the Assam and Nilgiri Hills, and in the Himalayan valleys up to an altitude of 7000 feet.1423 Besides this temperate product, it has put large areas into cotton, chiefly in the peninsular plateau of the Deccan, and by means of these two crops has caused a considerable readjustment in world commerce.1424 Nevertheless, here the infringement of the principle of tropical production in the torrid zone is after all slight. In tropical America, on the other hand, the case is quite different; this region presents an interesting paradox in relation to its foreign commerce. Here the highlands are the chief seats of population. They contain, moreover, the most industrious and intelligent native stock, due to geographical and historical causes running back into the ancient civilizations, as well as the largest proportions of immigrant Europeans. This is true not only of the Cordilleran states from northern Mexico to the borders of Chile, but also of Brazil, whose center of population falls on the plateau behind Rio de Janeiro and Santos. The isolation of these high plateaus excludes them to a serious extent from foreign trade, while their great altitude permits only temperate products, with the exception of sub-tropical coffee, which is their only crop meeting a great demand. The world wants, on the other hand, the long list of lowland tropical exports which torrid America furnishes as yet in inadequate amounts, owing to the lack of an industrious and abundant lowland population. Commerce will eventually experience a readjustment in these localities to the natural basis of tropical production; but how soon or how effectively this change will take place depends upon the question of immigration of foreign tropical peoples, or the more difficult problem of white acclimatization.1425
Despite some purely climatological objections, anthropo-geography finds the division of climatic zones according to certain isothermal lines of mean annual temperature the most expedient one for its purpose. The hot zone may be taken as the belt north and south of the equator enclosed between the annual isotherms of 20° C. (68° F.) These hold a course generally far outside the two tropics, and in the northern continents frequently reach the thirty-fifth parallel. The temperate climatic zones extend from the annual isotherm of 20° C. to that of 0° C. (32° F.), which bears little relation to the polar circles forming the limits of the solar Temperate Zone. The north temperate climatic zone has been further sub-divided along the annual isotherm of 5° C. (41° F.), distinguishing thus the warmer southern belt, which forms preëminently the zone of greatest historical intensity. The areas beyond the annual isotherms of 0°C. belong to the barren cold zones. [See map page 612.]
This isothermal division of the climatic zones is abundantly justified, because the duration of a given degree of heat or cold in any region is a dominant factor in its human, animal, and plant life. A map of the mean annual isotherms of the earth is therefore eloquent of the relation between historical development and this one phase of climate. Where the lines run far apart, they enclose extensive areas of similar temperature; and where they approach, they group together regions of contrasted temperatures. The compression of climatic differences into a small area enlivens and accentuates the process of historical development. It produces the same sort of effect as the proximity of contrasted reliefs. Nowhere else in the world do the tropical and frigid climatic areas, as defined on the north and south by the annual isothermal lines of 20°C. and 0°C. respectively, lie so near together as in Labrador and northern Florida. Separated here by only twenty degrees of latitude, on the opposite side of the Atlantic they diverge so sharply as to include the whole western face of Europe, from Hammerfest and the North Cape down to the Canary Islands and the crest of the Atlas Mountains in Africa, a stretch of forty-two degrees of latitude. This approximation of contrasted climatic districts in North America was an immense force in stimulating the early economic development of the Thirteen Colonies, and in maturing them to the point of political autonomy. It gave New England commerce command of a nearby tropical trade in the West Indies, of sub-tropical products in the southern colonies, in close proximity to all the contrasted products of a cold climate—dense northern forests for naval stores and lumber, and an inexhaustible supply of fish from polar currents, which met a strong demand in Europe and the Antilles. The sudden southward drop of the 0°C. annual isothermal line toward the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes brought the northwestern fur trade to the back gate of New York, where it opened on the Mohawk and upper Hudson, and brought prosperity to the young colony. Even to-day the center of collection for the Canadian fur fields is Quebec, located at 47° north latitude, while the corresponding point of concentration in Europe for the furs of Russia and Siberia is Nizhni-Novgorod, which lies ten degrees farther north.1426
This compression of the isotherms emphasizes the differences of national characters produced in part by dissimilar climatic conditions. Contrasts in temperament, manner of life, and point of view, like that between the New Englander and Virginian, Chilean and Bolivian in the Americas, Breton and Provençal in France, Castilian and Andalusian in Spain, Gurkha and Bengali in India, seem to bleach out when they are located far apart, owing to many grades of transition between; but they become striking, stimulating, productive of important economic and political results, when close juxtaposition enables them to react sharply one upon the other. In effecting these nice differentiations of local types, climate is nearly always one of the factors at work, emphasizing perhaps an existing ethnic difference. Even the slight variations of temperature to be found in the same zone or the same climatic region produce distinct results, especially where they are harnessed, as is usually the case, with some other geographic condition of relief, area or soil, pulling in the same direction. Mexico, Peru, Italy, Switzerland, Greece and Asia Minor, with its high plateau interior and its contrasted Euxine and Aegean coasts, represent each a complex of climatic differences, which, reinforced by other geographic factors, have made in these regions a polychrome picture of national life.
Climatic contrasts aid differentiation also by influencing both natural and artificial selection in the distribution of peoples. This effect is conspicuous in the distribution of immigrants in all colonial lands like Africa, South America and in every part of the United States.1427 The warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic States is attracting back to the congenial habitat of the "black belt" the negroes of the North, where, moreover, their numbers are being further depleted by a harsh climate, which finds in them a large proportion of the unfit. The presence of a big negro laboring class in the South, itself primarily a result of climate, has long served to exclude foreign immigration, which sought therefore the unoccupied lands and the congenial climate of the more bracing North. Hence it is both a direct and indirect effect of climate that the North shows a large proportion of aliens, and the white population of the South an almost unadulterated English stock.
The influence of climate upon race temperament, both as a direct and indirect effect, can not be doubted, despite an occasional exception, like the cheery, genial Eskimos, who seem to carry in their sunny natures an antidote to the cold and poverty of their environment. In general a close correspondence obtains between climate and temperament. The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious, thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The southerners of the sub-tropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going, improvident except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional, imaginative, all qualities which among the negroes of the equatorial belt degenerate into grave racial faults. If, as many ethnologists maintain, the blond Teutons of the north are a bleached out branch of the brunette Mediterranean race, this contrast in temperament is due to climate. A comparison of northern and southern peoples of the same race and within the same Temperate Zone reveals numerous small differences of nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total. The man of the colder habitat is more domestic, stays more in his home. Though he is not necessarily more moderate or continent than the southerner, he has to pay more for his indulgences, so he is economical in expenditures. With the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the process is upward. The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and larger profits, which render small economies possible, is constantly recruited into the class of the capitalist.
Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and brain. It gives an autumn tinge to life. Among the folk of warmer lands eternal spring holds sway. National life and temperament have the
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