Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Where the climatic difference is small, it is nevertheless often conspicuous enough to eclipse other concomitant factors which are at work, and hence to encourage the formation of some easy blanket theory of climatic influences. But just because the difference is slight, all attending geographic and ethnic circumstances ought to be scrutinized, to insure a correct statement of the geographical equation. The contrast between the light-hearted, gracious peasants of warm, sunny Andalusia and the reserved, almost morose inhabitants of cool and cloudy Asturias is the effect not only of climate but of the easy life in a fertile river plain, opposed to the bitter struggle for existence in the rough Cantabrian Mountains. Moreover, a strong infusion of Alpine blood has given this group of Spanish mountaineers the patience and seriousness which characterizes the race in other parts of continental Europe.1429 The conditions which have differentiated Scotch from English have been climate, relief, location, geologic composition of the soil, and ethnic composition of the two peoples. The divergent development of Northerners and Southerners in America arose from contrasts in climate, soil and area. It was not only the enervating heat and moisture of the Southern States, but also the large extent of their fertile area which necessitated slave labor, introduced the plantation system, and resulted in the whole aristocratic organization of society in the South.1430
When one type of climate extends monotonously over a vast area, as in Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the differences of temperature which prick and stimulate national endeavor in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20° Centigrade, except for a narrow sub-tropical belt along the Barbary coast in the north, and in the south an equally narrow littoral extending east and north from the Cape of Good Hope. At first glance, the large area of South Africa lying on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn raises hopes for a rich economic, social and cultural development here; but these are dashed by an examination of the isotherms. Excessive heat lays its retarding touch upon everything, while a prevailing aridity (rainfall less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters), except on the narrow windward slope of the eastern mountains, gives the last touch of climatic monotony. The coastal belt of Cape Colony and Natal raise tropical and sub-tropical products1431 like all the rest of the continent, while the semi-arid interior is committed with little variations to pastoral life. [See maps pages 484 and 487.] Climatic monotony, operating alone, would have condemned South Africa to poverty of development, and will unquestionably always avail to impoverish its national life. South African history has been made by its mines and by its location on the original water route to India; the first have dominated its economic development, and the latter has largely determined its ethnic elements—English, Dutch, and French Huguenots, while the magnet of the mines has drawn other nationalities and especially a large Jewish contingent into the urban centers of the Rand.1432 In the background is the native Kaffir and Hottentot stocks, whose blood filters into the lower classes of the white population. The diversity of these ethnic elements may compensate in part for the monotony of climatic conditions, which promise to check differentiation. However, climatic control is here peculiarly despotic. We see how it has converted the urban merchants of Holland and the skillful Huguenot artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.
In contrast to South Africa, temperate South America has an immense advantage in its large area lying outside the 20°C. isotherm, and in the wide range of mean temperatures (from 20°C. to 5°C.) found between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tierra del Fuego. Climate and relief have combined to make the mouth of the La Plata River the site of the largest city of the southern hemisphere. Buenos Ayres, with a population of over a million, reflects its large temperate hinterland.
Frigid zones and the Tropics alike suffer from monotony, of Arctic the one of cold and the other of heat. The Arctic climatic belt, extending from the isotherm of 0°C. (32°F.) to the pole, includes inhabited districts where the mean annual temperature is less than -15°C. (or 5°F.), as at the Greenland village of Etah on Smith's Sound and the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. Here the ground is covered with, ice or snow most of the year, and permanently frozen below the surface. Animal and plant life are reduced to a minimum on the land, so that man, with every poleward advance of his thin-strung settlements, is forced more and more to rely on the sea for his food. Hence he places his villages on narrow strips of coast, as do the Norse of Finmarken, the Eskimo and the Tunguse inhabiting the Arctic rim of Asia. Products of marine animals make the basis of his domestic economy. Farther inland, which means farther south, all tribes live by hunting and fishing. The Eurasian Hyperboreans find additional subsistence in their reindeer herds, which they pasture on the starchy lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) of the tundra. [See maps pages 103, 153.]
Though these Arctic folk are sprung from diverse race stocks, close vicinal location around an enclosed sea has produced some degree of blood relationship. But whatever their origins, the harsh conditions of their life have imposed upon them all a similar civilization. All population is sparse and more or less nomadic, since agriculture alone roots settlement. They have the same food, the same clothing, the same types of summer and winter dwellings, whether it is the earth hut of the Eskimo or of the coast Lapp, the Siberian Yukagirs of the Kolima River, or the Samoyedes of northeastern Russia.1433 The spur of necessity has aroused their ingenuity to a degree found nowhere in the drowsy Tropics of Africa. Dread of cold led the Yakuts of the Lena Valley to glaze the windows of their huts with slabs of ice, which are better nonconductors of heat and cold, and can be made more perfectly air-tight than glass. Hence these windows have been adopted by Russian colonists. The Eskimo devised the oil lamp, an invention found nowhere else in primitive America, and fishing tackle so perfect that white men coming to fish in Arctic waters found it superior to their own.
Owing to the inexorable restriction of their natural resources, contact with European commerce has impoverished the Hyperborean natives. It has caused the rapid and ruthless exploitation of their meager resources, which means eventual starvation. So long as the Ostyaks, before the coming of the Russians, were sole masters of the vast forests of the Obi Valley, they commanded a supply of fish and fur animals which sufficed for their sparse population. But the greed of the Russian fish dealers and fur traders, and the devastating work of the lumbermen have made double war upon Ostyak sources of subsistence.1434 The appearance of the white man in Alaskan waters was the signal for the indiscriminate killing of seal and other marine animals, till the Eskimo's supply of food and furs has been seriously invaded, from Greenland to the outermost Aleutian Islands. In all this wide territory, climatic conditions forbid any substitute for the original products, except the domesticated reindeer on the tundra of the mainland; but this would necessitate the transformation of the Eskimo from a hunting to a pastoral people. This task the government at Washington has undertaken, but with scant success.
In contrast to the numerous indirect effects of a frigid climate, no direct physiological effect can be positively ascribed to intense cold. It lays no bodily handicap on health and energy, as does the excessive heat of the Tropics. The coldest regions where tillage is possible are tolerable places of residence, because their winters are intensely dry. That of central Siberia, which is drier than the driest desert, makes tent life comfortable in the coldest season, provided the tenter be clad in furs. The low temperatures of the Canadian Northwest for the same reason have not repelled settlers even from the Southern States. Negroes, however, meet a climatic barrier in America at the isotherm of 5° Centigrade (41° F.). They are found in New England and Nova Scotia, generally with a large admixture of white blood; but there and farther north where the climate is moist as well as cold, they show a fatal tendency to pulmonary diseases.
The acclimatization of tropical people in temperate regions will never be a question of widespread importance. The negroes were involuntary immigrants to America, under conditions that can never recur. Their concentration in the "black belt," where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive, and their climatically conditioned exclusion from the more northern states are matters of local significance. Economic and social retardation have kept the hot belt relatively underpopulated. The density map shows much the largest part of it with a population less than 25 to the square mile. Only the small portion contained in India, southernmost China, and Java shows a density over 125 to the square mile (or 50 to the square kilometer). This density has to rise to 500 or more to the square mile before emigration begins. The would-be exiles then have a wide choice of new homes in other tropical lands, where they find congenial climate and phases of economic development into which they will fit. East Indian coolies are found in Cape Colony, Natal, Zanzibar, Trinidad, and British Guiana, where they constitute 38 per cent. of the population.
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