Environmental Mobilities 1: Coming to Terms with Environmental Determinism

This first progress report in a series on environmental mobilities reviews the persistence of environmental determinism—the apparent explanatory power of the environment in the context of human mobility—and recent efforts to understand the persistence. It reports on how environmental mobilities continue to be characterized by environmental determinism in weak forms, but that attempts to disentangle it are being made from multiple perspectives, including political ecology, mobilities studies, and social habitability studies. Greater focus on micro-scale and social factors, as well as cross-scalar factors and political factors, are methodologically important as is reflexivity and transparency on assumptions about causality.