In order to avoid some of the traps that appear to have stymied Hultkrantz, this dissertation must consider concerns that seem to underlie accusations of “Environmental Determinism” or “Materialistic Reductionism.” Hultkrantz explains the history of this concern in his field: 

Fundamental to the religio-ecological approach is the insight that nature not only restricts and impedes, but also stimulates cultural processes. The early anthropogeographers and students of human ecology took the positive, change-promoting power of environmental influence for granted. Their exaggerations were repudiated by one well-known scholars from their own ranks, Friedrich Ratzel, and by later researchers in anthropology and ethnology. Indeed, in insisting on the limiting but not creative importance of environment the anthropologists reacted too strongly against the ecologists.¹

This overreaction might explain, in part, the dearth of scholarly interest in the potentially causal influence of environments on religions. The reaction, itself, may be seen in the volume of publications taking up discussion of the influence of “Religion” on “Nature.” To an extent, “Environmental Determinism” appears to be an accusation of exaggerated, one-sided bias: human beings are affected by environments. Ironically, in the absence of nearly any scholarship on the influence of environments on religions, the sub-field of “Religion and Ecology” seems to have developed an image of exaggerated, one-sided bias in the other direction: human beings affect environments. 

In their article “The Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origins of Religion”, Terrence Deacon and Tyrone Cashman argue, building on Deacon’s work in The Symbolic Species, that the development of capacities among human species for language, society, and symbolic thinking led to the development of a kind of cognitive evolutionary niche.² They argues that this niche exerted evolutionary pressures that ultimately resulted in the development of abilities to comprehend and function in two worlds.³ They write, “We possess unprecedented mental features that evolved in an environment radically unlike any other. We live in a double world, one virtual, consisting of symbols and meanings, and one material, consisting of concrete objects and events. No other creature has evolved in such radically divergent niches.”⁴ This concept could be important to understanding part of the concern underlying an accusation of “Environmental Determinism:” perspectives that privilege the physical environments that contextualize our lives (and histories) may entail a lack of acknowledgement of the cognitive, symbolic rich world in which humans also live and interact. With regard to the investigation at hand, it seems that the way to avoid struggling with the potential threat of such a critique is to take into consideration the two worlds in which human beings are affected and cause effects.

In his book Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia, Michael D. Frachetti describes the perspective underlying his work as “Environmental Pragmatism” instead of “Environmental Determinism.”⁵ He writes, “Pastoralist mobility, for example, is first and foremost a strategic response to the environmental conditions used to grow pastoralists’ primary subsistence resource: their herds. Mobility orbits are strategically changed in reaction to short-term fluctuations in the natural environment such as extremely wet or cold summers in alpine meadows, for example. These pragmatic choices impact the environment in both intended and unintended ways.”⁶ Frachetti’s example of the interconnected exchange of influence clearly acknowledges the importance of the environment as well as the power of human beings to make decisions in and about their surroundings. His concept of “Environmental Pragmatism” can be used to interpret Hultkrantz's idea (adapted from Steward’s statement mentioned above) of looking for “fixed types and regularities in the process of cultural development, regularities which should not be considered as laws but as natural recurrences in similar situations.”⁷ “Environmental Determinism” is what Hultkrantz describes as “laws” and seems to imply an inevitability to the trajectories of human development in certain landscapes that precludes human creativity and adaptability. “Environmental Pragmatism,” on the other hand, connects to his phrase “natural recurrences in similar situations” and emphasizes human agency, strategic responsiveness, and innovation in the face of environmental challenges and opportunities.