User:Tyaser/Ellsworth Huntington

Academic Career
Ellsworth Huntington (September 16, 1876 – October 17, 1947) was a professor of geography at Yale University during the early 20th century, known for his studies on environmental determinism/climatic determinism, economic growth, and economic geography. He served as president of the Ecological Society of America in 1917, the Association of American Geographers in 1923 and President of the Board of Directors of the American Eugenics Society from 1934 to 1938 where he remained a director until his death in 1947. He also helped found the Population Association of America in 1931 where he was also elected to its executive committee.

Ellsworth Huntington spent his undergraduate years at Beloit College located in Wisconsin studying geology, chemistry, and physics. He graduated in 1897 and went on to teach at Euphrates College, Turkey (1897–1901); accompanied the Pumpelly (1903) and Barrett (1905–1906) expeditions to central Asia; and wrote of his Asian experiences in Explorations in Turkestan (1905) and The Pulse of Asia (1907). After leaving Turkey in 1901, he went on to attend Harvard for two years and study under William Morris Davis from 1901 to 1903. He taught geography at Yale (1907–1915) and from 1917 was a research associate there, devoting his time chiefly to climatic and anthropogeographic studies. He was the 1916 recipient of the Elisha Kent Kane Gold Medal from the Geographical Society of Philadelphia. He also began writing in textbooks starting with The Principles of Human Geography (1920). He also inaugurated Yale's "Chronicles of America" series by writing The Red Man's Continent (1919) upon invitation by Allen Johnson of the history department.

While Environmental Determinism was his main focus throughout his academic career, Huntington had experience in the fields of eugenics and dendrochronology. Huntington spent the summers of 1911 and 1912 at logging camps in the Sierras of California where he studied 451 stumps of Sequoia Gigantean analyzing the size of their rings. He worked alongside notable figures such as A.E. Douglass and Ernst Antevs.

Ellsworth Huntington was also made captain of the Military Intelligence Division in 1918 during WW1, and the following year he served as a major in the quartermaster section. He worked for the military throughout both world wars where he overlooked the creation of several military monographs on Siberia, Eastern Russia, and Mexico. He also co-edited a brief volume on Europe for Geography courses taught in the Students' Army Training Corps alongside H.E. Gregory.

Environmental Determinism
Ellsworth Huntington spent years on field studies in places across the world studying environmental determinism and the impact of climate on civilization. One of the populations he studied when conducting field research in Central Asia were the Kyrgyz people. In The Pulse of Asia, Huntington discussed nomadism in regards to the Kyrgyz people-- "nomadism has been regarded as a backward 'mode of survival" along with the concept of sedentarism. Location and communication largely impacted Ellsworth's civilization scale as the less contact a population has with others outside their own group, the 'less civilized' they are in his view.

In 1909, Huntington led the Yale Expedition to Palestine. It was his mission to determine "step by step the process by which geologic structure, topographic form, and the present and past nature of the climate have shaped man's progress, moulded his history; and thus played an incalculable part in the development of a system of thought which could scarcely have arisen under any other physical circumstances."

In his book Civilization and Climate published in 1915, Huntington included world maps showing civilization based on human energy expenditure and climate. Figure 1 is a map showing human health and energy based on climate according to Huntington.