Many geographers advocated the position that the most important questions for geography concerned the ways that humans have transformed the face of the Earth. Environmental determinism persisted long enough that by the time that geographers rejected environmental determinism, the damage had already been done. In the wider academic and societal arenas, geography had come to be associated with environmental determinism. A look at an encyclopedia from the mid 1950s and even some textbooks from the 1960s shows that environmental determinism was still present in popular geography, even though geography as a discipline had largely discredited the idea. Indeed, today it would be hard to find a geographer who would support environmental determinism.
Academic memories are also short in other disciplines as well.
His purpose is to subvert previous theories that argued that Europe was more developed because it was racially superior. He thus gets quite a bit of support from anti-racists. In one section, he claims that Europe and North America developed the way they did because they are continents with a dominant East-West extent. Because they had long bands of the same climate and vegetation, things more easily diffused. On the other hand, Africa and South America have North-South Orientations, with a greater degree of latitudinal change in climate.