This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my creative doctoral and master’s work on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as a healing practice.
“The environment confines, and yet it leaves me room to act. That narrow room is where a life gets made.”
I am standing at the edge of the Sea of Cortez on my third morning in Loreto, ankle deep, watching the light come up pink over the Sierra de la Giganta. The water is colder than it looks. There is a wind from the north that I had no part in choosing, a tide that arrived on its own schedule, a stretch of rocky shore that decides where I can enter and where I cannot. I have come here alone for thirty days, and the sea in front of me is utterly indifferent to my plans. It will be what it is. The question I carried into the water that morning, the question that became this whole essay, was simple and very old: how much of what happens to me here will the sea decide, and how much will I?
That question has a long history in geography. For a discipline that spends its days studying the relationship between people and the earth, the oldest argument of all is about who holds the power in that relationship. Does the environment shape us, set our limits, write our fate? Or do we shape it, choosing our lives from within whatever the land offers? I want to tell you about that argument, because I have come to believe that the small, private practice I named alonetude (the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude) is one quiet answer to it.
The Oldest Argument in Geography
For a long stretch of the discipline’s history, the dominant answer was that the environment decides. This view came to be called environmental determinism (the belief that climate and terrain directly govern human character, culture, and capacity). Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) trace its high point to roughly 1890 to 1920, when geographers asserted that environmental factors were the determinative cause of cultural practices, moral values, and the ultimate capabilities of any given population. It was, they show, a logic that ranked peoples by their climates and lent a scientific gloss to colonial hierarchy. Determinism was never merely a flawed idea. It was a tool that decided what land and its peoples were permitted to mean.
The reaction against it gave us a second answer. Judkins and colleagues (2008) describe the arrival, after 1920, of what they call cultural possibilism, a framework that reduced the environment from a dictate to a force of constraint and enablement, preserving only a muted sense of influence. Possibilism holds that the environment sets limits and offers materials, while human beings choose among the possibilities those materials allow. The founder of the view, Paul Vidal de la Blache, put it plainly in a line that Kriesel preserves: nature provides materials that have their limitations, and that “lend themselves to certain uses rather than to others. To this extent nature does make suggestions, and at times restrictions” (as cited in Kriesel, 1968, p. 562). The sea makes suggestions. The sea imposes restrictions. Within them, I act.
I love that Vidal de la Blache used the word suggestions. Standing in that cold water, I could feel the truth of it in my own body. The sea was suggesting. The wind was restricting. Neither was commanding. The space between suggestion and command is exactly the space where a self lives.
Confining, and Yet Not Determining
The phrase that has stayed closest to me through the writing of this piece comes from a presidential address that the geographer Risa Palm delivered to the Association of American Geographers in the mid-1980s. Human geographers, she argued, should understand the interactions between people and environment as “neither random nor law-given but rather the combination of historical circumstance of both long and short duration, confining and yet not determining human behavior” (Palm, 1986, p. 469). I have read that line more times than I can count. Confining, and yet not determining. Six words that hold the whole of what I went to Loreto to learn.
Palm reached this through a study of how Californians responded to the risk of earthquakes, a hazard that confines a life absolutely and yet leaves people with real and varied choices about how to live alongside it. Her insistence on holding agency (the human capacity to act and to produce effects in the world) together with structure (the durable conditions that constrain and enable that action) is what geographers call the structure and agency relationship. She refused to let either pole win. The earth confines us. We are far from helpless within the confinement. Both truths hold at once, and the honest work is to live inside their tension rather than collapsing it toward fate or toward fantasy.
This is the geography of my own history, and I want to be careful and truthful here. For nineteen years I have worked as a contract academic, semester to semester, never certain whether the next term would hold a place for me. Precarity is a confining structure. It is real, it is external, and it would be a lie to pretend that wanting my situation otherwise could dissolve it. The determinist temptation, in a precarious life, is to let the structure narrate everything, to conclude that the system has already decided my worth and my exhaustion. Palm’s six words are my refusal of that conclusion. The contract confines me. It has never fully determined me. Alonetude is the name I give to what I do in the room that confinement leaves open.
From Constraint to Possibility
If Palm taught me to hold confinement and freedom together, the sociologists Richard York and Jordan Fox Besek gave me a way to feel the difference between a condition and a sentence. Writing in Sociological Inquiry, they distinguish determinism from what they call potentiality. A determinist account looks for the single cause that dictates an outcome. A potentiality account, by contrast, “recognizes biology as intertwined with other factors, leading to alternatives and options as much as to constraints” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 326). Conditions, on this view, are “part of what makes human history, but they are not the master influence. They interact with many other forces, providing potential pathways for societies” (York & Besek, 2019, p. 327).
Potential pathways. When I read those words, I understood what my thirty days by the sea had been for. I had gone to Loreto carrying a determinist story about myself, the story that a childhood organized around fear and a working life organized around insecurity had simply fixed me as a certain kind of anxious, over-functioning person. York and Besek let me see that story for what it was: a monocausal explanation, the very thing potentiality refuses. My history was real. It was a condition rather than a master. It opened pathways as much as it closed them. The thirty days were a long walk down a pathway my conditions had left open all along, one I had been too depleted to see.
This is the heart of why I call alonetude a kind of possibilism. The sea imposed cold, wind, tide, and rock. Precarity imposed insecurity and a thinned-out sense of welcome in my own profession. My early life imposed a nervous system trained toward threat. These were my milieu, in Vidal de la Blache’s sense, the given conditions of my situation. And the daily practice of alonetude, the morning swim, the slow walk along the malecón, the writing done before the heat arrived, was the work of choosing a life from within them. I had no power to choose the sea. I could choose to turn it into a place that held me.
What the Water Gave Back
There is a danger in this kind of essay, and I want to name it so I avoid it. To celebrate human agency too loudly is to drift back toward the romantic illusion that we can conquer any circumstance through sheer will, an illusion that is just determinism wearing the opposite mask. Palm guards against this. So do York and Besek. Conditions are real. Some confinements stay confining no matter how I narrate them. A contract that ends still ends. A cold sea is still cold. The point of possibilism is never that constraint dissolves. The point is that constraint and choice arrive together, braided, and that a life is made in the braiding.
I think this is why open water has taught me more about possibilism than any book. When I swim out past where I can stand, I enter an environment that confines me utterly. The water sets the temperature, the swell, the limit of how far and how long. And yet within that confinement I am intensely, gloriously free: free in my stroke, my breath, my pace, my decision to turn back or to go on. The swimmer’s body knows what the geographers argued about for a century. The water suggests. The water restricts. Within the suggestion and the restriction, I am the one who swims.
On my last morning in Loreto I went into the Sea of Cortez one more time, into the same cold that had asked me the question on my third day. The sea had decided nothing about me in thirty days. It had only offered conditions, a milieu of salt and light and solitude, and left me to make of them what I could. What I made was a self a little more able to rest, a little more able to believe that being alone could be a chosen good rather than a sentence served. That is alonetude. That is possibilism, lived in the first person, at the edge of a sea that confined me and, in confining me, set me free to choose.
References
Judkins, G., Smith, M., & Keys, E. (2008). Determinism within human-environment research and the rediscovery of environmental causation. The Geographical Journal, 174(1), 17-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00265.x
Kriesel, K. M. (1968). Montesquieu: Possibilistic political geographer. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58(3), 557-574. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1968.tb01652.x
Palm, R. (1986). Coming home. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 76(4), 469-479. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00130.x
York, R., & Besek, J. F. (2019). Social evolution and environmental context: Explanative pluralism and potentiality. Sociological Inquiry, 89(2), 317-338. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.12267
Academic Lens
This post grounds the concept of alonetude in the classical determinism and possibilism debate within human geography, drawing on peer-reviewed journal scholarship rather than a survey textbook. Judkins, Smith, and Keys (2008) supply the historical arc from environmental determinism to cultural possibilism, while Kriesel (1968) preserves Vidal de la Blache’s founding articulation of possibilism in the geographer’s own translated words. The argumentative spine comes from two complementary sources. Palm’s (1986) presidential address models the structure and agency synthesis that refuses both environmental fate and voluntarist fantasy, captured in her phrase “confining and yet not determining.” York and Besek’s (2019) distinction between determinism and potentiality reframes conditions as opening “potential pathways” rather than dictating outcomes, which provides the conceptual hinge by which a personal history becomes a milieu rather than a sentence. Read through Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), the post enacts its own argument: the first-person account of a thirty-day retreat performs the possibilist claim that a self is made through chosen action within given constraint. The open-water swimming passages extend the argument into embodied, more-than-textual knowledge, positioning the swimmer’s negotiated relationship with water as possibilism felt in the body.
