geography as a science by attributing all human activity to physical influences so that he might classify civilizations hierarchically – favoring those civilizations he considered best. Late-20th-century growth of neo-environmental determinism Environmental determinism was revived in the late-twentieth century as neo-environmental determinism, a new term coined by the social scientist and critic Andrew Sluyter. Sluyter argues that neo-environmental determinism does not sufficiently break with its classical and imperial precursors. Others have argued that in a certain sense a Darwinian approach to determinism is useful in shedding light on human nature. Neo-environmental determinism examines how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular trajectories of economic and political development. It explores how geographic and ecological forces influence state-building, economic development, and institutions. It also addresses fears surrounding the effects of modern climate change. Jared Diamond was influential in the resurgence of environmental determinism due to the popularity of his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which addresses the geographic origins of state formation prior to 1500 A.D. Neo-environmental determinism scholars debate how much the physical environment shapes economic and political institutions. Economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff argue that factor endowments greatly affected "institutional" development in the Americas, by which they mean the tendency to more free (democratic, free market) or unfree (dictatorial, economically restrictive) regimes. In contrast, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson underscore that the geographic factors most influenced institutional development during early state formation and colonialism. They argue that geographic differences cannot explain economic growth disparities after 1500 A.D. directly, except through their effects on economic and political institutions. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and John Luke Gallup have examined the direct impacts of geographic and climatic factors on economic development, especially the role of geography on the cost of trade and access to markets, the disease environment, and agricultural productivity. The contemporary global warming crisis has also impacted environmental determinism scholarship. Jared Diamond draws similarities between the changing climate conditions that brought down the Easter Island civilization and modern global warming in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Alan Kolata, Charles Ortloff, and Gerald Huag similarly describe the Tiwanaku empire and Maya civilization collapses as caused by climate events such as drought. Peter deMenocal, Just as the earthworks in the deserts of the west grew out of notions of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban