Carl O. Sauer
by
Terry Miller

Carl Ortwin Sauer was born in 1889 and lived until 1975. In 1915 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and from there he began to impact the field of geography. During his life he wrote numerous books and articles about the topic he loved, geography. Most geography majors will recognize his name because he is mentioned in many textbooks, especially when dealing with cultural landscapes. I remembered his name from my Urban Geography class and found reference to him and his book "The Morphology of Landscape" in my text. As I searched for information about Carl Sauer, I was stunned by the amount of work this man did. I will try to give you an idea of the many accomplishments of Carl Sauer.

Carl Sauer held many different positions and offices during his life. Some of them include: map editor at Rand McNally Co., professor at University of Michigan, agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consultant for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, member of the Selection Board at the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, president of the Association of American Geographers, and professor at the University of California at Berkeley for over 50 years. That is just a drop in the bucket, I could go on for a page. During the time he held these positions he also found time to write nearly 100 articles, and 21 books and monographs.

Sauer seemed to play favorite to the areas of the Western United States, namely the Native American cultures, and Latin America. Other topics he studied include the impact of humans on the environment and the education of geographers. In the "Agency of Man", Sauer wrote, "the capacity for man to alter his natural environment, the manner of his doing, and the virtue of his actions. It is concerned with historically cumulative effects, with the physical and biologic processes that man sets in motion, inhibits, or deflects, and with the differences in cultural conduct that distiguish one human group from another."

Another major contribution of Carl Sauer was made through his desire to unify the fields of physical and human geography. He accomplished this and created his ideas of cultural landscape and cultural geography. Concerning cultural landscape in "The Morphology of Landscape" he wrote, "Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases, and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different-that is an alien- culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of an older one."

In conclusion, the thing that impressed me most about Carl Sauer was his article "The Education of a Geographer". The reason I enjoyed this article is the way he logs the development of a geographer. He wrote, "The geographer is partly born, partly shaped by his early environment, and comes rather late into our professional care... How common is a boyhood ambition to be a geographer? It is an unlikely interest to assert itself early or to be admitted to one's mates or one's self in school age." I found this to relate to me quite well, I didn't think about being a geographer until a few years ago, in my late 20s. Sauer had a wonderful view of geographers that I really enjoyed. He also helped the field of geography along with all of his research and new ideas that I mentioned before. I found out a lot about Sauer by doing this assignment, and I have a great respect for this man. In closing I will pull one final quote from "The Education of a Geographer". "The geographer and the geographer-to-be are travellers[sic], vicarious when they must, actual when they may. They are not of the class of tourists who are directed by guide books over the routes of the grand tours to the starred attractions, nor do they lodge in grand hotels. When vacation bound they may pass by the places one is supposed to see and seek out byways and unnoted places where they gain the feeling of personal discovery. They enjoy striking out on foot, away from roads and are pleased to camp out at the end of the day. Even the urban geographer may have in him the need to climb unpopulated mountains."