Carl O. Sauer

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Carl Ortwin Sauer (December 24, 1889 – July 18, 1975) was an American geographer. He was born in Warrenton, Missouri and graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in 1915. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957 and was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley. One of his most well known works was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952). In 1927, Carl Sauer wrote the article "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography," which brought up how cultural landscapes are made up of "the forms superimposed on the physical landscape."

Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career. He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history." This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. He drew heavily on the "superorganic" theory of culture of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, which saw culture as a causal agent sweeping individuals along with it. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world. Politically Sauer was a conservative, and expressed concern about the way that modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health of the world.

After his retirement, Sauer's school of human-environment geography developed into cultural ecology. Cultural ecology retained Sauer's interest in human modification of the landscape and pre-modern cultures. But it rejected the superorganic theory of culture and adopted positivist methodologies.