Carl O. Sauer

He married Laura Lorena Schowengerdt and had a son named Jonathan and a daughter named Elizabeth from the marriage.

Carl O. Sauer died at the age of 85 in Berkeley, California, USA on July 18, 1975.

Carl O. Sauer was born in Warrenton, Missouri, on December 24, 1889. His father was William Albert Sauer, a German immigrant and a teacher in a German Methodist college named ‘Central Wesleyan College’ which is now defunct, and his mother was Rosetta Johanna Hall, also a German immigrant.

He did his initial schooling from a school in Calur, Wurtemberg in Germany.

He returned to the United States and joined ‘Central Wesleyan College’ from where he graduated in 1908 shortly before turning nineteen.

He joined the ‘Northwestern University’ in Evanston, Illinois to study geology from 1909 to 1909 where he became interested in past history.

He shifted over to geography and studied the cultural activities and the physical landscape of the past.

Carl Sauer worked as an instructor in physical sciences at the ‘State Normal School’ at Salem, Massachusetts from 1913 to 1914.

He joined the ‘University of Michigan’ at Ann Arbor as an instructor in the newly formed department of geology and geography in 1915 and became an Assistant Professor in 1918, an Associate Professor in 1920, a Professor in 1920 and the Chairman of the department in 1923.

He taught environmental determinism, a part of geography, which stressed that the development of societies and cultures depended solely upon the physical environment.

While studying the reasons behind the destruction of the pine forests in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, he became convinced that humans control nature which determines the development of their cultures and not the way he believed till then. It was just opposite to what he had been teaching in environmental determinism and he became a fierce critic of the subject for the rest of his life.

In 1923 he joined the ‘University of California, Berkeley’ as a Professor and the Chairman of the department of geography. Here he developed the ‘Berkeley School of Geographic Thought’ which related the geography of a region to its landscape, history and culture. He held this position from 1923 to 1954.

One of the major works of Carl O. Sauer was ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ which was published in 1925 where he introduced the concept of ‘landscape’ in geography. ‘The Road to Cibola. Berkeley and Los Angeles’ was published in 1932 while ‘Aboriginal Population of Northwestern Mexico’ was published in 1935.

His book ‘Destructive Exploitation in Modern Colonial Expansion’ was published in 1938 while ‘Agricultural Origins and Dispersals’ about the domestication of plants and animals was published in 1952.