The Environmental Attitude Reflected upon Sauerian Cultural and Historical Geography

Despite Sauer set out his coursework in 1909 in the midst of Davisian physiography and environmentalism, Salisbury at Chicago assisted him to avoid the causative man-nature relation by laying emphasis on field observations. Having witnessed the widespread soil exhaustion in Illinois and Missouri, Sauer now at Ann Arbor had to redress economic and ecological problems from the deforestration of white pines on the Great Lakes. Advising on the issues of land utilization and soil erosion for the New Deal Government, Sauer in Berlekey shaped up the landscape morphology in which culture was conceived as an agent, natural landscape a medium and cultural landscape an outcome. The intellectual encounter with Boasian anthropology resulted in cultural and historical geography or culture history of seeking out the origin, diffusion and transformation of culture and cultural landscape, bearing the brunt of environmentalism. To be noted is that Sauer resurrected Marsh’s Man and Nature by organizing the 1955 international symposium on ‘Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth’. Sauer’s environmental ethics urges us to do our moral and ecological duties for the coming generation.