This, then, was the context within which Sauer's remarkable essay "The Morphology of Landscape" was written - and to which, over time, it contributed. The essay itself is a dense, scholarly definition of what geography could and should be. Dismissing the ruins of American environmental determinism as "divine law transposed into natural law" and a "rigorous dogma of materialistic cosmology," and declaring that "causal geography had its day," Sauer drew the attention of American geographers instead to a European renaissance of what he called "our permanent task" - "the classical tradition of geography as chorological relation" (Sauer 1925, in Leighly 1963: 320). His goal was to re-establish geography as a respectable science - a task all the more important because no other discipline had claimed for itself the "section of reality" that comprised geography. That "section of reality" - one that he asserted was "naively given" by the very nature of the world - was the "landscape" (1963: 316-17). Sauer therefore argued that "the task of geography" was to establish "a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape in order to grasp in all of its meaning and color the varied terrestrial scene" (1963:
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320).35 Sauer used the term "landscape" to "denote the unit concept of geography, to characterize the peculiarly geographic association of facts," and suggested that "equivalent terms" for landscape might be "'area' and 'region.'" Sauer's use of the term "characterize" should not be misinterpreted. Unlike many at the time (and especially later), Sauer did not argue that the goal of geography should be merely to describe "geographical associations of facts," as important as that job clearly was. Rather, in "The Morphology of Landscape," Sauer developed a sophisticated meth- odology to also characterize how those associations of facts came to be.
The first step of the methodology was, indeed, areal description. Sauer was at pains to make clear that such description was meant to be generic; that is, "the geographic landscape is a generalization derived from the observation of individual scenes"
(1963: 322). The means to this end, for Sauer, was to develop a "predetermined descriptive system." The first step in this system was to make an elementary distinc- tion between the natural and cultural landscape. The natural landscape existed as fully natural only "before the introduction of man's activities" in a particular area, yet it was still useful for studies of the contemporary scene to make this distinction because then different processes - natural and cultural - could be abstracted out to see both how they worked independently and how they worked in tandem. Any natural scene, Sauer averred, begins as a set of factors: "geognostic" (the underlying geology), climatic, vegetational, and so on. Over time these factors interact with each other to create the specific landscape forms (climate, geomorphic features, soil, specific asso- ciations of vegetation, etc.) that comprise the morphology - the shape and structure - of the natural landscape itself (1963: 333-41).
Such description of natural landscapes (including the description of the processes at work over time that give shape and structure to them) was, according to Sauer,
merely preliminary: the real task for geographers was to see how this natural landscape was both the stage for, and the prime ingredient in, human geographic activity. "The natural landscape is being subject to transformation at the hands of man, the
last and for us [geographers] the most important morphological factor. By his culture he makes use of the natural forms, in many cases alters them, in some destroys them" (1963: 341). Sauer is clear on the importance of the "agency of man on earth" (as he put it in a later landmark essay). "The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural
landscape by a culture group," Sauer writes. "Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result... The natural landscape is of course of fundamental importance, for it supplies the materials out of which the cultural land- scape is formed. The shaping force, however, lies in the culture itself" (1963: 343)
(figure 1.4). With this statement - quite bold for its time in American geography - Sauer forcefully reverses environmental determinism: the forms of the cultural land- scape - that which a culture group fashions out of and imposes upon the natural landscape - "are derived from the mind of man, not imposed by nature, and hence are cultural expressions" (1963: 343). The cultural landscape is therefore an effect and
35 "Phenomenology" has two primary meanings. In the sense in which Sauer uses it here, it means the science of phenomena - that which can be perceived as objects, occurrences, or facts. The second meaning refers to the philosophical movement of phenomenology, which focuses on detailed descriptions of conscious experience. This movement was influential in the development of humanistic cultural geography in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Figure 1.4 Carl Sauer's schematic representation of the morphology of landscape. Note that in contrast to environmental determinism, "culture" becomes the primary agent of change, and the results of that change - the "cultural landscape" - is what is to be explained. culture (working in, with, and against nature) is a - if not the - cause of what we see in any scene upon which we look. From a base in description, in other words, Sauer developed a powerful methodology for understanding the processes through which landscapes developed.
Over time, the cultural landscape becomes incredibly complex: with each "intro- duction of a different - that is alien - culture" in an area, a "rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of an older one" (1963: 343). The accreted layers of the cultural landscape could therefore be peeled back by an attentive geographer to determine exactly "cultural history in its regional articulation." Specifically, Sauer and his numerous students (and countless others influenced by his ideas) developed the methodology laid down in "The Mor- phology of Landscape" to show how cultural development and transformation (including conquest of indigenous peoples by imperial powers) constantly created and recreated the places and landscapes in which people lived. This was (and remains) an immensely exciting project, and for Sauer it was one of increasing urgency as the twentieth century wore on and the degree to which the ability of humans to transform the earth - with bulldozers, chainsaws, bombs, and nascent biotechnology - seemed to steadily increase.
Sauer's own political commitments, however, were not necessarily adopted by all who followed in his footsteps. If Sauer's "Morphology" directed geographers to a more subtle notion of causality than that espoused by environmental determinism - a notion that sought to understand how people lived in place and thus shaped it, rather than vice versa - and if it also directed attention to the agency of human cultures, it also reasserted a renewed importance for descriptive studies. After all, one of the purposes of studying the landscape was to determine just what the evidence of "culture" was. Sauer himself suggested that geographers needed to concern them- selves with the description of the cultural forms that comprised the landscape. "There is a strictly geographic way of thinking of culture," Sauer argued; "namely, as the impress of the works of man upon the area." Hence, particular attention was to be paid to such material artifacts - the evidence of the impress of the works of man - as building materials and types, forms of production and communication, and the arrangement of the population (dispersed, concentrated, etc.). The fifty years after
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"Morphology" was published, therefore, saw a torrent of studies of just these things by cultural geographers - the origin and diffusion of house and barn types or vernacular production systems, and the study of the layers upon layers of material artifacts in particular places, for example - studies that often did little to address the degree or nature of human environmental transformation. Indeed, such studies increasingly became divorced from the cultural ecology that Sauer himself more and more turned towards in the later years of his life. Cultural ecology, in fact, flourished as a largely separate field from what came to be known, in the post- World War II years as American cultural geography. Sauer therefore needs to be recognized as important founder of not one, but two geographical subdisciplines: cultural ecology and cultural geography. That is why it is hard to overestimate Sauer's influence on geography. Statements such as this one, therefore, are hardly rare: "At his death [in 1975] the American people as a whole lost one of the most articulate scholars this century has yet to produce" (Callahan 1981: xv).