agents shaped the nature of cultures into some predictable pattern of characteris-
tics. To some degree, the emergence of cultural ecology in academic geography
was an effort to apply systems theory, social Darwinism, and other more “scien-
tific” frameworks to the cultural landscape concept promoted by the so-called
Berkeley School, and championed by Carl Sauer, which itself was a reaction to
the dominance of deterministic assumptions in the philosophical structure of geog-
raphy and other social sciences. Although more rooted in the perspective ofpossi-
bilismrather than the rigidethnocentrismof the determinists, cultural ecology
recognizes that the impact of human activity on the landscape, and the influence
of the physical environment on human culture are both factors that dynamically
shape the cultural geography of a region. In general, cultural ecologists study
how nonindustrialized societies interact with their physical environment, espe-
cially through the development of strategies that allow them to exploit their physi-
cal surroundings. Cultural ecology therefore falls within the “man-land” tradition
of the discipline of geography, which is concerned with the relationship between
human activity and the environment.
In the first part of the 20th century, anthropologists and cultural geographers
had constructed their analysis of human societies around the nature of group inter-
action and relationships, or common features and beliefs that defined the culture,
i.e., customs, religious practices, kinship, or marriage structures, etc. Much of
the research produced was highly descriptive, and typically considered to be
Cultural Ecology 83Carl Sauer (1889–1975)
Carl Sauer was one of the most influential thinkers in cultural geography in the 20th century.
Sauer earned a doctorate from the department of geography at the University of Chicago in
1915, where he was initially influenced by the theory ofenvironmental determinism,a
perspective that many faculty at Chicago were promoting in their research and publications.
A few years after graduating, Sauer took a position at the University of California at Berkeley,
and met the eminent cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who fundamentally changed his
perspective on the human-environment relationship. Sauer abandoned his deterministic
approach, and began laying the theoretical groundwork for the developmental perspective
that would eventually emerge aspossibilism. Sauer’s benchmark work,TheMorphologyof
Landscape, argued for a more sophisticated approach to the concepts of the cultural land-
scape andcultural ecology, and the impact of humans on the environment. Sauer was a
strong proponent of the notion ofcultural diffusion, and was considered one of the world’s
foremost experts on the diffusion of domesticated species in the New World. He was the
founder of the so-called Berkeley School in American geographic thought and trained many
doctoral students who continued to develop his ideas.