He later attended Central Wesleyan College where his father served as the school botanist and taught music and French.
The elder Sauer was interested in history and geography and felt there was a strong relationship between the two fields of study.
Sauer wrote his dissertation on the geography of the Ozark highlands (published in 1920) and received his doctorate degree in 1915.
[13] Thus "the task of geography is conceived as the establishment of a critical system which embraces the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene".
[16] Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career.
He drew on the work of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and later critics accused him of introducing a "superorganic" concept of culture into geography.
[17] Sauer expressed concern about the way that modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health of the world.
[21] The first generation consisted of Sauer's own students: Fred B. Kniffen (1930), Peveril Meigs (1932), Donald Brand (1933), Henry Bruman (1940), Felix W. McBryde (1940), Robert Bowman (1941), Dan Stanislawski (1944), Robert C. West (1946), James J. Parsons (1948), Edwin Doran (1953), Philip Wagner (1953), Brigham Arnold (1954), Homer Aschmann (1954), B. LeRoy Gordon (1954), Frederick J. Simoons (1956),[22] Gordon Merrill (1957), Donald Innis (1958), Marvin W. Mikesell (1958), Carl Johannessen (1959), Clinton Edwards (1962), and Leonard Sawatzky (1967).
Among them, Parsons remained at the University of California at Berkeley and became prolific in directing Latin Americanist doctoral dissertations.
Denevan became a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, in turn, produced a third generation: Daniel Gade (1967), Bernard Nietschmann (1970), Roger Byrne (1972), Roland Bergmann (1974), Billie Lee Turner II (1974), Gregory Knapp (1984), Kent Mathewson (1987), John M. Treacy (1989), and Oliver Coomes (1992).
A member of the fourth generation, William E. Doolittle studied with Turner, earned the PhD in 1979, became a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at University of Texas at Austin, and has extended the school into the fifth generation: Dean P. Lambert (1992), Andrew Sluyter (1995), Emily H. Young (1995), Eric P. Perramond (1999), Phil L. Crossley (1999), Jerry O.