To Pass On a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer – Michael Williams with David Lowenthal and William M. Denevan, recently published by University of Virgina Press.

To Pass On a Good Earth is the candid and compelling new biography of one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive and influential scholars. The legendary “Great God beyond the Sierras,” Carl Ortwin Sauer is America’s most famed geographer, an inspiration to both academics and poets, yet no book-length biography of him has existed until now.

This Missouri-born son of German immigrants contributed to many fields, with a versatility rare in his time and virtually unknown today. Sauer explored plant and animal domestication, the entry of Native Americans into the continent, their transformation of the land into prairies and cultivated fields, and subsequent European enterprise that fueled prosperity but also triggered environmental degradation and the loss of cultural diversity. Providing profound and invaluable insights into the human occupance, cultivation–and often ruination–of the earth, Sauer revolutionized our understanding of the impact of European conquest of the New World.