SAVANNA
NATE CHISHOLM
ABOUT
Nate set out to learn how to manage savanna vegetation, the human habitat from innovative grazers and foresters around the world.
He used that information to start (with the help of Hanna Hart, Byron Palmer, Mark Sindt, and Susie Schroll) two ranching businesses that have made the land much more biodiverse while also producing more food.
Nate did not realize that by shaping human habitat, he would learn how that habitat has shaped humans and shaped our history.
He wrote a book about that and his family. They are starting their next venture to incorporate those lessons into their life.
The book lays out a worldview, developed through these unique experiences such as the technology of our distant ancestors, those large animals critical in shaping the ecological processes of earth’s savannas, how humans respond to this technology, agriculture as the prototype for how humans would deal with modern problems.
Among my fellow nature geeks, lawns have received a bad wrap. That’s understandable; lawns are heavy drinkers, they have chemical dependencies, and they seem to be unproductive members of society. But, what do lawns produce?
Chisholm, N. (2017). Savanna: How Modern Problems were Born Out of Prehistoric Extinctions.
The Masai in the Serengeti are in the news. In order to understand that situation you need to understand that African communal land is the most degraded land on the planet.
American ranchers can learn a lot from the world’s calmest cattle, though maybe not much about cattle handling.
Practical Serengeti Part III; Early Summer
