We are the way we are because of savanna ecosystems.

To truly understand ourselves and the modern problems we face, we need to look back at the world that shaped us—inside and out.

Today’s world is defined by fractured values, rising anxiety, political polarization, and a widespread sense that our shared cultural compass has collapsed. People are searching everywhere—ancient texts, neuroscience, spirituality, the cosmos—for a unifying framework that makes sense of the human experience.

But one place we’ve yet to look is the very origin of our psychology: the savanna ecosystems that shaped us. Every instinct, emotion, and quirk of the human body was shaped by that ancient world of grass, trees, grazers, and predators.

Drawing on years of managing and restoring wild landscapes across Africa and the American West, ecologist Nate Chisholm takes readers into close encounters with lions, cowboys, and real world wilderness survival, to reveal a radical truth: We are living in a habitat our minds were never designed for.

Eye-opening and timely, Savanna reveals:

• The ancestral conditions that shaped human psychology—why we feel the way we feel, fear what we fear, crave what we crave, and struggle with certain features of modern life
• How the loss of functional savannas—and the cultural, technological, and ecological shifts that followed—created many of the “modern problems” we experience as stress, distraction, instability, and disconnection
• How we can recognize our own ecological wiring so we can make better decisions, design healthier environments, improve relationships, manage attention, reduce anxiety, navigate technology, and cultivate more meaningful lives

Savanna offers something both radical and stabilizing: a biological and ecological foundation for universal human values at a moment when society is desperate for common ground.