spoiler
Most people drive through South Texas and see nothing — scrubby brush, dry heat, thorns. I used to see it that way too. Then I met Joey Santore.
Joey is a botanist, illustrator, and the voice behind Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t. A few years ago, he did something most people only talk about: he acquired a piece of Tamaulipan Thornscrub — one of the rarest ecosystems in North America — and started protecting it.
Less than 1% of this ecosystem is formally protected. Most of what remains sits on private ranch land, unrecognized or actively cleared. We spent a day walking his land to understand what’s actually out there, and why it matters.
00:00 — What Most People Miss in South Texas
01:00 — The Tamaulipan Thornscrub
01:45 — Walking the Land with Joey Santore
03:00 — The Goliad Gravels
04:00 — Plants That Wait
06:00 — Peyote and the Plants Worth Protecting
08:30 — Javelinas, Feral Pigs, and Evolutionary History
11:00 — Why This Place Is Worth Paying Attention To
Hell yeah, Crime Pays but Botany doesn’t is one of the best youtubers
Especially with his recent series targeting bad landscaping, he’s precisely the kind of plant scientist I’m trying to become. There are plenty of right-wingers who are angry about plants in bad and unscientific ways, but there aren’t enough left-wingers angrily advocating for plants in good ways with scientific grounding. It’s such an easy in-road for us in greater urbanism advocacy.
Oh, absolutely. His “Spiritually Depraved and Misery-Inducing Landscapes of North America” series is so fucking cathartic as someone who deeply hates American lawn culture.
i’d never heard of him until yt started recommending those videos but i’m a fan now
He published a book, Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance. The hard covers just started shipping. I haven’t had a chance to actually start reading my copy yet, but it looks good in my giant stack of books to read.