Concrete Botany

Joey Santore spent nearly 15 years working on railroads across northern California, southern Oregon, and western Nevada as a switchman, brakeman, conductor, and locomotive engineer. During that time, he developed a self-taught fascination with botany that transformed his worldview, calming him and giving him a positive focus. In his final years with the railroad, he did the bare minimum at work to pursue botanical fieldwork across mountains, deserts, and lava flows. In 2019, he started a YouTube channel called Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't, initially skeptical of the platform but recognizing the need to record plant species and habitats that might soon disappear. The response astonished him: Countless viewers wrote to say he had opened their eyes to a world they never knew existed, inspiring them to replace their lawns with native gardens. Santore frames these experiences as the foundation for his central argument: that humans are temporary caretakers of the land and must learn to return it in better condition than they found it.

Santore traces his awakening to botany back to a childhood spent disconnected from the nonhuman world. Growing up in a Chicago suburb, he had no awareness of the interconnected web of species that had once existed on the land before development. As he grew older, scientific facts like the age of rocks, continental drift, and evolution made the world more exciting. His interest in botany began with redwood trees in California, whose Jurassic-era fossil record and 2,000-year lifespans captivated him. At the arboretum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, noticing similarities between redwoods and a Tasmanian tree introduced him to phylogeny, the system of classifying organisms by shared evolutionary ancestry. Each plant now had a story connecting it to an evolutionary lineage, an ecosystem, and specific pollinators. Concepts like biogeography, the study of where plants naturally occur as a result of millions of years of evolution, came to explain why some species form aggressive monocultures when transported to new continents while behaving normally in their native ecosystems.

Working nighttime shifts on the railroad, Santore began noticing plants thriving in heavily disturbed places: shrubs growing through chain-link fences at steel recycling plants and horseweed sprouting from concrete cracks on loading docks. He bought a car and began exploring California's mountains, serpentine barrens (areas of nutrient-poor soil derived from serpentine rock), and forests, photographing every plant he encountered. His learning accelerated until he was reading research papers in locomotive cabs. He came to view plants not as background noise but as the literal foundation of all life on Earth.

From this personal narrative, Santore builds his broader critique. He argues that modern civilization destroys evolutionary masterpieces for the sake of development, and that habitat destruction and land clearance pose a threat comparable to or greater than climate change. He defines native plants as species that evolved in the place where they grow, shaped by millions of years of coevolution with surrounding organisms, and argues that bulldozing a region's plant life without inventorying it is like disassembling a complex machine and losing the parts. He introduces "plant blindness," a cultural condition in which people are taught from childhood to view plants as background scenery, and connects it to the concept of shifting baselines: Each successive generation inherits a more degraded landscape and considers it normal, unaware of what has been lost. He presents sobering statistics: Only about 4 percent of mammals on Earth are wild animals, global native forest cover has decreased by roughly half in 200 years, and a University of Hawaii study estimates 150,000 species have gone extinct in the last 500 years. He references biologist E.O. Wilson's proposal in Half-Earth to leave 50 percent of Earth's land and ocean intact for the biosphere to function.

Santore proposes viewing ecosystems as living machines whose moving parts, primarily plants, perform essential functions: retaining humidity, cooling landscapes, holding soil, and mitigating weather events. He explains how organisms act as evolutionary sculptors on one another through coevolutionary arms races, as when hummingbirds preferentially pollinate Salvia plants that produce the most conspicuous red flowers and abundant nectar, inadvertently selecting for those traits over generations. Oceans historically acted as barriers keeping continental ecosystems largely isolated, and entire clades (evolutionary lineages) of plants tend to be restricted to specific continents. He illustrates the consequences of this isolation through the American chestnut, once a dominant tree in Appalachian forests, which was nearly eradicated by an invasive Asian fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica. Molecular clock dating, a genetic method for estimating when species diverged, indicates the American and Chinese chestnut species diverged 10 to 15 million years ago. During that time, Chinese chestnuts evolved resistance through coevolution with the fungus, while American chestnuts, isolated across an ocean, had no such defense.

These principles became tangible through Santore's illegal garden on Mandela Parkway in West Oakland. The broad median had replaced a double-decker highway that collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. A neighborhood group had planted trees on the median, but the species chosen, including London plane trees and European buckeyes, were poorly suited to Oakland's dry Mediterranean climate and mostly died. Santore began sneaking in seedlings of Hesperocyparis, a genus of California-native cypresses adapted to poor, rocky soils. The cypresses thrived while nonnative species kept dying. He arranged for free wood chip deliveries and repaired the abandoned irrigation system, eventually creating a garden where an insect survey counted dozens of native bees otherwise rare in the surrounding industrial neighborhood. The experience confirmed that planting native is not environmental evangelism but pragmatism.

Santore also examines what he calls "anthrophytes," plants adapted to the human landscape of concrete, gravel, and asphalt. He explains that human-built environments, characterized by constant disturbance from mowing, bulldozing, and pollution, select for ruderal plants: fast-growing pioneer species that rapidly colonize disturbed ground. He discusses biological mechanisms that enable weeds to thrive, including apomixis (producing seeds without fertilization), polyploidy (possessing extra sets of chromosomes for greater genetic versatility), and allelopathy (exuding chemicals that inhibit competing plants). He presents case studies from cities including Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, and Chicago, finding mixtures of invasive and native species growing from concrete, steel walls, and building facades. In Chicago, he discovers floating garden docks planted with native species by an organization called Urban Rivers, and notes that beavers have even returned to the once-toxic Chicago River, evidence that planting natives brings life back.

In his final chapter, Santore advocates for immediate practical action, beginning with killing lawns. He critiques mowed turfgrass as absurd: Common lawn species are not native to North America, and their shallow roots offer minimal ecological benefit compared to native prairie grass roots that can reach 19½ feet into the soil. He outlines methods for replacing lawns, recommends starting with fast-growing native pioneer species, and points to the app iNaturalist and ecologist Doug Tallamy's work as resources. For those without lawns, he advocates guerrilla planting: collecting native seeds and scattering them in vacant lots and along fence lines. He acknowledges that invasive plants in degraded landscapes perform interim ecological services, building soil and holding moisture like a scab on a wound, but argues the goal remains replacing them with natives. He concludes by calling for a civilization-wide shift: mandatory natural science education, land permanently off-limits to development, native plants in public infrastructure and popular culture, and an end to the cultural fear of insects. Forming a relationship with the living world, Santore argues, is not tired environmentalism but a survival imperative. When people recognize that every species in a region is tied to every other, they gain a greater context for how they themselves fit within it.