Joey Santore
“Crime Pays, but Botany Doesn’t” – California, USA
Perhaps our favorite botanist to watch and learn from, Joey Santore offers us a bit of a different spin on the world of botany with his informative and hilarious (often PG-13) YouTube channel. Joey travels around the world and takes you on plant walks, with “colorful” commentary. He’s published 492 videos, and has over a quarter million subscribers
Joey is extremely interested in natural evolutionary adaptation, observing how plants evolved into different forms and determining how and why each one got to be exactly where they are. He is an “ex-punk” and a former freight train engineer who has been self-taught in his field. Nowadays he films the trips he takes in search of some of the rarest plants on the planet. In his videos, he crosses “citizen science with vigilante environmentalism.” He exposes the secrets of these botanical misfits to us in his own gleefully peculiar style, and we simply cannot get enough!
Santore was born in Chicago; his mother was an elementary school teacher and his father left on his first birthday. As a child, Santore took an interest in science early, visiting Chicago’s Field Museum with his mother and propagating elm trees from seeds in their yard. He started growing rare conifers from seed. When he ran out of room in his California backyard, he began planting them without permission in public places, including Mandela Median Parkway in Oakland. Then, in 2012, he officially appropriated space in the park for rare trees, including Baker, Tecate, Santa Cruz, and Guadalupe cypresses, along with lodgepole pines, coast (aka California) “evergreen” live oaks, and incense cedars. Some of his trees are now over 30 feet tall!
Among Santore’s fans are plant geeks, outdoor enthusiasts, and cannabis growers who were “worm-holed” into Santore’s channel while looking up plant propagation. Much of his audience, no doubt, shares his worldview: in a landscape of American cultural decline, the study of natural sciences and ecological systems are all that make sense right now. Santore is turned on to the outdoors because he’s turned off by everything else.
Aside from the hits, Santore’s long-form videos offer a panoramic botanical and geological breakdown of a location, explaining current topics like plant speciation and biogeography, alongside profane rants about climate change and the state of things in general. But the truth is that “Joey has this sense of raw and unbridled enthusiasm that’s elusive to a lot of professionals,” says Michael Eason, who runs the Rare Plant Conservation Department at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. “Joey’s a breath of fresh air. He is diversity. He didn’t grow up in a traditional way and has not had the traditional jobs that bring you into this field. He’s not afraid to mix the sacred, mundane, and lewd. And his science is good.”
“The promised land of Southern Utah – where the rednecks dance on cancerous housing developments, the cows (poo) chocolate and Pediocactus sileri grows on nearly barren gypsum hills. Gypsum-endemic plants of Southern Utah quell the pain of life in this culturally bleak wasteland.”
“Instead of this myopia, where we view everything through the lens of our own life, botany lets you zoom out and see how the world works and observe these relationships that different organisms have with each other. I want to get more people excited about it, because there’s a lot of dark (crud) coming our way. We’re gonna need this kind of awareness of ourselves in the world to be able to deal with it.”
Video 1: Santore’e Youtube Channel
Video 2: Interview
