E9 - Joey Santore — The Mescaline Garden

*Joey Santore, Creator of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t..*

In this episode Liam interviews Joey Santore of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t. Joey has an impressively broad knowledge of ecology, particularly of desert in south Texas where he lives, which is the home of Peyote and many other special cacti.

This episode has a slightly different flavour – to quote Joey “psychoactives are fucking boring” and mescaline is “shitty”. We wouldn’t phrase it quite the same way, but Joey has an important message – all plants are special and play an important role, even if we don’t understand exactly what they’re up to. Kill your lawn and plant the locals.

Humans are interwoven in the living fabric of ecology, but we don’t pay attention to plants unless they clearly benefit us somehow. Joey encourages us to pay attention to all local plants, and to spend less time obsessing over foreign species and cultivar groups.