CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt

Ad-Free Car-Slum Podcast

In this episode we talk with Crime Pays Field Correspondent WIll Doran about his traumatic experiences in the Car and Retail Slums of the American Sunbelt, possibly one of the ugliest and most soul-crushing landscapes in the first world. This is a landscape that exists as pure "anti-culture", and as many of you may know, is the only kind of landscape and infrastructure option offered to many people living in the lower-latitude United States. It leads to deteriorating mental, emotional, spirit...

The Plant That Self-Sows Its Own Seed

It was nice to visit the one of the only populations of Eucnide lobata in the United States yesterday. This plant is in the Velcro Leaf Family, Loasaceae. This is a rock wall obligate plant which you'll almost never encounter growing in actual soil. It's primarily restricted to vertical rock walls.

I hadn't noticed that the pedicels of the fruits reflex back towards the wall after the flowers finish blooming. This is, presumably, so that the seeds dehisce over the wall rather than jus...

How Peyote Recovers from SunBurn

In this episode we take a look at a few peyote plants that were sunburned suddenly when the Buffelgrass that was shading them out was removed. Epicuticular Wax is produced by the epidermal tissue itself and is a protective covering that reflects ultraviolet light, serving as one of the best defenses against "sunburn", which is a detrimental combination of both heat and sun exposure that causes a bleaching of the epidermal tissue.

Ad-Free Podcast w/Kerry Knudsen

In this episode we sit down with self-taught Lichenologist (and former Construction Worker) Kerry Knudsen to talk about lichens, finding fascination with organisms that have no directly observable human use, viewing the biosphere as a "living machine", bringing "nature" back to cities, the value of dark humor in a society that doesn't have reverence or respect for the biosphere, and more.

Davis Mountains Sky Island Complex

Thanks to Adam Black for tolerating me.

Ad-Free Podcast: What Happened to the Transgenic American Chestnut ?

What happened to the transgenic American Chestnut? In January of 2024 news broke out that a "lab error" had "compromised years of research" regarding the re-introduction of American Chestnuts into Eastern North American forests, this time with a simple 700 base-pair gene for blight-resistance inserted into the tree's genome. For those that don't know, an invasive fungus from Asia that was unintentionally introduced to North America devastated the entire population of American Chestnuts, rende...

Ad-Free Podcast on Mycorrhizal Harvesting, Sky Island Extirpations, etc

In this episode we talk about how we are explicitly NOT condoning it, how to harvest mycorrhizae from soil duff, what is "KNR" and what "IMO"s are, the paucity of study concerning mushroom diversity in the Davis Mountains and how some species there might be eventually extirpated due to the drying climate, the fungal genus Tarzetta, and more. The episode is polished off by a 40 question botany quiz.

Ad-Free Podcast

Adam Black talks about his food forest.

"Native", "Invasive" & the Ecology of Biogeography Lecture

Drinking from the Air : Tillandsia of Northern Chile

Here's a link to something I just cooked up on InDesign for the book. I tried to post as many photos as possible while also including as much (concise) pertinent information as possible. Since the publisher is a publisher of "Art books" not of science books, I came to the realization that this shit is never going to get done and certainly won't get done the way that I need it to be done unless I do everything myself. It's set to be 288 pages. Here's two of them. Enjoy

A Conversation with Martin Grantham

The first few minutes of this conversation were accidentally clipped, and later edits were made to remove irrelevant bits of conversation or mention of individual names. This is a conversation with my brilliant friend Martin Grantham about the relationship between Humans and the biosphere they live within, how we got here, where were going, how identity politics surrounding relationships with land miss the point, how a biocentric worldview could save us, and how it unfortunately might take ca...

Example Draft of "North America" section of the Book

Here is an example draft that I prepared on google slides for the Oblivious Publisher that hired me to do a book for them. I prepared this so that they could have an idea of what photos would be going in the book. This is the section for "North America", focusing on some of my favorite taxa and themes. There are still sections for Chile, Brazil, Dominican Republic, South Africa, West Australia, NAmibia, New Zealand, Tasmania.

Working with this publisher has been hell. They have been inc...

Plant Speciation Presentation

How do plants evolve? How do plants speciate? What is allopatric speciation? What is sympatric speciation? How do plants like the Hawaiian silverswords evolve to be such big weird bastards while their ancestors on the mainlaind (the tarweeds) are so small? What the hell happened with the genus Echium (Boraginaceae) when it got to the Canary Islands? Why were islands the big reveal for how natural selection might work when Darwin saw his finches and what the shit? How can geology cause a new p...

Revisiting the Illegal Garden

In this video we return to West Oakland, California to inspect the illegally-planted (but eventually authorized by the city) garden on Mandela Parkway, giving it a full species survey of rarities that were planted there including the Big Cone Pinion Pine, Pinus maximartinezii, as well as the inglorious Puya x berteroniana, Agave vilmoriniana (Octopus Agave), Quercus rugosa (Mexican net leaf oak) and many more.

We also check out some of the trees planted on side streets, including daw...

I Bleed For Cholla

Sophomoric, Juvenile, Idiotic in every way. Enjoy.

The Ride Down Shasta

When I was working the conductor pool between Klamath Falls and Dunsmuir, I would sometimes go stand on the nose of the locomotive during the descent from Grass Lake towards the Shasta, especially if the weather was nice. The ride went past some epic lava flows made over the last few dozen thousand years, and Mt Shasta always looked beautiful.

October Eastbound Through the Mojave

I've been going down memory lane the last day or two looking at old videos that were recorded nearly a decade ago that I never made public. This one was recorded sometime in 2015 or 16, during a trip through the Mojave Desert on Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Riding a freight train shirtless through the Desolate Mojave Desert on a warm fall night is a feeling that few things can beat. Hope you can get an inkling of what it felt like bc it felt pretty nice.

J

How Geology Causes New Plant Species to Evolve : Serpentine Endemism

Ad-Free Podcast w/ Tectonic City

The Best Botanic Garden in the US

UC Berkeley Botanical Garden isn't designed like most botanic gardens, with a focus mostly on aesthetics and corny ideas about "beauty", with 90 of the same thing planted in uniform lines with even spacing so as to mimic 19th century Victorian ideas about how plants should be considered attractive. Instead, this garden is focused on re-creating the habitats and plant communities of the various geographic regions of the world with highlights on species richness, evolution and ecology. A trip t...

Revisiting the Aizoaceae Greenhouse

Crash Course on Soils

...and using the rocks app...

Ad-Free PdCst : A Deep Dive Into CoyoteBush

The genus Baccharis is one of the largest and most diverse in the Composite Family, Asteraceae. It originated in South America a few dozen million years ago and has diversified and spread throughout South and North America and adapted to a variety of different habitats due to a number of key innovations such as tufted trichomes that secrete sticky wax, the abundant production of wind-dispersed seeds, and rapid growth, among other traits. When I was working for the railroad and frequently ...

Spreading Paht Seeds On the Train Tracks/Chicago Halloween Exposé

Photosynthesis, Broken Down.

This is a complex and confusing topic, and here I'm teaching it to a class filled with mostly non-bio majors who will need to remember a few primary points, which I Try to illustrate. Gahd help us all.

Ad Free Podcast 10-25-34

Patreon is fucking up and won't let me add the audio file, so here's a google drive link to the audio file.

Witchita Mountains Recap

The Limestone to Volcanic Waltz

A Morning with the Living Rock Cactus

Ad-Free Podcast Episode : Dr. Jim Mauseth

Did you know that the distal ends and tips of roots are the only parts doing any absorption? What the hell are cortical bundles and why did cacti evolve them? How can cactus roots grow so quickly after a rain and what do we mean by "root spurs"?  How does the South American parasitic plant Tristerix aphylla behave like a fungus when it grows inside its host plant? And if you still don't understand what the hell Parenchyma is, here's your chance for a refresher...