1596 Joey Santore and David Daley + News & Clips

Episode for May 14, 2026

1596 Joey Santore and David Daley + News & Clips

My Conversation with Joey starts at 34 mins and Dave and I get going around 1:07

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CONCRETE BOTANY: THE ECOLOGY OF PLANTS IN THE AGE OF HUMAN DISTURBANCE, by Joey Santore.

Joey, a citizen scientist and creator of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, delivers a raw, relentlessly smart, and eye-opening takedown of the ecological destruction caused by modern civilization. He’s spent years documenting the plants that survive in the most disturbed corners of our built environment – rail corridors, brownfields, freeway margins – and translating what they reveal about ecological disruption in a way anyone can understand. His big social media following loves him for his often foul-mouthed honesty, straight-forward botany videos and ecological explainers.

Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance, brings it alltogether. Part ecological narrative and part call‑to‑arms, it offers a grounded look at the plants of the Anthropocene, what their resilience tells us about the moment we’re living in, and why ecological literacy starts with noticing the species growing right outside our doors. Joey’s focus on disturbed landscapes offers a fresh, accessible way into conversations about biodiversity, invasive species, and the ecological consequences of human‑caused disruption.

David Daley is a senior fellow for FairVote and the author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, which helped spark the recent drive to reform gerrymandering. Dave’s second book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, chronicles the victories and defeats in state efforts to reform elections and uphold voting rights. A frequent lecturer and media source about gerrymandering, he is the former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, and the former CEO and publisher of the Connecticut News Project. He is a digital media fellow at the Wilson Center for the Humanities and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York magazine, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, Details, and he’s been on CNN and NPR. When writing for the Hartford Courant, he helped identify Mark Felt as the “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.