Concrete Botany appears to be a promising book on urban ecology and a good introduction to plant identification. Even more so, after I found out that the author, Joey Santore, is actually Crime Pays.

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, often shortened as Crime Pays by fans, is Santore’s youtube channel, on which he takes viewers along to identify plants in the “spiritually-deprived and misery-inducing” landscapes of the so-called US. A major human fault in plant identification, according to Santore, is that we are often interested only in what serves us, and fail to see the plants as living in their own right. There is good and bad to this message: good, because Santore’s jingle (“Kill your lawn!”) not-so-gently encourages people to take on responsibility for their local ecology and carry their share of the solution by inviting native plants and pollinators back into their yards. He gives people something to hold on to when fretting over said spiritually-deprived American landscapes, almost bullying people out of their rut of hopelessness into action. That is a beautiful thing to do in this day and age, chapeau. But it is also the start of the problematic of “Concrete Botany”. 

Santore seems to struggle to combine his disdain for US-American urbanism with a possible acceptance of the fact that it is a settler colony, and that it therefore operates to dominate, control and settle landscapes with non-Indigenous life. Simply reviving native plants in yards existing within a colonial structure could never undo this, which he understands and stresses as well. Which is where the misanthropy enters the game: the human as the problem. Now Santore’s main audience appears to be the American urban working class, so this critique is not without some understanding that us humans (in the urbanized West) as a major problem is an idea worth introducing. But it is also founded on centuries of Eurocentric environmentalism and universalization that refuses to acknowledge that there are (and always have been) ways of being that are not only compatible with planetary well-being but that seek to repair harm. Eurocentric universalization seeks to portray these ways of being as exceptions to the rule, instead of genuine alternatives. 

My hope for Santore’s long form writing was to see these considerations included and to build on the boldness of his platform by accepting that there is nothing inherently good or bad about humanity, but that there are indeed alternatives. And who knows, hopefully this is not Santore’s last book situating ecology in our modern world. For now, it is a great introductory read for those looking to better understand plants as they are, whether or not they are of any use to us humans. 

Concrete Botany was published on April 7th, 2025 by Cool Springs Press. Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an early review copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.