Especially with his recent series targeting bad landscaping, he's precisely the kind of plant scientist I'm trying to become. There are plenty of right-wingers who are angry about plants in bad and unscientific ways, but there aren't enough left-wingers angrily advocating for plants in good ways with scientific grounding. It's such an easy in-road for us in greater urbanism advocacy.

He published a book, Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance. The hard covers just started shipping. I haven’t had a chance to actually start reading my copy yet, but it looks good in my giant stack of books to read.

I'm jealous! I haven't been able to explore most of Colorado's arid ecosystems yet, but they're such a nice contrast to how I view the mountains. In the Rockies you can piss in a circle and hit ten of the most beautiful things you've ever seen. There's so much to look at that 90% of it doesn't stand out. Focusing on one nice flower misses the Ansel Adams nonsense going on behind it. In the arid regions I have visited, individual plants and features take on a lot more significance. Exploring that landscape in slow motion gives me a better sense of the ecosystem than I get from a hike to a vista.