CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt
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Could Peyote One Day Be An Endangered Species? Ad-Free Podcast
🕑 Added 2025-03-06 18:55:10 +0000 UTC
In this episode we talk with Leo Mercado of Morningstar Conservancy, an Arizona-based peyote conservation and propagation organization formed by members of the Native American Church concerned with the increasingly diminishing wild popuations of Peyote, a cactus species native to South Texas and Northern Mexico. We talk about the dwindling supplies of the plant available to members of the Native American Church (NAC) due to human threats to peyote's existence in Texas such as land clearance, feral pigs, invasive grasses (like buffel grass) and habitat loss.
We also explore why some members of the NAC want to keep peyote illegal as a means of "protecting" the species from use by outsiders. A well-intentioned stance that may actually further imperil wild populations of this plant due to the extent in which it makes propagation and habitat restoration, and salvaging peyote plants from land clearance for things like solar fields or the border wall impossible, even by those individuals that are Native American and permitted to use peyote in religious ceremony.
Comments
Giuseppe Testa
Wild, I was just watching your past videos on Peyote and then you drop this. I hope Leo was able to get some land conservation going!
