Mezcal Mankind Mutualism

Welcome to the Agave Spirit World! This website aims to explore – and involve YOU in exploring the many ways that the century plants called agaves, or mézcales and magueyes in Spanish, have evolved beneficial relationships with bats, microbes and human cultures that can bring health to our landscapes and to our bodies.

In a time of accelerated climate change, water scarcity and food insecurity, agaves can play a role with us in forging long term solutions.

In the 1970s the plant explorer Howard Scott Gentry coined the phrase “man-agave symbiosis” for what we now see as the many mutualistic relationships between mezcal agaves and humankind.

These mutualistic interactions span the arid lands and tropics of the Americas, extending far beyond their Mesoamerican cradle to Arid America- the desert reaches of the Desert Borderlands of the US Southwest and northern Mexico.

For at least eight thousand years Indigenous cultures have relied upon agaves for food, probiotic fermented beverages, medicine, fiber for rope, baskets and weaving, lumber and hedges.