Caring for Cacti

An interview with Jared D. Margulies on his book THE CACTUS HUNTERS: DESIRE AND EXTINCTION IN THE ILLICIT SUCCULENT TRADE

Jared D. Margulies is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Alabama where he organizes the Critical Conservation Geography Collective. His first book, The Cactus Hunters, recently received honorable mentions for this year’s American Association of Geographers (AAG) Globe Book Award for Understanding in Public Geography; the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the AAGs Outstanding Book Award; and the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the Political Geography Specialty Group of the AAG.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity. 

What is a political ecology of desire, and how does desire and the unconscious structure human-plant relations?

So I articulate this need for a political ecology of desire, and one of the things that I'm trying to do as an intervention in this book is say that there was something that exceeded the traditional frameworks of Marxian political economy that structured my dissertation research on human-wildlife conflicts. There was something in excess of economy in what was moving people into relationships with these plants, but in turn transforming species futures either towards abundance in proliferation—or flourishing, as I also tried to develop some theory around—or various forms of diminution; at the most extreme form, extinction.

I think it's really important to share that, especially for folks who may read this or are thinking about their own research, I did not go into this looking for a project through which I could theorize a more-than-human desire. I did not come to this project with a Lacanian psychoanalytic background—for better and worse. It emerged through trying to take seriously the work of studying and learning with plants and the people that care for them and desire them; I realized I was lacking a theoretical framework to understand that sense of desire. I was aware enough that there was this force operating and it felt to me like a kind of desire, but I needed the help of other scholarship. What is desire? That means something more than what we want, right? And so I found Freudian and Lacanian approaches to the unconscious and desire really helpful—in particular, the work of Lacan. Not exclusively, but that is definitely the theorist in psychoanalysis I draw on the most.

So for me, a political ecology of desire is a political ecology that takes seriously the space of the unconscious. And I use the word “space” intentionally, because I actually think—and this is drawing on a variety of scholars’ works in psychoanalytic geographies, which is this really wonderful and burgeoning subfield of geography—there is a real spaciality to the unconscious, that the unconscious isn't just a sort of shadowy cave that we don't have access to in the recesses of our conscious selves. It is actually something that we see before us, to riff on Merleau-Ponty, that we interrogate and move through in the realm of fantasy.

You talk about the contradictions of collecting succulents, between desire and extinction. Can you explain that?

Something that was really interesting to observe was how collectors framed the idea of collecting at times as the work of saving species or saving plants, so I had to do a lot of thinking to try to unpack what that word “saving” was doing. Here we're talking about a very specific band of collectors who still engage in wild harvesting of plants, which it's important to note is not the majority of people in this space—and I think it's changing day by day as well, in a good way. This idea that taking plants out of the place where they live somehow represents an act of preservation or saving has this long historical tail. Of course, immediately we should be thinking about relationships between natural history and imperialism and colonialism, and in the intertwinement of botany and natural history collections with empire and empire building. But also this very Western idea of the act of saving, especially when that act involves people from the Global North going to the Global South, taking things, then putting them in various kinds of collections, whether they're museums—so this relates to salvage anthropology as well—or natural history collections or living botanical gardens.

There's this idea that there's this imminent threat out in these places where these plants, which are very exoticized in the imagination, come from. And also this idea that saving operates as a way of moving these desirable objects into the realm of immortality, both in the imagination, but through, for instance, moving them into the greenhouse then propagating them, reproducing them, giving them to friends, passing them down from one collector to the next with our name appended to them on a little label. So it's both the immortality of the plant and the immortality of the collector themselves, moving through the embodiment of the plant at the same time.

And then one of the things I try to argue in the book—which will make me no friends in any sector other than maybe niche academic ones—is I saw a lot of the same impulses happening in the world of conservation, too. In terms of: what does it mean to save species from a more professional conservation standpoint? Maybe that encourages us to set more ambitious scales when we think about the exclusionary protected area, or something like that. I was trying to build a dialectical relationship between these ideas of saving, in part to say that I actually see a lot of the same dynamics at play with these collectors and these conservationists. Obviously leading towards different outcomes, maybe, for the species; so not trying to say one is one. But maybe that helps us to build a dialogue about what we're actually doing out there in the world and how we might live better with these plants.

In the book, you talk about species categorizations, and how it's a bit less cut and dry for plants than it is for animals. How do you think about the utility of the species concept? Especially the political utility. 

This was something that was new to me going into this work having not really worked on plants before. Disagreements abound; to be sure, there will be plant botanists out there who say, “No, the species concept is great.” Here, we're talking about the Linnaean species concept of genus and species within the broader taxonomic system. A lot of people will tell you that it doesn't work particularly well for plants. Cacti will hybridize with one another. People will oftentimes talk about things like species complexes, these assemblages even, of what we call a species.

The species concept for plants oftentimes tells us more in many ways about human desires than anything else. There are tens of thousands of species of named orchids in the world, and they're one of the most charismatic plants that people have been obsessed with for hundreds of years; it's not a coincidence. In groups of plants that are really heavily coveted and desired, we tend to find more species, because when you have more species, there's new things to collect and desire and want. One way of noting that is there are about 1,500 recognized species of cacti within the Cactaceae taxonomic family, and there are about 12,000 to 15,000 different names of cactus species that have existed historically. So, constantly, collectors and amateur botanists and horticulturists were going out and being like, “Aha, a new species!” And it’s just the same species, but it has a slightly different color or form, or the spines are more curved or longer.

I feel like that's us wading into the kiddie pool of this conversation because there's deeper questions about epistemology here, too. A lot of people recognize that the reason we continue to use the Linnaean system, especially in relationship to plants, is because it's what we have. It's how herbarium are labeled, categorized, and indexed. It's how we make decisions about whether or not a species is endangered.

I attended an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red Listing workshop—the Red List is the most widely recognized list of categorizing species endangerment—for agave plants in Mexico. It's a really challenging thing. First of all, the Red List only considers wild species. So if it's seen as a domesticated plant or animal, it's not on the Red List. Well, agave have basically evolved and moved along with people for millennia as this extraordinarily important cultural plant in North America and Central America and South America. So trying to distinguish sometimes the difference between what is a true species versus a cultivar is really a hot mess.

There was a moment in the workshop where a botanist said, “Well, it's either a species complex or a really complex species.” That was in relationship to this idea that it wasn't so easy to say this is definitely a wild species and this is a landrace or an agricultural varietal. They all hybridize and they mess around with each other.  One botanist friend of mine described the species concept for plants as being like tidal pools at the ocean, and each species is like a small indent in the coast. As the tide comes up, it fills in with new genetic material, and then it's its own little thing for a while, but then every so often, another wave comes in. I thought that was a really nice metaphor for thinking about that, so shout out to Michael McKain at the University of Alabama.

How species get split up matters politically, in terms of conservation because it might be a stable species within the Red List, but then suddenly botanists decide based on genetic analysis or molecular analysis that it's actually two species, but one is only an isolated subpopulation. In moving from a subpopulation to a separate population, it becomes critically endangered overnight. Then suddenly there's all these things that have to happen. Do we have a conservation plan for this species? Is it protected? Alternatively, a plant that is seen as critically endangered suddenly gets reclassified as just a sub-varietal of another species, and suddenly this thing that has been considered critically imperiled is stable. So these species categories do really matter in the space of conservation. 

How do you think desire can be used as a force for positive outcomes, or what you call a flourishing horizon?

Lacan says something along the lines of: the only thing we shouldn't betray is our own desires. I write about this in the last chapter of the book; I wanted to sit with that a little bit because I think it's often misunderstood. It's easy to imagine that meaning something weird, like people should just do whatever they want and not be concerned about other people or consequences and things like that. That's not what Lacan means; he writes about this in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which should be some indication. Getting with desire is about getting with this sense of lack that sits at the core of the desiring subject always on the search for the thing that we might imagine will satisfy that desire, but never will. It's that thing that keeps us always on the move as desiring subjects. Not betraying that desire, to me, means getting with and accepting that sense of repetition and the futility in imagining that we're ever going to be this completely satisfied subject, and embracing that as part of the beautiful thing about being human. 

What I see in that and how I try to connect it to thinking about flourishing is trying to orient our desires in a way that can support as much as possible the flourishing of all kinds of life. That may involve reorientations in contending with what we imagined those desires to be but is, in fact, something that's just operating within the realm of fantasy or the structures of capitalism. Actually, we aren't going to be satisfied subjects if we buy the 40 year old, wild-harvested Copiapoa that we imagine is the only thing missing from our collection and once we have it, our collection will be complete or something. Sitting with that question of: what is it there that I want? What is the next thing? And thinking about how that can reorient our relationships to these plants. To embrace the beauty and radical difference of the temporalities of plants, and the ways that they grow and die simultaneously and reproduce in these dizzyingly different ways than ourselves, and to enact politics that beget flourishing. This is flourishing as an approach that's underpinned by a desire for radical abundance—an earworm dropped into my head by my friend Nicholas Anderson. 

I realize that that all might sound quite abstract, but I see it as quite different than how we often talk about saving species and preserving species. That feels to me oftentimes like there's an emphasis on curtailing our desires or resisting these impulses. I want to find ways of moving beyond that where we see a stronger mapping of desire that begets that flourishing of plants in the world, but also just more generally. The answer is not going to be found by barcoding plants and buying and selling them. That simply ties into—and this is thinking with Todd McGowan's really brilliant work on desire and capitalism—the pernicious ways in which capitalism so brilliantly taps into human desires and senses of repetition. There's always going to be this new thing that we want, and capitalism is always going to be there to present us with an option to buy it and obtain it. All the while, we know on some level it will never actually provide us the satisfaction we seek. So we have to find routes out of that trap. For me, a way of articulating that is flourishing. 

What would multispecies justice, a concept you bring up in the book, look like to you?

It’s such a good question. There's an uneven terrain that we sit on in terms of thinking about what justice means for human communities, especially those most marginalized and often disenfranchised and dispossessed, and inequalities reproduced through, for instance, natural resource management, access, all the usual stuff. What happens when we open up that box of justice and try to expand the tent and think about what it means to talk about justice for non-human life? Are there ways of doing that that don't produce a flattening of terrains of power, or a sense that we're moving human concerns about justice into the same level as the concerns about plant conservation, which I think leads us down some troubling roads? Then the question becomes: how do we attend to these things at the same time, rather than just focusing on one or the other?

So for me, the project of multispecies justice is trying to sit with that tension and the entanglements that questions about justice have in recognizing that we live within ecologies. We, as people, have relations that extend beyond the human, so questions about environmental justice always will also concern non-human species. It's just that we often don't attend to them; or, alternatively, we attend to them at the cost of attending to human concerns. I think there's a way that this tension that we see—and sometimes you see it reflected in conflicts and debates within political ecology and allied fields—seems to reproduce nature-culture binaries within the Euro-Western philosophical canon that so many of us purportedly are trying to work to undo and upend because of the violence that they produce. When we start talking about justice, oftentimes people say, “Wait a second, are you saying that we should be talking about justice for animals or plants at the same time that we're talking about justice for people?” And I think we should be able to say yes; that doesn't mean that they have to mean the same thing.

It's interesting to me that this seems to stretch the imagination a little bit for some folks. Not to say it doesn't stretch mine. But I think that that is a space to lean into rather than to back away from. I recognize I'm not a philosopher, and maybe that's part of the problem [laughs], finding language to talk about this. How can we fight for these different modes of justice recognizing that they're related to one another rather than simply different things? To sit with that mess.

What lessons do you think we can take from this about what we can do about the extinction crisis and biodiversity loss and these massive problems we're facing with ecological and climate crisis?

Yeah, let me solve this once and for all [laughs]. Finally, someone asked me the big question. No, it's important; I didn't spend six years writing this just to dither in theory or something like that. This research changed a lot for me. Now I'm doing all this work on plants and I'm on a bunch of different IUCN groups, which take a lot of time, to think about how we actually respond to issues of illegal trade. But one of the things that I want to pause on for a second is this thing that happens when we entangle with the illicit, that there's something extraordinarily alluring about the illegal and the illicit; desire rears its ugly head. Both for the folks I encountered but also for the researcher. Why are people enraptured or interested in media stories about illegal plant trade?

In this book, I'm definitely focused in on the illicit trade realm, but climate change is a big part of the story. Ongoing issues of habitat degradation and habitat loss, development, urbanization are a big part of the story. And I think about how much less sexy that is for people. In part, I think it's less sexy to read about because it's so overwhelming. It feels so much harder to actually respond to, rather than when it feels like we have a scenario where there's a few bad actors, and if only we can stop them or nab them or orient them in a different direction... That's something I'm constantly reminding myself of, because this is just one thing that's having an impact on these species. So much more of this is about the mundane plotting of the fact that we have these ongoing, intersecting, enormous environmental challenges that face not just cacti and succulents, but so much of biodiversity, and also human wellbeing.

Obviously, in the book, I point fingers a lot at capitalism [laughs]. Shocker. I am a good political ecologist, or wanting to be a good political ecologist. Thinking with desire and capitalism is really important. What happens when we're able to start stepping away and seeing that overconsumption, at the end of the day, is a huge part of what underpins these problems. Overconsumption by some, which is linked to underconsumption by others. That's part of the reason I geographically focused the book largely on collectors in the Global North, because it's unsurprising that these are spaces in which we have already ongoing issues of overconsumption that span the web of life. That includes, for instance, the desire for these plants that are seen as exotic. Am I allowed to just blame capitalism [laughs] and talk about how we need socialist revolution to come?

Of course [laughs].

These are all intersecting issues. There's a great paper on the Lacanian political horizon by Erik Swyngedouw and Lucas Pohl that came out a year or two ago that I think really does a nice job of enunciating how it is that we can think with desire in leading towards more emancipatory political futures. Not a tactic towards repression, but this embrace of the strangeness of being in a world full of desire, and letting that desire lead us towards more liberatory futures.

The capitalist state seemed to promise all of that through everything becoming private and enclosed. The more that happens, the more we see how unhappy that makes us. And yet, structurally, that's so much of how society orients us. So we have to find ways of resisting that, and we have to find ways of building collective power and organizing that attends to justice in a multispecies valence.

What examples have you seen around cacti and succulents? Or maybe conservation more broadly?

I'll talk about this current research project I have where we're going to be looking at the transnational illicit trade in succulents from South Africa going around the world. These plants can be cultivated in greenhouses, and they can be grown sustainably; these species do not need to go extinct because people want them—and yet they are. In South Africa last summer, I saw literally the entire populations of some species rotting away in cardboard boxes that had been confiscated after illegal collectors or harvesters had been apprehended. It makes you really angry. It's really sad. And the lack of resources was really profound; these plants were rotting and dying in boxes because they simply didn't have enough staff to be able to handle caring for them properly. They knew that, and they were really frustrated. So whole species may no longer exist in the world because of people just wanting to have the newest fashionable succulent.

Part of the thing that makes the response challenging relates to economies of scale: the ability to anticipate the rapidity with which these desires cycle and circulate in a world full of social media and internet medias that reproduce different kinds of desires and are always presenting new things to us to want faster and faster than ever before. The answer, I feel, has to be that there are these people who have been living with these plants and acting as stewards of these landscapes for very, very long periods of time, and they need to be the beneficiaries of sustainable orientations towards cultivating these plants with care, to enable sustainable cultivation and sharing of this material.

I don't think the answer is repression. I think people want these plants and there should be ways in which people around the world can love these plants and celebrate them and have them in their houses or greenhouses, but it needs to be within this broader multispecies justice framework. There are so many barriers at a very deep level to overcoming inequalities. For instance, the fact that some of the greatest growers of these plants are not in the countries in which they are from. There needs to be opportunities for knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange and financial support. I hate to just focus in on this very pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts level, but I actually think that there are things that could be done and it's frustrating to see how few resources are being provided to make those things happen. 

I think a lot of people are frustrated. Unfortunately, one of the knee-jerk responses, therefore, is more law enforcement, more militarization. This is the new poaching crisis; back to the barricades and bring out the automatic weapons and all this kind of stuff that is not good and causes so much harm, including environmental harm. As seductive as that direction might be for some people in more old school conservation areas—because they see this crisis unfolding before their eyes and they want to do something, anything—we can do better than that.

Throughout this project, and I can see the succulents behind you, you fell in love with succulents. What is it about these plants? Why did you fall in love with them?

I'm a social scientist. If it wasn't for the people, I don't think I would have fallen in love with these plants in the way that I have. Much like the collectors that I write about, these plants all have stories, and they extend beyond the vegetal or the plant; they're human stories. They're stories of particular species or genera that I was introduced to by specific collectors or smugglers or conservationists, or geographies or places that they remind me of. They become imbued with all these memories that get carried on through the plants themselves.

I tried to take seriously, as a social scientist, really trying to learn the botany as well. I thought it was really important, as part of the research process, for these folks to take me seriously. To not seem like I actually don't care about the plants themselves, but also because I really wanted to forefront thinking: what does it mean if I put the plants more central to the story, rather than just the people moving them around the world? The study of the botany of these plants was, for me, a route into caring. The more I learn and the more I study, the more I find more and more fascinating about these different kinds of plants.

A really basic, silly example is this cactus [holds up a cactus]. It's actually got some flowers and now has a bunch of pups. I was given this cactus by a friend in 2016. When I first got it, it was this erect, upright, single, kind of tall cactus. And slowly, it started to just fall over. I was really fretting about this. So for two years, I had it propped up with chopsticks set into it. At one point, I was hanging a rock off one side trying to counterbalance it. It's in the Mammillaria genus, and I was reading about different kinds of Mammillaria. And there's a set of species in the Mammillaria genus that are known as procumbent species, which means that they reach a certain maturity and they basically lay down and they get lazy. Also, part of what happens is they start to propagate and proliferate. 

So what I think is fun about this singular cactus is thinking about vegetal otherness. I could cut these pups off and give you one, and then you would have a cactus, and I would still have my cactus, but now my cactus is two cacti. Whereas right now, I would still call it a cactus. There's something interesting about thinking with propagation and thinking with the ways in which their reproduction is really different than our own.

This plant has now also been with me throughout this entire research project, and it's grown and changed in really dramatic ways. When I first had it it never flowered, and one of the reasons it never flowered was because I didn't really know that much about how to take care of cacti. Now it flowers every year and puts out this really beautiful crown of pink flowers. 

That's cool. What did you do differently? What were you doing wrong that it wasn't flowering? 

Many of us are taught that succulents and cacti are impossible to kill, and they are the best plants for people who don't know how to take care of plants. Nothing could be further from the truth; that’s a story capitalism has sold us because they want you to buy them. They're actually extraordinarily particular. Sometimes the answer is that they want neglect, but not all the time. I was under-watering my cactus, because if you give them too much water, they'll die. That can be true, but also they do need water. Also, it wasn't getting enough light. I think that was the main thing. And I had it in a miserably inappropriate substrate. That's about it.