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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
That's really at the heart of the book is this question of what it is that makes these plants so desirable and what it is about the nature of desire.
Jared Margulies:Everybody collects and everybody collects cacti and succulents. I wanted to hone in on these kind of longer traditions of collecting.
Samantha Walton:Hi, I'm Samantha Walton and I'm a professor of literature, in Butterball University, based in The UK, and I'm a researcher of environmental humanities interested in, literature and environmental crisis and particularly the nature writer Nan Shepherd. And it's a real pleasure to be here today, talking to Jared about, his research into plants and succulent life. There's really fascinating kind of crossovers between the stuff that I'm really interested in and his work. So Jared, do you want to introduce yourself and your book a little bit before we get right into The Cacti?
Jared Margulies:Sure. Thanks, Sam. So my name is Jared Margulis, and I'm assistant professor in political ecology in the department of geography at the University of Alabama. And my book with the University of Minnesota Press is called The Cactus Hunter's Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade. And broadly speaking, the book is about the world of both legal and illegal wildlife trade in cactus and succulent plants, But it's also a book about desire, what sends people out into the world desiring certain kinds of things.
Jared Margulies:In this case, especially living, desirable, and collectible plants for ornamental collection in particular. And the book kind of takes a multi species approach to thinking about people and their relationship to these really unique and special plants. And it engages topics about extinction and desire and collection, especially, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about. But yeah, I'm really excited to be in conversation with you, Sam. If I can, I feel like, Sam, it might be worth you also to saying a little bit more about your most recent book?
Samantha Walton:Just, you know, after I did my introduction, I realized that was, like, the most British thing ever to be like, oh, I'm just this person. Yeah. So I have written most recently two books in the kind of environmental humanity space. The earlier one was the kind of first eco critical study of the Scottish nature writer Nan Shepherd, and particularly focusing her on her book, The Living Mountain. It's called The Living World Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought, And it is an exercise, I guess, an obsessive close reading of a text that just rewards you so much through that kind of hyper close attention.
Samantha Walton:And it's kind of like a love song to Nan Shepherd, and also reflects a bit on the way that she approached the living ecology of the Kangorn Mountains, the way that she kind of got to know plants and animals and soil and ecosystems in this very embodied, very tactile way over the long periods of her life, over many years in her life. I feel that there's some really nice affinity between that work and the kind of attention you pay to succulent life. These often very small, difficult to spot critters, I want to call them critters because they're so creaturely, which are entangled in these very complex ecosystems and then also these very complex political ecologies as well. So that's one of the angles I'm going to be coming at this at. I also research nature and mental health and I've written a book called Everybody Needs Beauty in Search of the Nature Cure, which is about why we think that nature will save us and why, we might need to rethink that relationship in the context of environmental crisis and capitalism.
Jared Margulies:Well, as you know, I gave Nan Shepherd the final word in my book, so I'm obviously a big fan. And so it's part of also why I was excited to talk to you about this.
Samantha Walton:It was noticed. It was definitely noticed. I would love to start off with a really open question, about what first got you interested in researching cactus collecting.
Jared Margulies:Right. So I was supposed to be studying the trade in tiger bones from India to China as part of this postdoc at the University of Sheffield on this project called BioSec, which is this big European research council project on relationships between biodiversity and security through the illegal wildlife trade. Did my PhD work in India on human wildlife conflicts. It felt like a sort of great transition to a adjacent but different topic. But I had major questions about how I was gonna do that work ethically.
Jared Margulies:Like, how would I actually ensure that research participants were safe, or how would I really learn things about this? And then I just I really was stumbling through questions about how to engage with that kind of illicit trade that's pretty intensely criminalized. And so I was sort of searching around for alternative kinds of topics because what I realized I was really interested in were some methodological questions. How do we study illicit economies? And how do we study forms of illegal trade?
Jared Margulies:As researchers, rather than say investigative journalists, and how do we think about doing that work ethically? There's a lot of journalism. I think that that approach is sometimes this work not thoughtfully enough about how they're ensuring the safety and security of their informants, for instance. And so I came across an article on what's called saguaro rustling, which is to say illegal harvesting of saguaros, you know. And so most people know the saguaro, but this is the big iconic, you know, cactus of the Sonora, you know, with the big arms that lives, you know, over a hundred, a 50 years old.
Jared Margulies:And now they're all a bunch of them are collapsing because of extreme heat due to climate change in in in the desert in Arizona. And it really piqued my interest. I was curious about why this illegal trade existed, who was winning and losing within these relationships, and also taking seriously that the plants are oftentimes the ones really losing out, but also there are certain humans that do too. And this led me down this path of, like, online forums and Reddit channels and eBay, and suddenly discovering there's this whole world of illegal trading cactus. And I kept looking around thinking, surely someone in the social sciences has really taken this to task and really rigorously questioned, who are these people involved in this trade?
Jared Margulies:What motivates them? Is this just about economy? Is it more than economy? Yes. Turns out, I think, is part of my big argument.
Jared Margulies:Right? This exceeds political economy questions. I just didn't find anything. I found, you know, conservationists being really concerned and talking about these, you know, villains and poachers, you know, which is this very heavily laden term. But yeah.
Jared Margulies:So it kind of set me off and I became fascinated. And very quickly, I was in Sheffield and joined, the Sheffield branch of the British Cactus and Succulent Society, and that was it.
Samantha Walton:I'm so charmed that this research began in Sheffield, which is in the North Of England and is, you know, it's not a place that you would necessarily think of as being a centre of cactus collecting or, kind of cacti appreciation. I think of cactus as these kind of rather sad things that sit on people's windowsills slowly dying in our very damp climate, in The UK. But to give people who kind of don't know about the world of cacti a bit of a sense of scope and scale, like where are some of the kind of key locations that you looked at in the book? Where do cactus grow? What kind of habitats are you talking about when you talk about cactus?
Samantha Walton:And kind of what pressures are they under in those habitats?
Jared Margulies:Yeah. That's a good starting point. It wasn't until the very final edit of the book I realized I never defined what a cactus was, and how it was different than a succulent. I was like, oh, yeah, that's probably important. So, yes, you're correct that in terms of thinking about where these plants live in the world as wild beings, they are not found in Sheffield, England.
Jared Margulies:But part of what I found fascinating in this work was how much time I spent in places like Sheffield or, say, Czechia, in in places in the global North where a lot of these cacti live out their lives. And, was curious about the history of that and and why in this fascination with these plants that have been exoticized over time. So in terms of the actual cacti, they are species that are found in, you know, the The Americas. There's technically there's some debate about this. There's technically one species of cactus, it's a Rhipsalis, that may or may not be originally from parts of, Sri Lanka and maybe Eastern Africa.
Jared Margulies:I I think most people would say that that probably is just, an issue of happenstance. But that cactus aside, they're all from The Americas. So thinking here, hotspots would include places like Mexico, especially, but also Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, but also North America as well. You know, there are certain cacti that grow pretty far up into North America as well. So these are quote unquote new world species.
Jared Margulies:And they are succulent, but succulents is a sort of physiological behavior and trait. So there's many, many plants across the tree of life that display forms of succulents, which basically just means these are plants that undergo a particular form of metabolic activity and are able to keep themselves going without the presence of water available to them. So they store water within their own bodies. That can be a tap root, but it can also be in fleshy leaves is when you get the cute pinchable succulents. Cacti though are a family, the Cactaceae family.
Jared Margulies:There's about 1,500 species of cacti. And they have very specific physiological features, like these fuzzy aerials often, which are these little spaces of where all the sexual organs of the plant come out, like the flower, but you also get the spines usually. That's kind of the main thing about, these plants. In terms of what's threatening them, you know, so one, climate change, of course. There was a recent paper demonstrating that climate change is probably very quickly gonna become one of the the leading threats of endangerment within the cactus family.
Jared Margulies:Then the usual things like urbanization, land use change, agriculture. But it turns out also harvesting for the ornamental trade. So people who want to go take these plants to put them in a pot somewhere else in the world and enjoy their proximity to them. And some of those plants are a lot more heavily pressured and threatened by ornamental collection than others. And some have arguably been led into extinction, in the wild as a result too.
Samantha Walton:That's so helpful. I really wanted to spend a bit of time just with the plants and kind of thinking about where they live and how they live and what they look like as well. We're gonna get into that in a bit more detail, hopefully, in a bit. But, the way that those locations, where those ecosystems are connected with these sites in the global north is a big part of the the story that you tell. You begin in this kind of collector context in Sheffield.
Samantha Walton:There's obviously quotes from Nan Shepherd in the book, there's also quotes from the detectorists. Thank you very much for that shout out. And I guess that's a way of asking about who collects these plants. Like, there's a lot of stereotypes out there about the kinds of people that engage in obsessive collection, and I wonder to what extent those stereotypes played out in the research you did. How true are they?
Jared Margulies:So the easiest answer is to say everybody collects, and everybody collects cacti and succulents. But then obviously, I I honed in on a particular kind of community, and that was by design, both in terms of research sampling, and methodologically I needed to kind of narrow the scope. This book is not as much about, say, the plantfluencers of Instagram. Part of this was this research also took place prior to COVID and the sort of explosion of the idea of the plant fluencer or the plant daddy in what we could think of as the sort of more Gen Z approach to thinking about houseplant care and collection. I wanted to hone in on these kind of longer traditions of collecting.
Jared Margulies:And and so for that, I specifically was interested in collectors that especially were affiliated with, like, these formal clubs. And there's a bias, admittedly, then in the research because, you know, we know that, for instance, formal kind of hobby organizations are definitely something in general of a different era a bit. We've seen over the long arc of time, over the twentieth century, a sort of general decline of engagement in formal kind of hobbies. I mean, think of, like, the book bowling alone. But, yeah.
Jared Margulies:So in general, within these kind of more formal societies, I was really interested in these formal societies for a couple of reasons. The British Cactus and Succulent Society, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. Every European country has their own equivalent of them. And these are societies that have existed for a really long time, and they have their own very pretty serious, journals that they publish on. So it gave me access to a real archive and thought about, for instance, questions about conservation and trade and illegality and harvesting.
Jared Margulies:But these are communities of people who gather, so Sheffield has actually one of the oldest branches. The Yorkshire Cactus Society is one of the oldest cactus societies, probably arguably in the world, actually. So there's this really rich tradition in Northern England of collecting cacti. And so for me, there was a real value of engaging with those folks. In terms of some of those stereotypes, yes, especially within these hobby communities, there is a preponderance for folks in general to be slightly older, especially being in The UK wider.
Jared Margulies:And also, I would say, you know, certainly both men and women were members of these societies, but I did find in doing some later survey research that there were certain kinds of stereotypes that did play out in kinds of in some of my sampling, right, where, you know, in terms of the folks today at least who are collecting exclusively cacti more than, you know, say, other succulents, they tended to self identify as men more than women, and and vice versa with succulents. But I also talk a little bit in the book about how that is also very much an expression of the current moment in society in which we live in. You know, a hundred years ago, that was totally different. There was this real explosion of fascination with cacti among, women collectors.
Samantha Walton:I would love to know, and this can be a short answer. Maybe it could be a very long answer as well, but what does a really good collection of cactus, like, look like? What is the difference between I've got some on my windowsill, I've taken a photo of them for Instagram, off I go, and this is my life. Like Yeah.
Jared Margulies:There was a moment during this research that I kind of started to veer into the serious collector category, and the result of that was because everyone I interviewed for this book that was a collector gave me a plant, basically. Because they have too many. Like, their cactus benches are simply overflowing with plants. So very quickly in The UK, I had, like, 30 plus cactus and succulent plants sitting on my north facing windowsill, which is, like, the worst place for these plants to be, trying to struggle to keep them alive. But yeah.
Jared Margulies:No. That's a great question. I would say that for a lot of collectors, and especially here thinking about North American and European collectors, a really good collection has a lot of older plants. They're oftentimes including plants that have been given to them by past collectors. So there's something about the intergenerational movement of plants from one collector to another.
Jared Margulies:Especially, I would say, broadly speaking in the global North, there's a real obsession of this idea of plants with kind of provenance or data. So, like, I know that this plant was grown from a seed that came from this mother plant that was brought over by some famous botanist or cactus explorer from the previous century. And I know exactly where because I have this note that tells me the latitude and longitude of where that plant came from. So this idea of provenance is really big for a lot of collectors. Obviously well taken care of.
Jared Margulies:A good collection is usually structured in some way, so whether that's by genus or geographic region, I would say those are probably the two most popular ways of structuring a collection. Collections always have subcollections, right? It's how we make sense of the collection. Is someone obsessed with one genus of cacti, or are they really obsessed with the cacti of Central Mexico? Something like that.
Jared Margulies:Or is it just that they like cacti with pink flowers? You know, it could be that something like that too. Totally arbitrary, but some sense of ordering. You know, I'd say I would say the best collections, you walk in and you have this moment of kind of dazzlement because they have a kind of aura of order and, coherence, but also beauty, of course, too, right? The plants are well taken care of.
Jared Margulies:They don't have pests. They're not diseased. But what a collection looks like can be a lot of different things for sure.
Samantha Walton:That's really interesting to know that there's obviously these more historic and more kind of scientific categories of classification, but the fact that people kind of find their own ways of classifying and ordering collections is really interesting. And you also mentioned obsession as well. And I think that the quote from the Detectorist is something along the lines of, you know, you have one cactus, as soon as you're given a second cactus, you kind of suddenly have a whole house full, right? The sort of thing that sparks somebody from being a person with a plant to a person who is a kind of rabid collector. That's really at the heart of the book is this question of what it is that makes these plants so desirable and what it is about the nature of desire that creates, a need that's unquenchable or only quenchable by a kind of endless collection.
Samantha Walton:And this is my kind of prelude to mentioning The L Word.
Jared Margulies:I see where you're going, Sam.
Samantha Walton:Lacard is really at the the heart of this book, or Lacan kind of structures this book. And for people who kind of don't know about Lacan, I'm afraid I might ask you to to give them a bit of an introduction. Because as far as I know, I mean, I grew up in literary critical world where Lacan was, you know, week one, Right? You need to you need to to work with this theorist in the humanities. But how common is that in kind of political ecology geography?
Samantha Walton:How many people are working with Lacan in this way?
Jared Margulies:Yeah. So we're talking about French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. This was a surprise turn for me. Especially coming from the practice of political ecology, I very much take seriously the idea that the theory should emerge through the doing of engagement in the world with people, but also, you know, other species in the research process. Wanna make very clear, I did not go into this research with the idea that, oh, I wanna write a psychoanalytic political ecology book at all.
Jared Margulies:In fact, quite the opposite. I don't come from that tradition at all. So readers will have to forgive me for that. I mean, what readers will find, I think, in this book is someone who came to psychoanalysis strangely through the world of people and their plants, which is not, I would say, a traditional way that people would have their first forays into psychoanalysis, to say nothing of Lacan. Not the easiest theorist to read, I would say, especially someone coming from more of a traditional political economy, political ecology background.
Jared Margulies:I'll give a shout out to Hannah Dickinson, who's a great researcher currently at Durham, who I would go into the office at Sheffield and make these jokes about dealing with these collectors and these obsession issues in in moments that feel like of engaging with the fetish. I had would have this nervous laugh where I was like, I guess I should read Freud now. And after, like, the fourth or fifth time, she was like, you know, Jared, you keep making this, like, anxious joke. Is there something to that? You know, I think you're circling around something here, and you need to be less afraid, maybe.
Jared Margulies:But, yeah, it meant a lot of reading. An enormous amount of reading. Maybe in certain ways the book benefited from the pandemic in that way. Because there was some field work that didn't happen as a result of the pandemic. I had tended to do in Mexico that didn't happen, and so maybe instead I was reading Lacan in extreme isolation.
Jared Margulies:Yeah. So that's just to give a prelude to kind of how I approach this work. But what I was delighted to discover through this work is there is a really robust and vibrant space of subdisciplinary engagement in geography through psychoanalytic geographies That has is a small community, I would say, but is also a growing one, but has also been around for, you know, a couple of decades now. So there's some really key thinkers like Paul Kingsbury, Anna Sikore, among a number of others. More recently, Lucas Pols doing some amazing work, with Lacanian geographies.
Jared Margulies:But there's a larger community too. But so that was a really important kind of community of scholarship to find. And I discovered, you know, that there were these people thinking extremely geographically with the unconscious. And that was really revelatory to me, to imagine thinking about the idea of the unconscious as something expressed before us. Right?
Jared Margulies:Not something sort of just hidden away in some lurky, you know, cave or whatever, but something that really was about how we understand ourselves in the world and what moves us in the world. And that's that movement is that question of desire. Like, what keeps us all going? And so for Lacan, this ultimately comes back to major questions about lack in the the realm of fantasy in which we inhabit the world as constantly looking to sort of fill this idea of the void that's at the center of our being and yet is also sort of not there, this absence. Right?
Jared Margulies:And so what are these things that we keep trying to stuff into that absence to feel whole? And it's this fantasy of feeling whole that keeps us moving in the world through the realm of desire, but also the drives, which are these kind of fundamental structures. And I'm glad you mentioned structures early on because this is very structural kind of stuff, but I'm into it. What moves us in the world to find enjoyment and oftentimes that we discover that enjoyment is is marked by these moments of both pleasure but also pain, and these kind of irritating itches of repetition. So this is where we get Lacan's idea of jouissance as this form of pleasurable pain that we both kind of can't get away from it, but also, like, keeps us on the path, but also is, like, never something that's fully satisfying.
Jared Margulies:And then on the other side of that kind of desire, the sort of broader strike psychic structure that just keeps us moving in the world, imagining some ability to be fully whole. That is impossible because that emptiness, that separation, or, you know, that castration is what marks our entire psychic structure and keeps us moving in the world as desiring subjects. And so for me, this theory was extremely important. It had immense explanatory power for me in understanding collectors, but also, especially these men, because it was a lot of my book, as people will see, is with men, going out in the world desiring to see plants, desiring to have relationships with these plants, and bring those relationships back into their greenhouses. And I could not just understand this a form of illegal wildlife trade through questions of economy.
Jared Margulies:Right? This wasn't clearly just about people making money. There was something bigger happening here. And especially Lacan, but also, you know, Freud, but also others in the Lacanian space and more contemporary folks, especially in geography. This theory had an enormous explanatory power for me.
Jared Margulies:And that's the best reason that I mean, that's that's why you should engage with theory as far as I'm concerned, sort of, in part, right? Like, it helped me make sense of something I couldn't understand without it. Now I'm gonna be this annoying evangelist of psychoanalytic political ecologies and, and geography. I'm totally there for it.
Samantha Walton:The arrival of Lacan speaks to a lack in a proper account of what it is that kind of urges people to go back again and again, or to extend the collection again and again to kind of add more things to it. And this, this sense that we all have this absent space inside of us. It's kind of what, what makes us a self essentially. What makes us distinct as a separation from the the mother figure or the the kind of the oceanic whole that we were part of before we kind of became a self, and this sense of absence and this striving for objects, this striving for things that might fill that lack, that create these kind of moments of near sated desire, but never quite sated desire. I mean, there's something so kind of like wonderfully pathetic about it, but something also very human about it.
Samantha Walton:And I think that there's a reason, you know, that Lacan has appealed so much to anti capitalist thinkers, people who are trying to understand kind of how consumerism works, how it's a model of kind of endless production of desire and kind of partial sating of desire or the kind of pretense of sating of desire until the next commodity comes along. And you, you know, you describe how that maps onto the cacti trade so well with this kind of desire to always find a new species or a new subspecies or if necessary just, like, create one using the bit of, I don't know, razzmatazz, a bit of renaming, a bit of saying, well, this was ever so slightly different from that one. And there is something quite sad about it almost, this kind of thinking these species are finite, you know, but there's this kind of like pretence that they're infinite that kind of drives collectors on or that drives the trade on. How did finding that framework for thinking about this help you understand what your intervention might be, you know, to shape conversations about this trade?
Jared Margulies:Yeah. And thank you for that kind of intro to that because I think you summarized so well what led me here. I mean, for me, the biggest thing is now in a more kind of on a theory academic level, this is some writing I'm working on right now is trying to synthesize some of these ideas. Unsurprisingly, most people who are interested in psychoanalysis and questions about the unconscious and desire are mostly interested in human relations. Now I would say the subgenre of psychoanalytic geographies extends that, especially about thinking our relations with the world.
Jared Margulies:And this takes me into this tack of questions about where do we place the unconscious in relation to these ideas about more than human geographies, but also just our relationships with other species. So this is where kind of the rubber meets the road in thinking about, well, what happens when these psychic structures collide with the particularities and evolutionary traits of, say, rare, threatened, endangered plants that become objects of desire, or objects of the drives? And so that therefore becomes both a question about political economy, but also ecology. Right? So if desire is suddenly sending certain species into extinction, then both for me, it felt like there was a real need to attend to desire and thinking about what that desire was, but its consequences.
Jared Margulies:So for me, the real intervention here is thinking about the fact, you know, maybe unsurprisingly, but Freud and, Lacan didn't really write about cacti, or the consequences of the unconscious on the environment in general. So for me, kind of extending, thinking about kind of a psychoanalytic political ecologies, and Rob Fletcher has a new book out that writes this too, was about kind of placing the environment in relationship to desire alongside other thinkers. But here especially thinking about the role of the unconscious in human and other species entanglements. There are real consequences there. Therefore, in terms of thinking about the power of desire to shape other species' futures and trajectories towards flourishing, maybe we could say on the one hand, or diminution, extinction in the final instance.
Jared Margulies:And so I engage with questions about extinction as a result too. But also, what does it mean to contend with ideas of flourishing and radical abundance? And so I'm glad you brought up questions about capitalism, because there's such great writing about how so brilliantly capitalism latches on to the structure of desire. I should also add, I think, you know, especially given the context of such exciting and burgeoning growth and sort of work on indigenous geographies and decolonizing geographies and geographies of the global South. I think in particular this very kind of Western tradition of psychoanalysis, which extends well beyond Western context, of course.
Jared Margulies:But it felt extremely appropriate within the context of a lot of the collectors I was engaging with. Because, of course, there are critiques about the unconscious you know, Lacan, for instance, is still very masculine and paternalistic and trapped within the structure of the sort of patriarchal family or whatever. But it was also extremely appropriate within a lot of the kind of subjects I was engaging with. So So it felt like, again, the theory was pretty appropriate to the topic.
Samantha Walton:So what I want to know is, did you talk to the collectors that you were interviewing or kind of hanging out with? Did you talk to them about Lacan at all? Did you sort of show them your workings as you were doing this work?
Jared Margulies:I don't think I ever talked about Lacan. I will say that, at least for a few of the collectors, I did run drafts of what I was writing by them, and I have shared some of these interpretations with collector communities. I gave a talk last year to a sort of large collector community, and afterwards, someone came up to me and said, you make us sound like a bunch of perverts. He was laughing. He was not angry.
Jared Margulies:He was laughing. Because there is something uncomfortable, right, in all of this. And I think there's something just very uncomfortable about engaging with psychoanalysis in general. But it's that kinda itch that I realized spoke to some of its explanatory power. There felt like there was something uncomfortable at moments potentially even grotesque or sort of this idea of a perversion, I thought was really interesting that that's what he took away.
Jared Margulies:For me, what I've come to recognize in it is a sort of humbling acknowledgement of just the immense fallibility of being human. And I think one of the brilliant things I found in Lacan was recognizing the idea of embracing structures that kind of extend beyond the idea of the individual self that connect all of us, or at least a lot of people that grow up within particular kind of social conditions. There's a freedom that comes with recognizing some of these meta structures that inform our understanding of our place in the world. I wouldn't say I I talked a whole lot about psychoanalysis. Part of the reason for that is my engagement with this theory was slowly moving along as I was doing the field work.
Jared Margulies:And so a lot of this field work was taking place before I'd done a lot of this kind of reading of, you know, say, the the seminars and things like that.
Samantha Walton:I think, I mean, it's so interesting when you you brought up that when you presented some of this material, one of the collectors said it makes them sound like perverts because there's this really interesting kind of narrative that comes across in your writing about collectors. There's a lot of kind of goodwill. There's a lot of understanding. It's a very kind of tender account of a lot of the people you meet. And their words are so interesting because they try to describe what it is they desire about these plants.
Samantha Walton:And then those explanations never quite work. Like they never quite sound good enough. And I guess that's a clue, isn't it, that there's something else going on at the level of the unconscious that needs to be explored. There's these very kind of saccharine, very sweet accounts, like, oh, it reminds me of my granny or, you know, a lot of the subjects that you interview, these kind of middle aged men or kind of older men who associate their collection with kind of female figures in their life. So there's these kind of nice family stories that open up there.
Samantha Walton:But then there's also this kind of uncomfortable question around the the erotics of these plants, you know, the close-up photography. I think there's one subject who describes it as being like pornography. And just a really interesting opening up of a space to think around, not necessarily to think through or to say out loud, but to say things around the question of masculinities as they play out in relation to these plants. Because cacti, they're quite contradictory, they're kind of cute and then they're also often spiky, they're tough but they're also delicate, they kind of hold these different tensions and contradictions together and they're often kind of phallic and volval all at once, right? They have this kind of very peculiar disturbing alluring genital quality to them.
Samantha Walton:So, yeah, I I would just love to know a little bit more about how masculinities were negotiated in some of the conversations you had and kind of how you handled that as a researcher.
Jared Margulies:Yeah. This was another place where I didn't see myself getting into questions about gender and masculinity in particular in this research, but it just emerged as something I couldn't really work around. And then I realized that I was, like, trying to avoid it somehow because I felt uncomfortable about it because I wasn't a sort of, you know, gender studies scholar. I also want to say there are a lot of people who collect cacti and succulents who are, of course, not men. It just happened to be a part of the story, especially in engaging with issues of illegality and illicitness in the legal trade.
Jared Margulies:But of course, there are also really important spaces for thinking about the importance of queer theory in relating to plants. And there's amazing people who are doing writing, really thinking about the vegetal world with queer theory. And I would love to think about future work that engages with that. Especially, there's a kind of huge plant queer community out in the world. And I acknowledge that that's a limitation or a gap in this particular book.
Jared Margulies:But, yeah. So, I'm glad that you said that you thought it was tender, because I tried really, really hard to think about how to write this in a way that the folks who are the subjects in these stories would recognize as respectful. These are people who are also my friends now, and I really respect, and they have incredible skill and talent for caring for these plants. And so I'm glad that you found a tenderness in it. But, yeah, I had these fascinating moments, especially with men kind of in the greenhouse.
Jared Margulies:Through our engagements of standing around looking at and talking about plants, they had real moments of intimacy. They had expressions of vulnerability about their own questions about masculinity or their relationships to masculinity. People would talk about how they felt comfortable being involved in cactus collecting as a particular kind of plant collection because of those expressions of masculinity they identify with them. The genus Ferocactus is a great example, like ferocious cactus, these big spines that curve around it. And it's like an armor.
Jared Margulies:I think unambiguously a lot of these men saw themselves moving through the world in a way with particular kind of armor, and they saw themselves reflected probably in these plants. But then as you know, like, there's these moments of vulnerability and beauty that come with the flowering of the plant. And so for a lot of these collectors, it's the moment of flower, right, that that really sends them into the greenhouse. And they could be quite sensuous in describing it. You know, if you're a collector of disco cacti, which are extremely hard to grow in the global north or global, like, northern latitude climates.
Jared Margulies:These are Brazilian, in particular Brazilian cacti, but extremely hard to maintain well in collection. They produce just the most stunning smells. And if you've ever entered a greenhouse where suddenly someone's collection of disco cactus are in bloom, like, you will not forget. It's like just being, like, enveloped if you just, like, ran your face into a gardenia or a coffee blossom, like a coffee plant and flower. Like, it's overwhelming intoxication of smell.
Jared Margulies:So I saw men a lot contending with their own engagements with masculinity through these plants. But like you said, they're contradictory. People don't necessarily collect plants that they only see reflecting themselves. They could also be collecting plants that speak to other forms of desire. As you mentioned, there's also a lot of not just phallic, but also very ionic kind of cactus and succulent plants out in the world.
Jared Margulies:And these moments of discomfort with the kind of up close erotic, up close imagery of the sexual organs of the cactus, was it certainly there? And then, of course, it makes people very uncomfortable when you put that together in conversation with the fact that like so many collectors I interviewed, their first cactus was given to them by a mother maternal figure. You start creeping into the realm of the Oedipal in the greenhouse. But I also don't wanna be too overdetermined in saying that. Right?
Jared Margulies:Like, it's not just about sex. But we also shouldn't ignore it. But it was an unexpected twist in the book. You know, I both wanted to take it seriously, but also approach it sensitively.
Samantha Walton:I think it's so important because, I mean, yeah, certainly in the queer ecology space, a turn to nature, it's definitely taking place. There's so many kind of queer writers and artists, really interested in mushrooms, really interested in fungus, you know, really interesting in plants that don't fit into sort of simple categories, whether that's kind of gender categories or kind of categories of human and more than human, all of that, you know, I'm very into that movement but I'm really interested in kind of going into these spaces where you're often dealing with communities. Heterosexual masculinity is not okay. Right? And it seems like these plants are giving these people some kind of like language or way to, to articulate things that they're maybe not able to articulate otherwise.
Samantha Walton:And I think that's kind of one of the things that feels most sort of radical and just tender about the book, I suppose. There are also these existences or these, more like frontier tropes, these kind of more aggressive forms of masculinity. And I actually really enjoyed the chapter in Chechia where you're gonna have to help me out with the name of the person you hang out with.
Jared Margulies:The pseudonym of Svek?
Samantha Walton:Yeah. Yeah. So he's this pseudonym taken from a literary work, these imaginary Wild West stories. Do you wanna just tell us a little bit about that history? Because I found it it was like a real, like, ripping yarn, as well as why.
Jared Margulies:Yeah. That was such a fascinating turn in the book. Book. Something I kind of stumbled upon. There's this trope or stereotype or narrative within the broader conservation, but also collector community that sort of epicenter of illicit succulent and cactus trade is in The Czech Republic or Czechia.
Jared Margulies:And the work ultimately did take me there. And again, this is sort of thinking about kind of these ideas of follow the thing or follow the species. Like, I tried to really, like, allow the research to unfold in the geographic directions it took through just sort of my engagements with others and where the plants took me, quite literally. So I ended up spending several weeks there with someone who, depending on who you are, kind of either one of the, like, the real underdog heroes of the cactus world, or, like, the number one villain in stories of cactus poaching. Unambiguously someone who not only is extremely skillful in growing and propagating plants, but also finding them out in the world, much to the consternation of authorities, especially in Mexico.
Jared Margulies:But, yeah, there's a history there. Right? Like, so it's not just random that Chechnya has become a sort of major hub of illicit cactus trade. And there are other, actually, illegal wildlife trades that are kind of moved through there too. And part of that history, I think, has to do with a sort of long history of an invasion and an an oppression by the Czech people, and their capacity to survive repeated bouts of occupation, especially in the long twentieth century.
Jared Margulies:But especially within the context of cactus and succulent collection, there's a sort of combination of things that were at play. One, the sort of exoticization of American landscapes that really became amplified as sort of under Soviet communism, I would say. But even further back, it just so happens that there's, in the turn of the century, one of the major figures of early quote unquote cactusploration and botanical discovery, to use that word in quotes, is this legendary figure known as Alberto Wojciech Fryc. He adds the name Alberto as to sort of hispanicize his name later in life. This was a Czech man from a very prominent Prague family of academics and and kind of political leaders who, through, his own illicit engagements with cacti as a child, becomes really obsessed with cacti.
Jared Margulies:He ends up becoming a leading figure and sort of a real hero in, the Czechoslovak community. There aren't a lot of, like, colonial era Czech explorer types that emerge from that history. You know, the Czechs never formally colonized another country, but that doesn't mean that they weren't indirectly or secondarily involved in issues of colonization. For instance, through, say, things about going out to The Americas and looking for cacti. And so he was this real hero and he remains this huge hero and figure.
Jared Margulies:But so there's this long history of what placed cacti in the sort of history, social history of Czechoslovakia. And in the early twentieth century, it became this hugely popular to collect cacti and succulents. And a lot of that had to do with this sort of fascination with these as very exotic plants, but also the sort of fantasies of this imagined wilderness frontier landscape of The Americas. And then under Soviet communism, it sort of becomes an issue of repression and sort of space of imagining the other and the exotic in the greenhouse that was not available to people because they could not travel. It also engages sort of with issues of refusal to accept authority of the other as well.
Jared Margulies:So the other is very present in the sort of role of the Czechs, I would say, in this story.
Samantha Walton:It was really interesting to see that from a kind of cultural perspective, the fact that there's these colonial anxieties or this, like, yearning for a form of colonial romance in early twentieth century Czech culture that still lingers in the way that cacti explorers feel about what they do, and the way that that structures desire and shapes the way that particularly the subject you work with conceptualises himself. He's a bit like an American maverick figure, he's a bit like a cowboy. He's kind of got, like, a sort of, like, rogue detective quality. It's a real standout chapter for me, and it it made me feel a bit kind of worried for you as well because you're sort of you're drinking quite heavily.
Jared Margulies:Oh, Sam. I've never been so drunk in my life for for so long while doing serious research.
Samantha Walton:Oh, you definitely get a sense of that. You get a sense of somebody who's been through the rigor, who's meeting people in car parks, at night to exchange. Not not to do anything illicit, but you know, that you're kind of like beginning to infiltrate certain kinds of networks and they're beginning to sort of see a little bit of how the more illicit, if not the illegal side of this trade works. And, yeah, I I wonder apart from being heavily inebriated, like, how you felt. Was it exciting to conduct this research?
Samantha Walton:Did it feel risky at any point?
Jared Margulies:I didn't mention at the beginning, but one of the reasons I got excited about the the possibility for this project was while this can be a form of illegal trade, it's not been criminalized in the way that a lot of other forms of illegal trade have been. One of the things we know about criminalization and its effects on trades is the more you criminalize, the more you tend to both create more externalized harms in the world, environmental social harms, think about the drug trade. But you introduce more and more dangerous or serious criminal actors. One of the things that this project allowed me to do is to get really up close to this form of illicit activity and illegality. Save one instance that I talk about in the book.
Jared Margulies:I was encountering, like, narcos in relationship to this trade. And and this is why I theorize this idea of the Robin Hood conservationist as a sort of fallible and ultimately failed archetypal figure, especially through the check collector, who sees themselves as engaged in illegal activities but on a higher moral authority. They recognize the law and understand the law, but they see the law as wrong. And they work beyond the law because they think that what they were doing was actually conservation work. I mean, that for me was this huge light bulb moment of like, well, this is fascinating.
Jared Margulies:These people who are being made out by American, Mexican authorities as, like, the number one villain in these stories, they see themselves as real kind of folk heroes. And so I I engaged with the idea of the Robin Hood archetype as a result of that. I wouldn't say I thought I was ever at serious risk. There was riskiness in the work that certainly had its moments of feeling, you know, exciting. Right?
Jared Margulies:Seeing these plants in greenhouses that I knew were basically illicitly taken. But wanting to do that work, again, as a researcher that was respectful and both ensures the anonymity and security of my informants, but took seriously their perspectives that they did not see what they were doing as necessarily wrong even if it was illegal, without trying to suggest that I necessarily agree with that. And this was something I got into complicated conversations with about because they would say, well, if you're encountering illegal activity, don't you need to report it? And I was like, well, that that that actually would be extremely unethical from the perspective of these people are putting trust in me to be able to tell their story. And and one of the reasons I think I found access here was that a lot of these people are people who felt like their version of the story wasn't being told and they wanted that story told.
Jared Margulies:Everyone in the book is anonymous because of the research ethics approvals I had for this work because it engaged with illegal or illicit activities. But a lot of those informants are really frustrated that they're anonymous in the book and wanted their names in the book because they really felt like they had a argument to make, and I wanted to take that seriously. They didn't like how anonymity breeds this idea of wrongdoing. Right? That, like, they needed to be anonymous because what they were doing was wrong, even if it was
Samantha Walton:illegal. I wasn't expecting you to say that. I I thought it was gonna be something to do with the way that these collections have a kind of temporality that exceeds the human life. You know, this idea of the collection is something that is is a way of confronting anxieties about death. Maybe being quoted in a book or having your story told is another way of sort of putting your your voice into the world.
Jared Margulies:Well, there's that too, for sure. And that was part of it. I think a number of collectors saw me as their chronicler. I don't know if, you've seen the TV show Our Flag Means Death, but there's a it's a pirate. It's a pirate show.
Jared Margulies:Anyways, but there's, like, a there's a really grandiose captain and and he he brings on a sort of scribe to sort of follow him around and, you know, write down everything about his adventures. And I think that for a number of the folks that are in the book, especially on the quote unquote cactus explorations, right, I was their scribe.
Samantha Walton:In the book, I mean, there's so much pleasure in the writing. It's very beautifully written. And at some points, I could imagine you in the scribe role, but also you're you're experiencing these things with them, right? You know, you're not just the objective observer, you're not just noting things down, you're also feeling and experiencing joy and rapture of finding a cactus that you thought was completely lost from a habitat, and also feelings of anxiety and dread in seeing cactus being transplanted from one habitat where they're in in peril to another habitat where they're clearly not going to survive, you know. We really feel with you as you tell this story.
Samantha Walton:That's a very Nan Shepherd insight as well, you know, that you're the instrument of your discovering in this book. And I wonder how much it changed you going on these journeys.
Jared Margulies:Yeah. I mean, unambiguously, this research and these plants have changed my life forever in in very material, but also emotional and effective registers. I mean, I do have cacti at home now. And I I just moved, so I my collection of plants is quite small right now, but I have visions. I had to leave my collection of plants that I was gifted to by people in The UK for reasons of regulatory purposes.
Jared Margulies:So I I even called the sort of regulatory body in The UK that's in charge of CITES to find out what it would take. This is the convention on international trade and endangered species, and I think we're not gonna talk too much about it because it gets really boring really quickly. But this is what makes this whole thing illegal or not. So it's in the book. Don't worry.
Jared Margulies:But, you know, I called them, and I was like, yeah. So I have this collection of cacti. I'm moving back to The US. And they were just like, how much do these plants mean to you? Because this is not gonna be cheap and it's not gonna be easy.
Jared Margulies:And I was just like, yeah. Okay. So I gifted them all to friends. And they many of those plants live on now with others, which again, I feel like emplaces me in these emotional relationships. But, yeah.
Jared Margulies:No. I was deeply affected by these plants. I'm a long time mushroom forager, and I realized that, you know, maybe there was less coincidence in me stumbling into this project than I would have liked to admit or the way I frame it in the book. You know, I just happened into this topic. But, like, maybe actually there was a lot that kind of set me up to be writing this book.
Jared Margulies:Like, I think about the fact that I suddenly had this moment a couple of years into the work. So many collectors were, like, pre adolescent, prepubescent stage, like, 11, 12, 13, gifted a cactus by a mother figure, or in the case of the check, sometimes stolen from a mother figure, it turned out. And I suddenly had this memory of of being at the, Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio with my mother, and she bought me my first cactus. And I was like, oh, good lord. Like, it felt so uncomfortable to recognize that memory that had been, I wouldn't say repressed, but just forgot about.
Jared Margulies:Like, I just didn't think of it as meaningful or significant. There's a very funny story about how my brother ultimately threw that cactus out the window in a classic case of both defenestration that speaks to Czech history, but also potentially the castration of my own cactus out the window. He he he swears it never happened, but I know it did.
Samantha Walton:Oh, my goodness. We're getting right into it now, and we're nearly at the end. The psychoanalytic reading of your cactus obsession. Right? That's podcast number two.
Samantha Walton:Spending time with these plants, like, transformed you or, like, allowed you to maybe I don't know. Like, I'm interested in what you learned maybe about care or about anxiety. These are some of the the big themes that come up in the book as well.
Jared Margulies:Yeah. I think a big thing that the book offered me was, there's a robust literature about kind of care and questions of more than human care, and how care extends beyond the the human realm, and how we both are, as humans, composed of many species, but also our understanding of ourself is formed and inflected by other species and our relationships with them. And that that literature on care was really important for me because I realized so much of what I was seeing with these collectors were modes of care and a desire to care. And I think that's also where the unconscious and the sort of psychoanalytic approach comes in, where I was uneasy with the idea of sort of always approaching care as something sort of, you know, fuzzy and warm and benign. And, you know, good theorists of care talk about how, you know, care always also entails certain forms of violence.
Jared Margulies:It doesn't necessarily involve only positive effects on others or effects on ourselves. There's always winners and losers in enactments of care, and there's also a political economy to care. But where psychoanalysis, I think, informs that is is also it's not always such a neat and easy story. Like, so I think there's often a gap in the desire to care. Like, so what was it that these a lot of these collectors are seeking to do in aiming to care for plants in particular ways, but where does that sometimes also fall short?
Jared Margulies:And so I engage with these questions and tensions around desire to thwart extinction or where maybe that desire to care actually isn't always so good for the species that one intends to care for or on behalf of. I learned a lot about care in this process as something that's often ambiguous and uncertain and fraught, But also really important, like, as human creatures, we want to care for others. It's part of what makes, I guess, it worth living in the first place.
Samantha Walton:That would have been a really beautiful note to end on, but I do want to to think of it about readers as well. Yeah, people are going to read this book because they are obsessed with collecting cacti or because they're interested in the regulatory frameworks or because they're interested in the story, I suppose, or interested in the story of desire and what kind of motivates people to become involved in these plants' lives in various ways. So what would you like people to take away from reading this book? Would you people who might be looking for answers about ways to responsibly collect cactus or whether they should just leave them alone altogether?
Jared Margulies:I'm I'll be curious to see how readers respond towards the end of the book and whether they were, like, expecting a blueprint for how to care for cacti well. Folks might be disappointed by that. Pragmatically, I've come to a place of recognizing that deep engagement with these plants and learning to care and care well is both possible, but also something that we should embrace. I don't take some sort of old school preservationist mindset, like, the answer to this story is people shouldn't have cactus collections. Which was an open question to me in in doing this research.
Jared Margulies:Right? Like, is the ethical appropriate response, leave these plants where they are in the world, and if you wanna go see them, go travel to Brazil, but otherwise, like, you shouldn't have a collection of cultivated cacti at home. And I don't think that's the answer. I think, one, it's unrealistic. I think people that become fascinated by these plants are gonna do what they can to get them.
Jared Margulies:Because of the nature of plants, there are ways that this doesn't have to negatively impact the species, and they're flourishing in the world. Like, plants can be propagated. They can be cloned. They can be grown from seed. I think a big question that has to be contended with within the conservation community and the sort of broader community interested in these plants is, what are the systems and institutions and forms of support needed to make sure that people can care well in a way that does not harm these species flourishing in the world?
Jared Margulies:That also attends to the economy of unevenness. Right? Like, why is it that the Dutch continue to be the sort of largest breeders and growers and financially beneficiaries of these plants when, like, there are communities in the world, like, in places like in rural Brazil or Oaxaca or in thinking about succulents, like the succulent Karoo of Northern South Africa, who could really stand to benefit from these plants. And that's the sort of long history of colonialism still at play, and these uneven dynamics of who wins and who loses, and these economic relationships formed by these plants. So what I want to see is a lot more engagement with that, and support for building modes where you should be able to buy a plant if you want that you know in some way maybe is also benefiting the communities who live with these plants, the human communities that live with these plants, rather than just say some sort of large greenhouse in in Europe, who happen to have taken these plants before trade regulations exist during the sort of colonial period.
Jared Margulies:Maybe you're under, you know, modes of imperialism. There's a lot of work that still remains to be done to care well, but a big thing I would want for people to take away is that learning about these plants is an enormous opportunity to sort of find better modes of caring. They aren't just cacti. They have histories. They have botanical histories.
Jared Margulies:They have social histories. But we can also learn a lot about ourselves through caring with these plants. And I think that's great, and I want to encourage that. So I definitely don't take a sort of prohibitionary approach to these things. I don't think it's realistic, and I don't think it actually will instill modes of caring better in the world.
Jared Margulies:I saw the book as kind of a devotional to these plants as I developed effective and emotional relationships with them and the people who care so much about them. I mentioned to you that I have had some people tell me they thought that was the book was rather sad, and I was actually surprised by that. But I guess that'll be for readers to decide.
Samantha Walton:Oh, I can say I definitely didn't find it sad. I found it full of fascinating incident, really wide ranging analysis, the social, political, the cultural, and the legal context for, this movement of plants. It really delves into questions of desire that open up fascinating and uncomfortable, but also really vital spaces to think about gender and sexuality, and what it is that kind of draws us to the living world. It's also full of beautiful pictures of cactus. I mean
Jared Margulies:Thank you. Thank you. I am extremely grateful to the press for letting me put a whole bunch of photos in this book.
Samantha Walton:Go and get your cactus paw on everyone. And, I I can't wait to to see what readers make of it. It's been a real pleasure talking to you about it, Jared.
Jared Margulies:Oh, Sam, thanks so much. It was such a delight talking to you about it. You distilled such nice thoughts out of this book. It makes me very, very happy.
Samantha Walton:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book The Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.