Cactus hunters and the illicit succulent trade.

What inspires desire for plants? In The Cactus Hunters, Jared Margulies takes readers through the intriguing world of succulent collecting, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that sometimes exceed the limits of the law. His globe-spanning journey offers complex insight into the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. Here, Margulies is joined in conversation with Samantha Walton.

Jared Margulies is assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. Margulies is author of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade.

Samantha Walton is professor of modern literature at Bath Spa University in England. Walton is author of Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Nan Shepherd

The Detectorists (British comedy series)

Sheffield Branch of the British Cactus and Succulent Society

Cactus and Succulent Society of America

Jacques Lacan

Sigmund Freud

Hannah Dickinson

Paul Kingsbury

Anna Secor

Lucas Pohl

Robert Fletcher / Failing Forward

Alberto Vojtech Frič

Locations discussed:

England

Brazil

Czech Republic

Mexico

The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade is available from University of Minnesota Press.

"This book offers a powerful example of the value of close attention to the entangled lives of plants and their people."
—Thom van Dooren, author of A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

"A deeply felt and nuanced reckoning with desire as a structurally produced and world-making force—a unique and major contribution to political ecology."
—Rosemary Collard, author of Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade