The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade

Margulies, a political ecology professor at the University of Alabama, debuts with an esoteric deep dive into the illegal cactus trade. “About one-third of all approximately fifteen hundred cactus species are threatened with extinction” from overcollecting and climate change, Margulies notes, exploring why “people who are so passionate about these plants” are willing to “seemingly love them to extinction.” Drawing on the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Margulies suggests that succulent collectors are driven by an insatiable desire to fill a “lack [that] can never be truly satisfied.” Interviews with collectors illustrate how they imbue the plants with symbolic meaning; for example, a British gardener searching for rare cacti in Brazil observes that receiving a plant as a gift from someone can serve “as a memory of them when they pass.” Margulies also examines the illegal trade network that has developed around the endangered D. pachyphytum, describing how poachers in California take the plants from the wild and sell them to retailers in South Korea. Unfortunately, Margulies explains the plant’s appeal to the South Korean market with a characteristically opaque Lacanian discussion of their “cuteness” and “hypercommodification,” one of many difficult-to-follow passages that arguably offer more insight into the French theorist’s ideas than succulents. The result is an odd amalgam of psychoanalysis and ecology. Photos. (Nov.)