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

By Jared D. Margulies; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023; 392 pages, $24.95.

Reviewed by Anjulie Rao

Some years ago, a friend handed me a potted cactus. I wasn’t aware of the genus or species, only that it looked like a quintessential cactus: seven inches tall and deep forest green, its ribs dotted with malicious, symmetrical spikes. Though he had cared for it over the years, he no longer wanted this particular cactus. Looking around his home, I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that it was filled with succulents of many varieties, shapes, and conditions of health. It seemed that his minor obsession was similar to one that had overtaken my thirtysomething peers’ homes. There were succulents everywhere: Senecio rowleyanus, or string of pearls, hanging from macramé-covered pots in the bay windows of Chicago two-flats; aeoniums in vibrant pinks and greens; pincushions tucked into windowsills, looking soft and dangerous. 

The peculiar psychology of collecting these plants is the focus of The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade by Jared D. Margulies, an assistant professor of political ecology at the University of Alabama. Throughout the book’s richly descriptive eight chapters, Margulies recounts his global travels to document, interview, and work alongside prominent cactus collectors—some botanists, others longtime hobbyists. But these are not the everyday collectors employing succulents as decor. Instead, these collectors visit remote places in South and Latin America, and they erect greenhouses, tending to their collections meticulously by crafting elaborate environs that mimic each specimen’s original habitat.

Importantly, the book also characterizes the act of collecting living nonhuman beings in a psychosociological context, raising issues of overextraction, commodification, and extinction through the lens of desire. And it is, perhaps, this willful tug of desire that separates collectors from landscape architects, whose livelihoods are shaped by plant knowledge and care. Margulies’s narrative jumps between people who practice collecting to intimate case studies of particular cacti in their natural (or human-made) habitats. The structure is intentional —noting that one of his interviewees calls such cactus collectors “plant-people,” Margulies writes that one way to think about this book is as a “dedication to that hyphen: what both connects and separates the collector from the plants that serve as objects of desire.” Beyond the ethnographic interviews with collectors and the vivid profiles of the specimens they hunt, he uses the concept of desire to paint a broader narrative about how the practice of conservation is fueled by human emotion. The author elucidates the interconnectedness between human feelings and the precarity of nonhuman life with precision that speaks to more than just cacti but also encompasses how we might use those connections to address our collapsing global ecosystem.

Margulies paints a (thankfully) clear picture of desire as defined by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Desire, according to Lacan, is characterized by lack—we, humans, are in a perpetual spiral, chasing the “Thing” that we lack. We attempt to obtain that “Thing” through behaviors or parasocial relationships to people or objects. But, of course, those behaviors never fulfill, producing what Lacan calls jouissance—an ache, a painful pleasure produced in our failure to find satisfaction. Repetition of failure, writes Margulies, is a type of pleasure. Collecting, then, represents a repeated failure to obtain what we lack, propelled by desire.

This definition of desire returns throughout Cactus Hunters, but it is notable how Margulies frames care as both an act and a capacity to affect and be affected by others. Citing the scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, he writes, “a politics of care engages much more than a moral stance; it involves affective, ethical, and hands-on agencies of practical and material consequence.” The author combines these concepts of desire and care with his observations of cactus collectors. In a survey of primarily United States and United Kingdom–based cactus collectors, he found that 86 percent identified as white, 62 percent identified as male, and more than 70 percent were over 50 years of age. This data colors the affective relationships between collectors and plants, especially throughout his first chapter, “On Collecting and Caring for Cacti.” In a section brilliantly titled “Men, Their Cacti, and Feelings,” Margulies takes note of how these male collectors speak of their cactus obsessions; outside the more obvious phallic or breast shapes associated with cacti and the corresponding psychoanalytic meanings therein, caring for such spiny, hardy creatures rewards their caregivers with flowering buds.

“The current association of cacti with masculine qualities is suspended in these briefer moments in which many cacti will suddenly become adorned with a veritable crown of flowers…. That some collectors likened themselves to their cacti through these moments in which tough-looking plants revealed their ‘feminine side’ was a window into understanding how collectors imbued their plants with meanings of the self and their navigation of prescribed gendered norms,” he writes.

Cacti help collectors attain a clearer understanding of their own masculinity. But there are other inherent qualities of these plants that lend toward desire; for some collectors, caring for a gifted cactus acts as a proxy for their relationship with the gift-giver. Margulies interviews collectors who received cacti from grandparents—cacti can live a long time with proper care—and keeping those cacti alive is a way of keeping those loved ones alive, too.

The book descends into the darker side of collecting in chapter 3. “Illicit Encounters with Succulent Collectors” opens with an excursion to Brazil to find Uebelmannia buiningii, a rare cactus species that has been placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The author says that unlike other species that are threatened by deforestation or urbanization, U. buiningii is threatened because of overcollection for international trade.

While on that trip, Margulies’s cacto-explorer group struggles to locate a U. buiningii specimen until the author himself spots one in the distance. He reflects poignantly on that discovery—what some of us might understand as “giddiness” he interprets through Lacanian sublime, a sensation similar to enacting desire but at a much greater magnitude that leaves “an excess of jouissance in its wake,” he writes. Citing the theorist Karen Barad, Margulies describes how this sensation can also be characterized by “intra-action”—the interaction between beings is how new “categories of knowing emerge and agencies are enacted.”

This is where the book introduces one of the main tensions in collecting: extraction versus protection. Some collectors, knowing how endangered a rare specimen is, might extract it from its habitat for conservation purposes. In Cactus Hunters, this tension serves to introduce the complexity inherent in illegal and illicit trajectories of cactus collection.

While Margulies attributes much to desire, its fulfillment is mediated through legal structures such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the IUCN lists, laws, and recommendations. The rarer the species of cactus—or any nonhuman species—the greater the demand for it in collections, entwining market forces with desire. Taxonomy contributes to desire, argues Margulies, as recategorization of cactus species occurs within Linnaean hierarchical classifications. A collector might create a “discovery” by “renaming” a species to produce rarity or emphasize the need for protection. In that respect, taxonomy “produces opportunities to render life-forms as novel commodities, a flourishing of objects onto which desires might ‘hook’ wherever they can,” he writes.

This presents ethical conundrums for collectors, whose choices to “steal” a cactus from its habitat can operate under the guise of protection from endangerment; those collectors purchasing rare specimens (even those succulents rendered rare through taxonomic reclassifications) contribute to the narrowing of the in situ species. Margulies expands his earlier discussion to include extinction anxieties and their roots in historic European cactus collecting.

Alberto Vojtěch Frič, a Czech botanist and explorer, began his cactus collection as a teenager, and later became a renowned collector of both cacti and artifacts from rapidly disappearing tribes in Brazil. He traveled to South America extensively, returning to Europe to sell cactus species and to give lectures on his expeditions to European audiences. Frič also sold cultural artifacts, particularly to German museums—an irony that, the author writes, shouldn’t be lost on us: The Germans, like other European groups purchasing these antiquities under the guise of preservation, were actively involved in the decimation of Indigenous groups through colonization.

In this way, Margulies argues that colonization and narratives of racial superiority are baked into the history of cactus collecting and conservation. “Stealing” a species is fundamentally wrapped up in ideas of who might best care for such an endangered plant. Scarcity breeds desire, but both scarcity and desire are wrapped in preservation and colonist ideologies. When confronted with extinction, these convergences become amplified. “[E]xtinction, as a profound loss of being, serves an important role in structuring how desires for flourishing life can, in a psychic twist, be transformed into acts of possession through the production of desire,” Margulies writes. Turning back to Lacan, endangerment presents a real possibility that we can no longer desire what potentially no longer exists.

Conservation of a cactus species is an act of care spurred by anxiety. It moves these collectors to behave against international laws in the name of care, but those acts are not necessarily extricable from capitalization—individual collectors, who will spend money purchasing a novel species, or, in the case of the book’s final chapters, an organized ring of harvesters who “steal” cacti to cultivate and sell en masse. Margulies spends the final chapters moving through a case study in which the tension between extinction, legality, commodity, and desire plays a role in the illicit harvesting of cacti. Margulies traveled from the misty sea cliffs of Northern California to South Korea to track a group of illicit South Korean cactus harvesters armed with rock climbing gear in search of the species Dudleya farinosa. Though not endangered, thousands of this species were removed from their native habitats on the rocky cliffs and shipped to South Korea. Chased by local police and prosecuted under increasingly broad local and federal laws, these collectors baffled Margulies in their death-defying hunt for a common cactus you can buy at Home Depot for $10.

I won’t give away the ending, which provides a unique look into the ways that cultural fetishisms interplay with desire, commodity, and the law. But I can say that landscape architects should find delight in this book—particularly in how it weaves together tales of plant hunting with nuanced psychoanalysis. But Cactus Hunters transcends collectors and politics; it’s a book, ultimately, about how we wrestle with ecological loss. Understanding desire and how we act upon our desires illuminates much about our growing anxieties about climate change and collapse.

This is particularly true when presented with global species extinctions—a 2019 United Nations report stated that one million of the estimated eight million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction: The list of birds, mammals, and insects already lost colors our collective fears. While we may believe that the desire to capture and preserve these living creatures is connected to their protection, Margulies invites readers to complicate this understanding by instead considering what it means for a community, environment, or ecosystem to flourish.

“Flourishing geographies are spaces where life is afforded the possibility for becoming in an ever-changing and dynamic world, where an individual, a community, or a species can thrive across the distinctive (and, for plants, multiple) temporalities of life they inhabit,” he writes. While desire can be driven by capitalism’s impetus to consume, enabling flourishing can free yearning humans from the belief that desire is inherently toxic, and instead prompt us to “a reckoning with what sets desire in motion.” The author doesn’t deny readers the ability to feel desire; instead he asks us to act ethically upon it. Doing so, we grow our ability to care for a greater diversity of human and nonhuman species; we are able to more acutely evaluate what drives us to protect and to consume.

As for my cactus, it died. The friend who gifted it to me moved away and our friendship drifted apart. Over the years, it never grew or changed much, until one day, it collapsed. The once-verdant, spiny creature now looked like a hunk of styrofoam left in the rain. Obviously, I didn’t tend to it properly considering it was thousands of miles removed from its natural habitat, but perhaps it was a transference of my heartbreak over a lost friendship that rendered the cactus a victim of this loss. It’s a small reminder that contemporary ecosystems aren’t just defined by creatures, weather patterns, or climate existing within them. Care and its affective politics can weave together disparate entities toward an all-encompassing flourishing.

Anjulie Rao is a journalist and critic covering the built environment.