The Cactus Hunters

Jared Margulies, author of The Cactus Hunters, doing field work.

It was reading an article about the illegal poaching of Saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert in the US that led Jared Margulies to start a research project back in 2016. He’d never heard of the illegal wildlife trading of cacti, he’d never thought about the stealing of plants or the illegal trade in plants and he became fascinated by this world that he didn’t know existed. As a researcher, he realised that he could find very little work on what was motivating this illegal trade - which led him to a lightbulb moment that maybe there was an interesting set of questions to ask here. Seeking the answers to those questions has led him to travel all over the world and resulted in a book called The Cactus Hunters. (For American listeners here is the link to buy the book in the States.)

I came across Jared’s work when I was doing the research for Lindy’s plant story about her cactus that always bloomed during Wimbledon week. You can hear that episode here. When I was researching a previous episode about Spider plants, I had heard a little bit about plant poaching in South Africa and if you listen to this episode about Jared’s work you will hear that that is where he is heading next. It seems the demand and supply for these plants stolen from the wild moves as desires and fashions change.

If you want to read more about the Dudleya in California there’s an interesting Guardian article here.

I do hope we will return to cacti in a future episode as it feels like there is so much to learn about these extraordinary plants. In the meantime if you want to look for more information about cacti, including events, you might want to look on the website of the British Cacti and Succulent Society.

Below are photos of the California coast featuring Dudleya farinose and Dudleya pachyphytum in a greenhouse in South Korea.

As always you can support this podcast via buy me a coffee - it really does make my day when people do this - showing they enjoy listening and want more plant stories!

Transcript

Welcome to our plant stories. In the previous episode we heard about a house plant famed for blooming every year during Wimbledon week that for its owner bears the name Sally's cactus in memory of the woman who gave the original stem cutting to her mum many years ago. I confess I know very little about cacti but the point of this podcast is to learn about plants from experts, and so often as I research the plant story, I come across another fascinating story about that plant. And so it is with cacti.

Initially, the law enforcement agencies didn't even know what to really sort of charge these people with. You know, I think what it signals is just how little attention is played to forms of plant crime.

And what was the plant crime in this case? Stealing cacti from California. Let me introduce you to Jared Margulies, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Alabama, and the author of a book called The Cactus Hunters. And it was the stealing of cacti that set him on the research path that led to this book.

I came across an article on saguaro poaching or saguaro rustling in the Sonoran desert of the U.S. and I found myself just really intrigued that I had never heard about such a thing as you know illegal wildlife trading cacti. I had never thought about the stealing of plants or illegal trade in plants at all but I also certainly hadn't thought about it as a kind of wildlife trade. And so I don't know, I became really fascinated by this world I didn't know that existed. But as a researcher, I started looking more and more into it. And one thing that I couldn't find was actually very rigorous research on what was motivating this kind of illegal wildlife trade. And of course, that was a sort of light bulb moment of saying, well, maybe there's an interesting set of questions to ask here. And that was back in 2017. 2016, yeah, 2016, 2017. And so it's been a few years now.

What are the threats to cacti as you see it?

Yeah, there's multiple. And I think some kind of passionate collectors have been maybe less thrilled with my book because it focuses in particular on this issue of trade and illegal wildlife trade and poaching or collector desires, but you know like a lot of species around the world, climate change and habitat destruction, habitat degradation, urbanization, all of the kinds of things that threaten lots and lots of species around the world threaten cacti. Habitat destruction is certainly the biggest. And climate change is increasingly not so far behind, probably. the outlook for a lot of cacti because of climate change is not great. And as I mentioned in the book, and will be a surprise to a lot of people, I think, is cacti, and specifically we're talking about the cactus family, it's about 1,500 species of plants, are actually one of the most threatened taxa of life on the planet, inclusive of animals. So this is a really threatened group of plants, which is striking to think about, given how universally adored and familiar people are with them. And, but yeah, but in addition to that, illegal wildlife trade does threaten cacti. It doesn't threaten all cacti though, because within the sort of broad sweep of plants that fall into the cactus family, it's a more limited set of cacti that really seem to incite collector desires. So for instance, there are certain cacti that grow really, really massive. And so the... you know, conditions in which to be able to grow certain cacti are limited by space. So, you know, it's oftentimes the smaller cacti that, you know, can live for decades in a small pot on a greenhouse shelf that are more likely to sort of, um, be highly popular in the kind of collector or horticultural trade. Um, certain cacti are also just much, much harder to keep alive in greenhouses and in places outside of their habitat. Discocactus are actually a good example of that. They're, they're quite challenging in, in sort of collectors who are able to grow them well are really respected by their peers because they're not the easiest cactus to keep alive. You know, I think a lot of times people imagine that cacti are these plants that are impossible to kill and that's what attracts a lot of people to buying them. And there are certainly some species of cacti that seem to thrive under a kind of caring neglect. But there's others that are pretty particular about their needs. You know, some cacti are really desired because of their shape and size and color, or especially their flowers. You know, a lot of people don't realize just how stunning cactus flowers are, whether it's like a crown of flowers at the top of a cactus or, you know, like a discocactus, these big white stunning blooms. But for other people, it's about provenance and data about where they came from, like, is it just a naturally rare plant, meaning that if you have one, it's less likely that other people will. Or is it a plant that is really desired because it only grows in a really small locality?

In terms of doing the research, which led to the book, who did you talk to?

I talked to lots of different kinds of people. The project involved spending time with and talking to just sort of passionate to everyday cactus and succulent collectors, which doesn't necessarily involve anything illegal. And so, you know, This involved, for instance, joining a chapter of the British Cactus and Succulent Society and attending cactus club meetings. But it also meant attending expos and conventions. But it also meant I spent a lot of time talking to botanists and conservationists and even law enforcement officials and environmental and conservation nonprofit organizations. It also meant talking to government officials related to CITES. So. management and scientific authority members in countries like the US and in Mexico and in Korea. And so it was really diverse in terms of the kinds of people I was spending time with.

So I sense in your research, there are people who see themselves as conservationists, you mentioned the term kind of Robin Hood in there, and then there are what we would describe as a criminal element. to the process of actually stealing these cacti to sell and make money from. Can you explain a bit about those two different groups as you see them?

Yeah, one of the kinds of goals from my book was to try to develop a more nuanced and meaningful conversation between people who see themselves on the side of conservation and how many conservationists see the collector or amateur enthusiast community as not in that group of people. and in particular when that crosses questions of illegality or illicitness. And so one of the things I argue in the book is for this category of person I call the Robin Hood conservationist. And these are often people who are really passionate about cacti and succulents, but whose passions may also exceed the limits of law, but oftentimes will argue that they engage in forms of illegal trade in the name of doing conservation work. Now this is a very particular kind of conservation work. And obviously lots of people in conservation don't see it as conservation work at all. They actually just see it as criminal behavior. But the argument basically here is that within the sort of collector community, there are these insatiable desires to obtain the ability to grow different species and that collectors are gonna do no matter what they have to do to get those species, which could include things like wild poaching of plants. And so in order to try to subvert that sort of wild poaching of plants, these are people who will go out and actively maybe take seeds or cutting or a few wild harvested plants and then try to propagate them and grow them en masse in order to do what they would see as quote unquote flooding the market. So getting this material out to collectors who really desire it. Now, this oftentimes is happening completely outside the limits of law. It's not happening with CITES paperwork or permits or export permits. And so it's illegal. And so understandably sort of mainstream conservationists or those tasked with enforcing the law see these people as just criminals. So it's not my place in the book to sort of just cast judgment on whether that's right or wrong per se, but to say, I think it opens up an interesting opportunity to think about what is it that we mean when we talk about conservation? What is the actual work of saving species involved? And are there ways of sort of bridging the gap between these what seem like very different communities who sort of cast one another as both heroes or villains? And yet the actual reality maybe is a lot murkier.

And the other group, the more criminal organized networks?

That's different. So the second half of my book focuses on this particular case of Dudleya. So Dudleya is a genus of succulents from mostly from the west coast of the United States and Mexico, but especially this emergent case of widespread Dudleya farinosa poaching in California. And so There we had a much smaller group of actors who basically had professionalized illegal wildlife trade. So this was a sort of operation in which thousands of plants were being poached from the California landscape. They were being laundered into sort of licit legal transit internationally. And then they were sort of being sold wholesale onto other retailers who would then sell them onto collectors. And so we saw here a kind of scale of commercialization, which is different, I would argue, ways that maybe individual collectors go out on trips and engage in a form of illegal wildlife trade, largely for their personal benefit. And so it was important to try to disentangle and understand those as different kinds of trades.

How do they actually do it, Jared? I mean, surely it's noticed, someone sees it, if you're literally going and stealing hundreds of plants.

Oh yeah, or in cases, thousands. And I think that was what was so striking to me about this. So I was at a workshop with botanists and scientists in Mexico, when I heard about this, a botanist from California told me about this thing happening with Dudleya and really encouraged me to go to California and spend some time there. And so I did, I spent about a month in California doing interviews up and down the coast and trying to understand it. And this trade totally took the California Department of Fish and Wildlife by surprise. Abalone harvesting, illegal abalone harvesting is a big issue or has been a big issue in California. And so oftentimes when these people were out on these cliffs, so Dudley and grow on the sort of cliffs facing the Pacific Ocean, they were wrongfully thought to be abalone poachers. And so initially the law enforcement agencies didn't even know what to really sort of charge these people with, which was interesting too. little attention is played to forms of plant crime. So illegal wildlife trades or other kinds of wildlife crimes and how rarely we give attention or law enforcement prioritizes plants. And that was certainly the case in California. I mean, what's remarkable now is it's now a felony to take Dudleya from public lands in California. But at the time this was happening and it was likely happening for years, largely going unnoticed. I think that tells us more about human culture. or some human cultures and sort of our disinterest historically in plants than maybe anything else because by and large it was kind of happening out in the open. Now, how those plants then got out of the country happened in different ways. So sometimes that involved people putting them in post office boxes and just shipping them out of US postal offices and just lying about what the contents contained. But the kind of most spectacular example, and this was the sort of really big bust involving this one actor, Byungsu Kim, in California, where he was actually going and getting USDA legal export paperwork for these plants. But what he said was that these were cultivated plants from a greenhouse rather than wild harvested because that would have been illegal. And so he had he had legitimate export paperwork. And so his export of these plants happened completely above board. It was just that he was lying about the origin of the plants. Now I have a lot of questions about how he got that paperwork. It seems to me it would have been extremely obvious that these were not greenhouse cultivated plants. I think there's a lot of questions that need to be asked at the USDA about how that occurred. But but pretty bold, we could say, for sure, in terms of the operation.

Where were these plants actually destined for?

So initially these plants were destined for greenhouses in Korea. So the act, the primary actor, Byungsu Kim, not only had access to greenhouses in California, but also greenhouses in Korea. But the story got more interesting from there because I eventually went to Korea to try to better understand this trade. And... most people understandably in the US presume that, well, if the plants are being imported into Korea, that's where the primary market is. But in fact, what I found and has been written about is that a lot of this trade was actually much more international. So a lot of the demand was also still in East Asia, in places like China, and to a lesser extent, maybe Japan. But it was also even more global than that. And so these were plants that were being imported into Korea, being kind of grown out in sort of... you know, because that's that kind of transit is quite stressful for plants. But once they got nice looking, you know, they were being sold all over the world. And so this was really a very cosmopolitan, multi multinodal kind of illegal wildlife trade.

And were they being sold for large sums of money or was it more the volume of plants they had that they could sell them for less if you see what I mean but still make a lot of money from them?

Yeah you know I think it depends on your perspective about what a lot of money means in the world of succulents. There were certainly some examples especially the Dudleya pachyphytum which is a species from an island off the coast of California in Mexico where you had some really large mature plants that were being sold for a lot of money you know like thousands if not even potentially tens of But with this large influx of Dudleya farinosa, my research suggested that pretty quickly the price crashed. So where initially some of these plants may have been sold for a couple hundred dollars, US dollars, those prices were quickly dropping to $30 or $40 for a decent plant. And a lot of these plants are being cultivated and grown now artificially in Korea and China and elsewhere as well. So that has also sort of affected the prices. But there was definitely a moment where these were very, very popular and they were selling for a lot of money. But, you know, like a lot of trades where fashions and fads move in and out of quickly, but also supply changes rapidly. You know, we saw a lot of fluctuation in those prices.

Why do you think it is that we have this kind of, what would you call it? Would you call it disregard? Would you call it our own ignorance of these things going on? Or we just don't notice, what is it? We just don't notice it happening?

It's a good question. Some people have made this argument about the idea of plant blindness, which I think has really made the rounds. And so a lot of people will be familiar with it. This idea that especially within Western cultures, there's a sort of general sense that we're much more aware and concerned about animal life compared to plant life and that we don't sort of notice plants as living organisms as much because they sort of paint a backdrop for a livelier animal and human world. That's not universal. There are plenty of cultures in the world where that's not the case, but certainly in the kind of modern contemporary context of, you know, I think that... there's a certain way in which that feels correct. We don't talk that much about plant welfare, for instance, compared to animal welfare. And there's good reasons for that in terms of our scientific understanding of how plants may or may not feel pain. That's quite different than how animals suffer, for instance, in illegal wildlife trade. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But so I think that in general, there's just been less concern about plants for a long time. And so I think that when there's less concern, there's a cascade of effects, right? So one is, capacity. So, you know, in terms of the hierarchy of concerns at Customs and Border Patrol and law enforcement involved in, you know, international trade, illegal plant trade ranks pretty low in comparison to say the importation of weapons or drugs or you know, even things like, you know, human trafficking or animal trafficking, right? And so, you know, by the time you get to thinking about plants in the fact that you know, How is it that we could expect customs officials to be familiar with thousands and thousands of different species and be able to tell whether or not a plant is cultivated and grown in a greenhouse or whether it was wild harvested and poached. So there's an educational component there as well. But I do think a lot of it comes down to these basic questions about concern and care for non-human life.

So what's next for you? You've written this book. Are you still on the trail of cacti?

Yeah, a little bit. I mean, it's shifted a little bit. I have a new project with colleagues at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and also in South Korea. And we just got a grant from the UK, actually the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, to look at sort of transnational succulent trade and poaching from South Africa. Unfortunately, right now we're seeing huge issues around illegal trade in South African succulents, both of geophytes or bulb species, but also, you know, more... familiar succulents like Conophytum and Lithops and Avonias. And this is really sad. It involves, for instance, more issues around kind of radical inequality and poverty as well. And so we're trying to think about more pragmatically sustainable alternatives to these trades and how to sort of, how is it that these plants can actually benefit the communities from which they are derived? So that's one project I'm working on. I'm working on another project right now funded by the National Geographic Society on Venus trade and poaching. Everyone knows the Venus flytrap, but actually they are from a really limited and endemic range in North Carolina and South Carolina. And then I've got a new project I'm working on songbird trade now as well. And so the illegal wildlife trade definitely has got its claws in me. And so for the time being, that's going to be sort of where I continue to put my time and efforts.

Can I ask you one final question? Do you have any cacti on your own house?

Yeah, they're sitting right behind me right now. I don't have a huge collection right now. When I was doing this research in the UK, I have to say, because collectors are such generous people and they always have too many plants. So every time I did an interview with a collector, they always would send me home with plants. And whenever I left cactus in succulent society meetings, I would invariably be sort of too tempted and end up buying a cactus. These were always artificially propagated. But by the time I was finishing this work in the UK and moving back to the US, I probably had 40 cacti living on my windowsill. But because of CITES, I ended up just giving them all away to friends. So they all still, I think some of them have died, but a lot of them continue to live on with friends, which is really nice because it's like in terms of things we've talked about earlier as well before this interview. It's nice to sort of have those plants carry on and those are people who also will send me photos when they flower and say that they're thinking of me and things like that. But right now I only have a couple. A number of Opuntia. I've become really interested also in collecting cacti that are named for some of the people who I sort of interface with or historical figures who came up time and again in my research while I was writing this book. And so in certain ways I have a very kind of historical kind of collection. But once I, I'd like, I have dreams post tenure of building a little greenhouse, and I'd love to sort of slowly build up a cactus collection again.

I wonder if there are some people in the UK who have a cactus on the shelf at home or in their office which they referred to as Jared's cactus, which would bring us full circle to Sally's cactus. Jared’s book again is called The Cactus Hunters. I hope we will return to these extraordinary plants in a future episode because there is clearly so much to learn. So if you're listening and think, I have a cacti story, do get in touch. I'm starting to plan series three for next year.

Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.