Jared Margulies: Succulent collection and extinction from the illicit trade (ep417)
“What we’re talking about are plants that people desire for ornamental collection and will oftentimes go to great lengths to get them. Sometimes, that desire leads to conservation problems, and sadly… in the worst-case scenario, the extinction of an entire species.”
Where does cacti and succulent life fit within the realm of illegal/illicit wildlife trade? What conversations might arise when we include them in a wider picture of political ecology and colonial histories? And how might the entanglement of desire, care, and conservation complicate trends of in-vogue succulent and cacti collecting?
Join us in this episode with our guest Jared Margulies, author of The Cactus Hunters, as we delve into prickly themes of globalized trade networks, desire, and preservation.
About our guest:
Jared Margulies is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. His work engages across more-than-human geographies, political ecology, and the geohumanities. Jared's first book, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade, will be published in November 2023 by University of Minnesota Press.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by anisa sima hawley.
Dive deeper:
The Cactus Hunters, a book by Jared Margulies
The Sounds of Life, a book by Karen Bakker
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jared Margulies: One thing I'll just say quickly is that I'm gonna talk a lot about cacti and succulents, but they're not the same thing. So cacti are an actual taxonomic family of plants. There are about 1,500 species of cacti. They're all genetically and evolutionarily related to one another. And then succulents, though, is a sort of much broader category. It's actually about a trait that a lot of different kinds of plants across the tree of life have. This is about 12,000 different species around the world.
That's simply a term that means that plants have evolved a particular set of traits that make them able to kind of continue metabolism and live in the absence of water in the ground. So this is often plants that, you know, for instance, store water in their tissue, which is why they're succulent. All cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. People have one of these plants for a long, long time. It's not a suddenly new problem.
And certainly, especially with cacti and succulents, as popular as they are right now, this isn't the first time. You know, for instance, in the Victorian period, these were also really popular plants. They were also really popular in the mid 20th century. So like any sort of kind of fashion, things move in and out of fashion, just like there was a tulip mania in Europe in the 1600s or the sort of orchid delirium of the Victorian period in the UK. So what has changed in part is again the presence of those rules saying whether or not it's acceptable, for instance, to take a plant from say Chile or Peru and take it out of the ground and ship it around the world or bring it back to your personal collection in Europe. And there are rules now in place that prohibit that when it impacts the species conservation.
A lot of what we're talking about are plants that people desire for ornamental collection and will oftentimes go to great lengths to get them. Sometimes, that desire leads to conservation problems, and sadly… in the worst-case scenario, the extinction of an entire species.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this backdrop. We have been entering into what many call the sixth mass extinction, and evidently succulents and cacti are no exception to this. How would you paint an overview of the status of cacti and succulents in terms of their diversity and presence in their habitats, and how much has the illicit or illegal succulent trade played into their plight?
Jared Margulies: So cacti are not doing great, we should say.
The best science we have on this suggests that around 75% of all cacti are currently threatened with some degree of endangerment and the threat of extinction.
There are different reasons for this. Some are land use change, urbanization, agricultural development, the kind of usual suspects, but climate change, like a lot of things, like plants and other species, looms large in terms of the threat. Again, a lot of these plants are living in arid ecosystems and in deserts. And a lot of these are places that map really tightly onto areas of the world that we expect some of the most severe impacts from climate change. But on top of it, you also have the problem of a legal collection for ornamental trade in personal collections. So bring these all together and there's a lot of species of cacti that are facing fairly dire straits. Within the broader grouping of succulents, you know, it's harder to say because there's so many different ones and where all cacti are only originally from the Western Hemisphere, succulents are found across the globe.
So for instance, right now we're seeing major issues with illegal succulent harvesting in say, Southern Africa and also in Eastern Africa. Largely this has to do with sort of changing popularities and aesthetic tastes and what kinds of plants are really popular within the ornamental trade. But a lot of those species that right now we're seeing are being really, really heavily hit by illegal harvesting. And some of those species have actually already been harvested to extinction in the wild, unfortunately.
Kamea Chayne: And it doesn't help that I feel like many people largely see deserts as these barren and lifeless Landscapes right like landscapes that aren't productive terrains that don't have inherent value of their own so on the one hand quote-unquote more fertile lands might be converted for extractive purposes for monocultures of production but on the other hand terrains that are deemed quote unquote, not as valuable or fertile might also be overlooked in terms of the diverse ecology that are also present and need to be protected.
Jared Margulies: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's devastating when I see literary allusions in, like, for instance, fiction or in journalism, where people talk about deserts as these dead spaces or empty spaces. I mean, if you've ever spent time in a lot of deserts, I mean, they're anything but that. My goodness, the Sonoran Desert is so lush and green so much of the year, actually, but also home to so many incredible species that have evolved slowly over time to survive in these extreme climates. Yeah, absolutely.
I think that [deserts] are often overlooked in terms of their protected status, but also just general conservation focus.
So yeah, no, I mean, I agree entirely, and I wish people looked at deserts very differently.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, a lot of people encounter succulents in kind of de-contextualized spaces such as plant stores or ornamental settings that they were transplanted into and not necessarily in their original communities and habitats. Can you share more about what you've thought through in terms of how human desire and demand relate to commodification in our extractive economies, which maybe lead to this divergence between someone's love and passion for something from a broader interest in protecting their general well-being. Because one might presume that if people prize and value succulents so much to want to pay such a premium on it, that they might also have an inherent motivation to support their protection and proliferation. Or is part of the disconnect there the knowledge that rarity renders something even more valuable?
Jared Margulies: Well, that's the mystery, right? I mean, so this is the mystery that kind of set me off on writing this book in the sense that I was so perplexed by the fact that you have these people, as you said, who are so passionate and care so much. And I do mean care. I really saw a lot of care and love for species in this research.
Yet that a desire to care, desire to love, and desire manifested in the form of possession could lead toward species extinction is certainly a paradox, if not a deep irony or a contradiction.
And so that's really what set me off in thinking about this work. I don't come from a training in my work as a political ecologist where I normally thought about desire. I was trained to think about issues of the economy and certainly the economy was a big part of the story. But in sort of searching for intellectual frameworks to understand these problems, I felt like I was coming up lacking in a way to really understand what was going on here, which is why the book takes this turn towards thinking pretty seriously, I think, about desire. Because what I saw was a whole lot of desire, but that desire could lead towards all different kinds of activities. In some of those activities, probably did a lot of good for plants, you know, conservation work, work to sustainably cultivate and propagate species so that people who want them in their collections can get them, but get them in a way that doesn't harm wild plants out in habitats. But also desires that really didn't think about plants within a situated ecology and desires that led towards, you know, issues of illegal harvesting or what often people think about as poaching.
That can do real harm, you know, and so I saw a lot of that in on a trip recently this past year in South Africa. I don't write in the book about South Africa, but that's some of the more ongoing work that I've been doing now with other collaborators. And so, you know, desire was a really important part of this story and trying to see how desires led people to want to obtain these plants at all cost. But as you mentioned, thinking about it within the modern capitalist economy, how brilliantly capitalism as an economic form latches onto our desires. And specifically here, I'm thinking about the fact that under capitalism, we're so, we're repeatedly presented with the new object that might grab our attention. And we might imagine holds the key to satisfying our desires. And even though we all know that like, the minute you get that new thing, we realize that the fantasy is gone in the sense that, oh, you know, it doesn't actually satisfy you on this deeper level as a human being, we still seem to repeat the same activity over and over and over again of looking for the next new thing that might kind of fill the void, so to speak.
And so you see this in plant collecting too, this desire that leads us over and over and over again towards the next new thing. And this is, you know, you see it especially like if there's a new species described or like something new hits the market that everybody wants. You know, we saw this in the pandemic. I've been thinking a lot about the sort of like aeroid craze for folks who are listening, who are like houseplant people, they'll know what I'm talking about, but like the variegated monstera albo, like people were selling single leaves of this one monstera cutting for like thousands of dollars. You know, it was a total hysteria. And of course those hysterias end. And they crash and then you suddenly realize that all you actually have is a plant that you spent an enormous amount of money on that was entirely unnecessary. So I don't know if you feel like I'm getting at what you're asking.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and that does feel a lot like fashion trends and how that whole world operates as well, so it's interesting to draw that connection. I'm also interested in thinking through the nuance of collecting because there are different approaches and intentions that undergird the act of collecting and keepsaking. So what feels important for you to highlight when it comes to the idea of how collecting as artifacts can deaden and objectify and how cacti collection are different too, given their unique temporality of life. And then, yeah, I guess if it feels relevant, like maybe alternate relationships to collecting that you've come across from different cultures that might not collect to commodify or objectify per se, but with other intentions.
Jared Margulies: Yeah, it's a really fun question to think about. I'm glad you asked it. Yeah. So basically, I keep the more I talk to people about my book, the more I realize it's just the whole process of researching the book, but writing it is one about me exploring the surprises I kind of just continue to encounter along the way. One of which was having to read a lot about psychologies of collecting. Why do people collect, understanding collecting as a sort of benign behavior in the world, like most, it's extremely popular. I think rough estimates suggest about a third of, for instance, people living in North America today have some kind of collection as adults.
It's really popular for children. Oftentimes people, I had a rock collection as a kid, and then I had a stamp collection, and then I stopped. But some people keep going, or some people return to them later in life. And as you mentioned, there's lots of different ways that people collect.
One of the things to basically understand collecting at its basic level, it's when you start to work to amass a certain set of objects in the value of the objects for you is not based on their initial intended purpose. So for instance, spoons are something that we use to eat with, right?
The minute you start keeping spoons, not to use them to eat with, but because you're collecting spoons because you're looking for different shapes or spoons of different eras or of different materials or of different manufacturers, you've got yourself a spoon collection. Taking things out of their living context and putting them into this sort of immortal tomb, as some writers have talked about collections, as an act of preservation, is when you start to enter the terrain of collecting.
This is also, I should say, different than hoarding, which is an actual sort of, a kind of disorder that can be extremely both dangerous but also harmful. And collecting can be a very healthy and benign thing. There's nothing wrong with collecting. So if there's any serious collectors listening, this isn't like a discussion of a perversion or something like that. This is a very typical thing for people to do.
Where it got interesting thinking with plants and cacti with this is that
I could not find any serious psychological literature on collecting that grappled with questions about what happens when those collections aren't just of literally dead objects, stamps, or coins, but living things, literally living cacti. That changes the context of that act of possession.
And so that added these whole new levels of meaning to these collections because for instance, like a great example is a lot of cacti, one of the reasons that people love to collect them is that they live a really long time. And one of the things that permits is a kind of collection that grows with you as you age yourself as the collector. But even more than that, many cacti will live on beyond the life of the collector and they'll pass from one collector to the next. And as they do that, they accrue in value, not just in monetary terms, but in emotional and sentimental terms.
Many collectors I spent time with and interviewed have openly wept over the death of a cactus, not only because it represented an enormous amount of time and care within their own life, or maybe even their own mortality, but the lives of others who went before them. And so we can see how all these emotions get wrapped up in these plants as they become parts of these living collections. And I found that all just incredibly fascinating to learn about in writing this book.
Kamea Chayne: And to go a little deeper into the idea of collecting, you talk about the different stances that collectors and conservationists have taken on whether it is acceptable or not to collect the seeds of wild cacti and succulents. What can you share on this front in terms of the different perspectives people with a shared love for succulents might have on this topic? And what nuance is there in considering both the preservationist concept of ecological sovereignty and moving away from relations of human domination and ownership over the more than human world.
Jared Margulies: Okay. These are great. You're hitting the good questions. So let me see, I'm trying to think about where I wanna start. I'm sorry, Kamea, can you say that, can you say it one more time?
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, so what are the wide range of different perspectives that people might have in terms of whether or not it's okay to collect the seeds of wild cacti and succulents? Because I'm aware that some people see it as an act of social good, for example. And then also for people who are trying to approach succulents with the mindset of their well-being. There’s both the preservationist concept of ecological sovereignty that you talk about, and also others who feel like this ecological sovereignty might play into reproducing relations of human domination. So just, I'd be curious to hear like this whole wide range of perspectives out there that are kind of… they share the common denominator of people wanting the wellbeing of succulents, but just they come at it in different lenses.
Jared Margulies: The seed question was such an interesting one to research. And I'll be curious if people read the book where they think I land on the topic. Because I try to intentionally not be too determined, sort of deterministic about my opinion, because I wanted to leave the book as a sort of space of exploration for people to consider these different kind of perspectives. And so hopefully people, regardless of where they fall on the issue will feel like I tried to do a good job of balancing these different perspectives. So the question revolves around the fact, I think it's best structured through a very specific example, which is that in 1997, the state of Mexico decided to not just include cactus plants on the CITES appendix—-that’s again that international trade convention that regulates wildlife trade—but also includes seeds. So this meant that even if you wanted to take seeds from Mexican cacti out of the country or trade them internationally, you would need export permits from the state of Mexico.
Well, this caused a great deal of consternation and frustration and even anger within the sort of international cactus collector community, because it suddenly meant it was going to become very hard and much more challenging to get the material of these plants that people like to grow. And one of the reasons people were especially frustrated about this was they felt like getting seeds was a more sustainable way of embracing this desire and this hobby, which helped take pressure off of people wanting to maybe illegally harvest full plants. Because once you had the seed, you could grow it and many cacti will produce thousands of seeds, right? So it was seen as a sort of more sustainable alternative.
The other problem with it was while at the same time, Mexico listed the seeds to CITES, they've been less forthcoming in actually granting those permits. So effectively, kind of created a space where there was a sort of prohibition on the trade writ large in these plants. This got further muddied by the fact that a lot of these species and seeds were already out circulating in the world before the trade regulations happened. So suddenly a lot of people were confused about whether or not the plants they had in the trading of them or the seeds was legal or not. And so I write about this idea of gray markets as this space between white markets and black markets.
But so for conservationists, the argument more or less goes along the lines of, hey, we understand that even if a cactus produces hundreds or even thousands of seeds, one of the reasons that they've evolved to do that is so extraordinarily few will ever actually successfully germinate into fully mature adult plants that then go on to reproduce. So it's really, really important that they produce thousands and thousands of seeds. But it doesn't mean that it's OK for people to go and take them, because we need those in the seedbed, in the ground, because so few will ever actually make it into becoming a new cactus.
On the contrary, other collectors would sort of say, some collectors would say, that's sort of nonsense. If I can get access to just a handful of seeds, give me three years and I can have thousands of plants to offer people, and that's gonna take pressure off of these plants and habitat. And so that's kind of a big distinction. The other thing though that you brought up was this question of ecological sovereignty, which is the other argument that some conservationists and folks say like Mexican authorities would make, which is saying this isn't even just about a conservation issue, but also an issue of kind of ecological justice and that these are Mexican plants. And who are you, let's say a European or British collector, who are you to have the right to think that you should just be able to come and take them without there being any benefit for say the people of Mexico?
And so that's where this idea of kind of ecological sovereignty comes into play. This is an idea of that I read about a lot with this with a scholar named Mick Smith, who writes about against this idea of ecological sovereignty, because he still sees it reproducing harm in the world because it makes the assumption that the state like the Mexican state should have a right to any kind of biological life rather than sort of thinking about all life on the planet as sort of, you know, exceeding the rights of a particular state. But hopefully that kind of helps explain some of those different perspectives and dynamics.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, this is super interesting to think about. And I also don't have a particular orientation just yet in terms of what resonates most with me. So I'm gonna let this all sit with me for longer. And I think what is also interesting is to think about the temporality of succulents and how they differ from other plants that might have considerations of, you know, plants being taken from somewhere else becoming invasive or becoming very aggressive in how they behave in a terrain to take over an entire place. But it doesn't feel like that same sort of issue would be as concerning for succulents just because of their vastly different temporality. But I wonder maybe there is….are there considerations for like, if plants are taken to somewhere that they haven't called home before and issues with them becoming quote unquote invasive and I know that's a contentious term as well.
Jared Margulies: Yeah, no, but I think you handle I think I like the way you've handled thinking about like, you know, going from home. I like the way you phrase that. And so yes, there actually are some good examples. So think about like the prickly pear or any number of apuntia species of cacti. You know, these are a lot of cacti that you find across the US southwest or Mexico, the Caribbean. But a number of apuntia, or prickly pear species, have also, they're an interesting one because they're also now become a really important global agricultural crop. So for instance, people harvest the fruit of prickly pear. It's an important food source. They're also edible, they're very nutritious. I can go and buy nopal from the supermarket down my street. But they're also fed to livestock and cattle. But they also can be, as you said, sort of a more pernicious species. And so, for instance, across the Mediterranean, prickly pear have become a real problem species. But we also see, for instance, examples of this with some other succulents, like ice plants have taken over in a lot of places. So for instance, in coastal California is a good example, where you've got some succulents that have really kind of changed a lot of the coastal landscape. So there are a few like that.
I can't say how much that traveling of these plants is related to ornamental collection and trade as much, or for instance, like the case of the prickly pear, I'm sure it was brought over as an agricultural crop that then just sort of got loose and went, kind of went awry.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, lots more to consider here. And I feel like I've seen a lot more like beverages made from prickly pear juice or like all these things that wasn't as prevalent before. So I guess it's just important to also continue to think about how the market value of these plants even if they are in the succulent family, how that might affect the overall biodiversity of desert ecosystems across different terrains. When it comes to the topic of illegal wildlife trade, more broadly speaking, I think people are more aware of the poaching of animals for certain commodified parts.
So what are the similarities or differences that the illicit or illegal succulent trade has with animal poaching? And what are the underlying threads in terms of dispelling this illusion that the global north, quote unquote global north nations are not complicit in these trades, often depicted as something that happens mostly in quote unquote developing countries?
Jared Margulies: Yeah, glad you asked that question. There's a couple of things happening here. So one you're absolutely right Like for instance, I teach a class on legal and illegal wildlife trade and I always start out by asking the students to close their eyes and I say like, you know if I say the word poaching or poacher, who do you imagine and what do you imagine the activity being? And the majority of students will often say, I'm imagining people with AK-47s killing elephants or rhinos in sub-Saharan Africa or in South Africa, for instance, or Mozambique.
And that's not random. That's because that's the sort of image that we've all been exposed to the most, you know, in nature documentaries and in nature publications and in the media. And mostly it's structured through what we could call the Africa-Asia nexus. This problem of poaching happens in poor African countries. It happens with charismatic, what we could call charismatic megafauna. So like think rhinos and elephants. And the demand is found in East Asia. And it's because of things like luxury goods and traditional Chinese medicine. And that's often sort of just presented as the whole story of, or a big chunk of the story of illegal wildlife trade and poaching, and it's not to discount that existing, but…
The global north, as you said, and countries like the United States and in the UK and in Europe, are huge consumers of illegal wildlife trade products in a way that has for way too long not received the attention it should have.
And so this is a big problem. And I think that this was something I was interested in exploring also through my project focusing on plant trade because there is a lot of demand in global North countries. But it also is interesting to think about illegal trade in plant illegal wildlife trade in plants because first of all when you hear illegal wildlife trade you normally just think about animals or at least most people do. But it's the same convention that controls the trade in animals and in plants. Thinking with plants became a really interesting space for studying illegal wildlife trade for a couple of different reasons. So like one is a great example with plants and cacti or succulents is another good example is there.
The ability for these plants to move through trade networks in a multitude of different ways is so different than a lot of animals, especially if the trade in wildlife is in live animals rather than just animal parts.
So here not thinking about ivory or rhino horn, but for instance, say I like to use oftentimes the example of the baby tiger. Or parrots, exotic parrots from South America is a great example, right? There's a huge illegal wildlife trade in parrots. Well, there's only so many ways that you can get a living parrot from, say, the tropical rainforest of Columbia alive into an exotic pet store in Colorado.
With the parrot still having value on the other end and that value being tied of course to it being alive in a value to a potential collector. This is so different than a lot of plants where not only can you trade in seeds but also offsets or cuttings of plants, right? As well as just throwing, you know, cacti have evolved, one might argue as I write about in the book, this idea of their elutability, they've evolved to withstand pretty harsh climates and absence of water for long periods of time. You know, pulling a plant out of the ground and throwing it in a box and sending it around the world in two weeks is not necessarily such a big deal, whereas that would be a very big deal for a living animal. And so all of those reasons for me, this became a really interesting way of trying to get at understanding broader dimensions of illegal wildlife trade.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing all of this. We are nearing the end of our main discussion and I would love to connect our conversation so far to the bigger picture. So how do these themes of illicit succulent trade tie into our broader structures of power and economics? And what should people know in regards to how illegal wildlife trade is increasingly framed by US foreign policy as national security concerns?
Jared Margulies: Yeah, so the way we talk about, and here I'm thinking a lot about the work again of my colleague Rosaline Duffy, but the way we've talked about conservation in responses to illegal wildlife trade has changed so dramatically in 10 years, it's kind of hard to recognize it for those of us who've been in the game for a little while. As we think about conservation, for a lot of people you might still think about your local park or the national park and you know, park rangers as people wearing like Smokey the Bear hats. But in a lot of places in the world, conservation has started to look really different. And you see anti-poaching groups that have been trained by, you know, ex special forces from the UK or the US, former Navy SEALs going to African countries to offer military training or increasing use of automatic weapons in patrolling national parks.
And this is like a really, this is a pretty fundamental shift in what conservation is and what conservation does and what kinds of actors are engaged in the work of doing conservation. And I think this is something that we should be concerned about.
We have a lot of evidence from the criminological literature that efforts of criminalization and prohibition as a response to trying to curb forms of illicit economies, often fail.
We can think about the US failed war on drugs as a good example of this. And yet we're seeing some of the same problems being reproduced in combating illegal wildlife trade. Again, through more severe sentencing, less of a focus on rehabilitation or the structural underpinnings of why people might be engaged in, for instance, poaching in the first place. One of the things that I'm trying to do right now as an example is work with collaborators in South Africa but also in South Korea to think, for instance, responses to this big problem, say, succulent harvesting that's illegal in South Africa right now, rather than just responding through criminalization of extremely impoverished communities that are simply looking largely for economic opportunities could instead be reframed through thinking about sustainable use and livelihoods approaches that actually recognize that the people who maybe are best suited to do this conservation work are the people who've been living with these species for very, very long periods of time. But are under increasing pressures of the sort of global economic system that reproduces and has only exacerbated so many global inequalities, especially that we saw, for instance, during the pandemic. So that's sort of a direction that I'm trying to take my work in now.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and certainly there's so many patterns that we can find between what you just shared here and other forms of criminalized trade and illegal trade, whether that's in mining or in other fields as well. And before we go into our concluding remarks here, I would love to welcome you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, maybe in terms of what has inspired you most doing all of this research, as well as your calls to action or deeper inquiry for our listeners.
Jared Margulies: Sure. I've had different people who've read the book say that they really appreciated that they felt like ultimately as critical as the book was and as sort of dire a situation as some of these scenarios are for certain plants that I talk about, like that are veering towards extinction or have maybe already gone extinct because of the way that people's desires work in the world. Other people have told me that they found the book to be somewhat sad or melancholic. And I was actually quite surprised by that because I definitely am hopeful that if people read the text and stick with it, that they can see that I truly became obsessed with these plants as well as the people in that they move into relationships with through efforts of collecting. And I can never look at cacti and succulents the same way ever again. And not in a bad way, but in a way that I've moved into care of more caring relationships with them. And so I think that that's something that I would encourage people to think about is if you've got a lot of houseplants, for instance, spend some time learning about where they come from and their histories and not just their natural histories, but their social histories as well. So many cacti, for instance, have really important cultural values for a lot of people in the places that they come from, whether we're talking about the sort of iconic saguaro of the Sonora, in their relationships with the Tana Odom, or any number of cacti from Mexico. And I think there's a lot of hopeful promise there in recognizing that people can have good relationships with plants. It's not just a dismal story about capitalism, I think, ruining everything, although there is some of that too. So I think I'll end there.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. And we're now going into our final lightning round closing question. So just the first thing that comes to mind for you. What has been one of the most impactful books that you've read or publications you follow?
Jared Margulies: Okay, because that's a really hard question, I'm only gonna focus on things within the last couple of months, is that okay? So as people will learn if they read my book, I took a sort of major turn towards thinking with some psychoanalytic thought lately. And so a new publication that I'm very into is called Parapraxis. And it's a cool new magazine about psychoanalysis and contemporary life, and I think it's great. In terms of a book. I'm going to give a shout out to a book by unfortunately a geographer who is really brilliant but sadly passed away quite recently. And that's a book called The Sounds of Life by Karen Bacher. And that is a neat book because it's very accessible. It's written for a public, you know, broad audience. But it's about the ways that Western science is trying to better understand that the living world through sound in a way that really is quite fantastic. And it was a it was a real pleasure to read. So I'll give those as my two answers for right now.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have additional links and references from this conversation in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Jared, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This was super fascinating. I'm really excited to continue learning more about these subjects. For now, as we come to a close though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Jared Margulies: Well, first of all, just thank you so much for having me. It's been a real treat, and your questions were fantastic. I think, because I mentioned sort of hope, because I think a lot about that a lot right now, especially in the context of current events that are happening right now. I don't think being hopeful is only being naive, but I think it can be apolitical when we sort of think of it as a kind of just passive thing we think about, like to be hopeful. And I think that it's possible to think about hope as something that we can demonstrate through our actions to make the world more livable. And so I think that applies to thinking about our relationships with plants as well. So I think I'll leave it with that.
