United in Desire
THERE
IS A MORBID THRILL in searching for the last of
something. I considered this while looking for
the critically endangered
cactus Uebelmannia
buiningii among the quartz hills of
the Serra Negra in Minas Gerais,
Brazil. Uebelmannia is a
small genus of Brazilian cactus described by
Dutch botanist Alfred Buining. The genus is
named for the Swiss cactus collector and former
race car driver Werner J. Uebelmann, a lifelong
collector, nurseryman, and devotee of Brazilian
cacti. These Eurocentric tendencies in species
naming are common in botany, a field whose
entwinement with settler colonialism and
imperialism runs deep.
I
was travelling with a group of self-described
European “cactoexplorers” for several weeks
through the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia,
Brazil, a region with some of the highest cactus
species richness and endemism in the world. I
was invited to join the search as part of the
research for my book on the global illicit trade
in cactus and succulent plants.
Thanks
to our guide, an expert Brazilian botanist, we
were equipped with the precise coordinates of
one of the few known locations of U.
buiningii, so our prospects for seeing it
were high.
Unlike
other species I had already encountered in
Brazil, U.
buiningii isn’t primarily threatened
by farmland development or urbanization.
According to species experts it is threatened
above all by illegal collection for
international trade. U.
buiningii’s habitat is restricted to an
area of less than 40 square kilometers, with
just a few small and isolated subpopulations
remaining. The type locality for the species, or
the location where a plant was first taken and
used to formally describe the species on an
archived herbarium sheet, is now absent any
remaining plants.
Political
ecologist Jared Margulies takes readers inside
the intriguing world of cactoexploring and
unravels the similar passions that animate both
illicit cacti collectors and conservationists in
our Autumn 2023 print issue cover
story. | 
