Considering that they’re often prickly little things, cactuses are popular plants, particularly among the younger crowd as they are low maintenance. But according to a recent New York Times story, their popularity is making them ripe for black marketers.
“The basic functioning of the planet would effectively grind to a halt without plants, but people care more about animals,” Jared Margulies, a geographer at the University of Alabama who studies plant trafficking, told The Times. “A lot of plant species are not receiving the amount of attention they would be if they had eyes and faces.”
One person who noticed this trend was our own Phil Hall, who wrote about endangered and extinct plants for our May “The Landscape Reinvented” issue. Check it out here.
