‘Alternative Field Guides’ is the name our group gives to projects narrating contested geographies, political ecologies, alternative visions of conservation futures. These guides can take many forms, from digital to print, from sonic to visual, and are intended for a diverse range of audiences, but typically aimed at a wider public than academic papers.

Exploring Venus Flytrap Landscapes through the lens of socio-ecological and racial justice.

This is an ongoing research project supported by funding from the BAND Foundation, the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at UA, and a 2024 National Geographic Explorer Grant to interrogate issues related to Venus flytrap conservation landscapes in North Carolina and the drivers and socio-ecological costs associated with illegal harvesting and trade in Venus flytraps. Although an open project, we have several collaborative Alternative Field guides emerging from this effort to explore. 

TRAPLINES (Issue #1) is the result of a collaboration between digital illustrator and UA instructor Joel Fuller and CCGC member Jared Margulies. This 16-page, fully illustrated graphic comic, is an effort of speculative storytelling, drawing both on an active research project on the critical conservation geographies of Venus flytrap landscapes in North Carolina, and a collaborative dialogue between researcher and artist that develops a conversation about socio-ecological and racial (in)justice in America, conservation, and abolition geographies through the lens of a very special plant, the Venus flytrap. Set in “New Carolina”, TRAPLINES tells the story of siblings Maya and Carter and their grandfather, who seek to understand why people would illegally harvest Venus flytraps. In the process, far more is uncovered and questioned… Enjoy scrolling through TRAPLINES below (it can take a little while to load)! Copyrighted under the CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons license. 

Paired with TRAPLINES is a newly published story map entitled “Venus flytrap harvesting: crime, culture, and conservation” published by Jared Margulies, Benjamin Trost, Joel Fuller, Sara Heise Graybeal, Frederick V Freeman, and Melanie Ditts. Both of these projects were informed by the recently published article (authors include CCGC members Jared Margulies and Benjamin Trost) “Expert assessment of illegal collecting impacts on Venus flytraps and priorities for research on illegal trade,” published in the October Special Issue of Conservation Biology entitled “Beyond Charismatic Megafauna in Illegal Wildlife Trade,” also co-edited by Jared Margulies. 

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Welcome To Otay Mountain: An Alternative Field Guide

Welcome to Otay Mountain is an Alternative Field Guide to the Otay Mountain Wilderness Area in San Diego County, California near the US-Mexico border. It was created by Jared Margulies after visiting Otay in February 2019 shortly after the Trump administration declared a National Emergency at the border. Welcome to Otay Mountain offers a political ecology reading of the US-Mexico border through the lens of rare and endemic plant species conservation. It asks readers to consider our current political moment in which plants may be afforded more legal protections than asylum seekers attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Risograph printed on French Paper company Kraftone at Baltimore Print Studios in Baltimore, MD in April 2019, Eurostile font. 5×3.5″.

In 2023, a related text which discusses this was published in the journal Geopolitics:
Margulies, J. (2023). Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California. Geopolitics, 1-32.

Feel free to contact Jared for a copy of the article. You can view a scanned copy of the physical zine below. The zine is also now archived at https://geoz.one/ (thanks Eden!).

Other iterations of Welcome to Otay Mountain include a 38 minute soundscape which was commissioned by the US National Building Museum as part of their (now closed) exhibition, “The Wall/El Muro: What is a Border Wall?” This soundscape was later incorporated into a sonic art/activism piece produced by Electronic Disturbance Theatre 3.0 as part of the Mexicali Biennial.