Australia
The eighth international “Fascination of Plants Day” 2026 (FoPD 2026) will be launched by plant scientists across the world under the umbrella of the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO).
The goal of this activity is to get as many people as possible around the world fascinated by plants and enthused about the importance of plant science for agriculture and sustainable production of nutritious food, as well as for horticulture, forestry and the production of plant-based non-food products such as paper, timber, chemicals, energy and pharmaceuticals. The role of plants in environmental conservation is also a key message.
Presented by Veit Braun.
Animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously said, are not just good to eat but good to think with: they elucidate the structure of social relations. But what about plants? In this talk I argue that the ways we relate to plants on the one hand and the matrix of people and things on the other offered by property thought are a bad match. Much of what plants are and do does not neatly fit into the categories of subject and object or body and idea; nor can the problems caused by intellectual and tangible property in plants easily be addressed by the critique of property. To elaborate this point, I want to sketch the trajectories on which plants go astray and slip through our matrices of property (including my own) by exploring some of what has happened in the legal landscape of especially European plant breeding over the last 20 or so years. Whether we should run after plants and leave property behind or, conversely, try to patch up the structure of property relations depends on what we care about more: saving plants or saving property.