May 9-10,  2024, Brussels

Join MINT Lab Directly Paco Calvo at the event “New perspectives in Plant Ethics”, held from May 9 to 10 in Brussels. Paco’s talk during this event is on May 10 from 11-11:30 and will be titled “Decoding Plant Behaviors as a Prelude to Ethical Challenges”. His talk will be one of many exciting talks during this 2-day event:

In recent years, environmental ethics and philosophy have become more specifically concerned with issues relating to the plant world, to the extent that some authors have even coined the term “plant turn” or “plant ethics”. Plant ethics is not a hyper-specialized theoretical niche, but rather one of the expressions of a growing awareness of the extent of human responsibilities towards living beings, ecosystems and present and future societies. This awareness cuts across many disciplines. In agronomy, the characterization of so-called harmful, useful or invasive species has a bearing on the decision to favour certain crops. In molecular biology, the rise of plant transgenesis techniques places researchers and companies in a situation of unprecedented risk and uncertainty. In the fields of law, economics and social exchanges, the need for new rules to enable seed sharing and new principles for sustainable agri-food production are the subject of much debate. Because of their close links with ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as our agricultural, cultural and social history, the destruction and degradation of plants should not be considered ethically neutral, if only because of the serious consequences these behaviours have historically entailed and continue to entail. However, the theoretical reflection and actual implementation of more respectful actions towards plants are not straightforward. Neither reducible to animal (welfare) ethics nor completely soluble in environmental ethics in the broadest sense of the term, plants as organisms with their very particular biology and ecology call for their own ways of thinking. A number of practices are already integrating this ethical dimension into their actions, inventions and recommendations in the fields of law, agriculture, forestry, conservation biology and so on. It is these practices and actors that represent indispensable resources for the creation of new philosophical and ethical frameworks of thought, to articulate them coherently with existing literature.