This session invites participants into a slow, conversational space to reflect on how artistic, scientific, and local knowledge practices might work together to support plant life and the communities entangled with it. Building on the research framework of Free Radicals, the discussion centres the idea that meaningful ecological work does not emerge from a single epistemic tradition. It calls instead for ongoing negotiation between Western scientific methods, artistic and design-led approaches, and the forms of expertise embedded in Indigenous and local relationships to land.

The session will facilitate transdisciplinary exchange and seed new partnerships for ethnobiology research and practice that explores social, ecological, political, and creative processes in their complex interdependencies. Rather than rehearsing established narratives of sustainability, the discussion opens questions around how different knowledge systems can meet without hierarchy, extraction, or appropriation, and how such encounters might develop critical practices for worlds in transition. Participants will be invited to think through plants as teachers, neighbours, and agents of place, and to consider how practices of attention, listening, and reciprocity might inform cultural work grounded in care.

Drawing from examples across European field sites and from collaborations with Australian colleagues working on fire ecologies and eucalyptus, the session asks how cross-cultural exchanges can reshape the ways we imagine and enact ecological repair, and how they might foster practices of care, tools for solidarity, and radical proposals for innovation.

The session lasts 60 minutes and is intended for a group of 10 to 25 participants. It is ideally held outdoors, in a shaded, vegetated setting, with participants seated in a circle to support attentive listening and exchange. Technical needs are minimal, a simple PA system and access to electricity for brief listening components will suffice.