In the wake of the 2019-2020 bushfires in Australia, I was moved to change tack on my ongoing Terraform series.
You might have seen that we had some pretty apocalyptic fires here in Australia that started in August 2019 and burned through until May 2020.
(I realised this week that somehow I missed posting this piece here,
so better late than never).
so better late than never).
In December and January I travelled to East Gippsland, Victoria a couple of hours away from my home, to shoot images of the aftermath.
Australia has a long history of regular bushfires, but climate and fire experts agree that climate change helped create the conditions for the extreme intensity that we experienced in 2020. Ordinarily, when a fire burns through an area, wildlife are able to find replacement habitat nearby, but the sheer scale of these fires meant that that isn’t possible resulting in fears that a great many species were driven to extinction.
Most prominently, you might have heard the news that one of Australia’s most iconic animals, the Koala, is currently projected to become extinct in the wild in the coming decades.
The fires burned out about 186,000km2 of land and killed or displaced an estimated 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates alone.
As I started learning about these consequences, I felt I couldn’t not make work that looks at the fire. As the COVID lockdowns here ease, I’ll be creating more work that speaks to these kinds of issues affecting wildlife and our planet.
