Eva Peroni
Recovery & Listening:
Eva is a writer and PhD candidate who explores the ways food is produced, distributed, and consumed and its impacts on the environment and global health. Her work profiles environmental and community leaders crafting a positive vision for the future of food.
In the first six months of this new decade, cumulative environmental, economic, social and health crises have exposed an array of vulnerabilities across society, as well as the natural world. As we continue to struggle to respond and adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, and numerous countries navigate eruptive political and social unrest, some of the earlier yet equally immense events of 2020 seem like a lifetime ago. Australia’s turn of the decade witnessed an incomparable summer of devastating bushfires that scarred the nation and stunned the world. While the ashes may
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BioLogical || a journal for change
have settled, the multiple, deeply pervasive impacts to Australian landscape, wildlife, and the very fabric of familiar life for individuals and their communities continue to unfold. For our nation’s farmers, the devastation was particularly deep. Often portrayed as stoic, lone rural underdogs pitted against a harsh and unrelenting environment, this farmer-as-Aussie battler image takes on new meaning when contextualised by the unparalleled intensity and duration of the Black Summer bushfires. There are those who lost loved ones,
friends or neighbours. Those who lost their homes, vital infrastructure and equipment, livestock and crops. There are many who have suffered major disruptions to their livelihoods, where the already significant daily workload of running a viable farming business is now done in addition to the arduous tasks of rebuilding what was lost. And with the megafires burning relentlessly for up to six weeks in some areas — at times threatening the same properties on multiple occasions from multiple firefronts — the traumatic and mental health impacts will
