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| Rusty Plum, Plum Boxwood Cake |
Bakers make a cake in the shape of any threatened species or threatened ecosystem that occurs in Australia.
The annual competition attempts to educate about Australia’s biodiversity and foster pro-conservation behaviours.
In a town with an overabundance of dogs, cats and cows attention has to be directed to the spatial erasure of the ‘environment out there.’ A place that many native animals and plants used to call their home.
Mostly Australian iconic poster species that are cute and cuddly are present in minds and then reemerge in cake form. Due to the nature of the event there is a 'thingness' character that does not allow for the depiction of ecosystems.
This bias towards the charismatic and familiar neglects lesser known taxa such invertebrates, plants, fungi, seaweeds, fish or whole ecosystems
Getting to know and like “The unknown or Loving the unlovely” might take a bit more than a competition spectacle with bakers and celebreties mixing a lot of sugar and artificial colour together.
The organised abandonment of Australia’s biodiversity and the compounding ecological disasters are a deliberate choice and pattern. To give up (willful) ignorance requires uncomfortable lifestyle changes.
To use social media campaigns to warm hearts to ‘uncharismatic organisms’ and to ensure funding for the conservation of biodiversity, specifically threatened species might be an uphill battle.
Human settlements prefer a monoculture of sameness: Industrial plantations and exotic gardens. “If the Anthropocene describes a planet transformed by humans, the Homogenocene is one ecological consequence: fewer places with their own distinctive life.” (source)
Human society leaves only small, fragmented and degraded ecosystems to the More-Than-Human World.
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| All species of sawfish are now globally Critically Endangered |
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