Geelong

If you were flying into Melbourne for EPIC2020, you would be bombarded by quarantine regulations both on the plane and in the airport—and for good reason. Since the beginning of European settlement in 1788, there have been at least 30 species of pest animals and more than 500 weed species introduced. Pests continue to represent one of the greatest threats to biodiversity and the native flora and fauna in Australia.

Like some other European colonizers, in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin in the town of Geelong, Victoria, released 24 rabbits on his property for the purpose of hunting them. Across Australia, their population multiplied due to the lack of predators in their new environment. By causing damage to crops, killing young trees in orchards and forests, and creating erosion problems, these rabbits have become one of the most significant factors in the loss of native plant species in Australia. The government has employed a range of biological, chemical, and mechanical control measures to reduce the rabbit population from an estimated 10 billion (1920) to the roughly 200 million that remain today.

Geelong captures the cascading consequences of intervention and innovation—intentional or inadvertent, subtle or exponential. What seems normal and casual to one creature, but alien and transformational, perhaps catastrophic, to another? What lens from the past frames a vision of the future?