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Tara Bellerose spends between 15 and 20 hours a week creating videos for Instagram or TikTok. She works from her farm in rural South-West Victoria. Inspiration comes from all over the 23-year old, with each video taking approximately two hours. The final product is short and engaging. It includes colourful captions, images and filters that address climate change.
“There is nothing really to it,” she says. “I don’t have any other hobbies, this is my hobby.”
“I am trying to teach people about animals and wildlife and what the earth has to offer. You can’t force people to change, people don’t like being forced to do stuff, but if you suggest and say, ’look how beautiful our reefs are and how cool these animals are… you can make people care.”
Tara Bellerose (23), uses her large social network following to discuss the climate crisis.
Ms. Bellerose, a third generation farmer, has seen the effects of climate changes firsthand. Droughts and floods can have a devastating impact on crop growth. “Dad says the weather is different from when he was my age,” she says. “When I saw the effect of humanity, I wanted to learn more, and use my platform to teach people about the ‘invisible’ day-to-day impacts we have as humans and try to show them the creatures they don’t see but harm indirectly.”
She’s been on social media since 2016, but it wasn’t until she watched David Attenborough’s Blue Planet IIIn 2018, she shifted her content to address climate change.
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Ms. Bellerose has a large following, with 585,000 followers on TikTok and 12,000 followers on Instagram. She also has 33,000 subscribers on YouTube. But there’s an ugly side to social media.
She’s been subject to death threats – at one stage she was getting one a week. One such message sent last year said: “I hope you kill yourself or get hit by a truck. I really hope that it happens to you. Or you die from malaria because you are a waste space. You shouldn’t exist.”
