The Anthropocene Illusion

© Zed Nelson

“While we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature - a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.”

In a tiny fraction of our Earth’s history, we humans have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in tens of millions of years. Scientists are calling it a new epoch, ‘The Anthropocene’ - the age of human.

Future geologists will find evidence in the rock strata of an unprecedented human impact on our planet - huge concentrations of plastics, fallout from the burning of fossil fuels, and vast deposits of concrete used to build our cities. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years. We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.

We have broken our ancient bonds with nature, divorcing ourselves from the land we once roamed and from other animals. Yet we cannot face the true scale of our loss. Somewhere deep within us the desire for contact with nature remains. So, while we destroy the natural world around us, we have also become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Over six years, across four continents, Zed Nelson has examined how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly simulated environments to mask our destructive divorce from the natural world. From theme parks, zoos and natural history museums, to national parks, African safaris and alpine resorts, his work reveals not only a global phenomenon of denial and collective self-delusion, but also a desperate craving for a connection to a world we have turned our back on.

‘Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’
John Berger (1926 - 2017). ‘Why Look at Animals’.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

The Anthropocene Illusion reflects on how—at a time of environmental crisis—a consoling version of nature has been packaged as a commodified, curated experience, designed to mask our divorce from the natural world.

The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years.
Today, more tigers exist in captivity than in the wild.

click to view the complete set of images in the archive

Charles Darwin reduced humans to just another species – a twig on the grand tree of life. But now, the paradigm has shifted: humankind is no longer just another species. We are the first to knowingly reshape the living earth’s biology and chemistry. We have become the masters of our planet and integral to the destiny of life on Earth.

Surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature paradoxically constitutes an unwitting monument to the very thing that we have lost.

Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat.

In 1989, the writer Bill McKibben (in his book The End of Nature), foresaw a moment when our environment would exceed the capabilities of our environmental language. The remade Earth, McKibben further argued, would set record after record—hottest, coldest, deadliest—before people realized the need for new ways of keeping score. But inertia is an intellectual proposition as well as a physical one; for a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would refuse to change their mind.

Medea, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, said, “I can see - and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse.”

Today, social media and the internet’s ceaseless flow of information and visual stimulation have birthed a state of unreality, where we are no longer looking for truth, but only a kind of amazement.

Our future as a species depends on urgent new assessments of humanity’s relationship to the natural world - requiring intentional acts of culture, with paradigm shifts in priorities and empathies.

Zed Nelson

The Anthropocene Illusion, by Zed Nelson, is published as a book by Guest Editions

254 x 300mm | 196 pages including 75 colour images, made over six years and across four continents | 12pp index section with extended image descriptions and an essay by Zed Nelson | Casebound in a printed green Colorado cloth | Printed in the UK on Fedrigoni papers.

Order book - £45

Order book with fine art print - £150

The Anthropocene Illusion

The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years.Today, more tigers exist in captivity than in the wild.

The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years.
Today, more tigers exist in captivity than in the wild.