Over six years and across four continents, the London-based documentary photographer Zed Nelson has examined how humans have immersed themselves in increasingly simulated environments to mask their destructive divorce from the natural world. Featuring everything from theme parks and zoos to national parks and African safaris, his images reveal not only a desperate craving for a connection to a world we have turned our back on but also a global phenomenon of denial and collective self-delusion. “People may have flocked to see them to see the unfamiliar and the exotic,” he says. “Now they may go to see what is no longer out there, what is endangered, what we have lost.”
In his new photo book, The Anthropocene Illusion, Nelson writes, “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.” His images document our increasingly futile attempts to create a simulacrum of an Edenic natural world that none of us have actually experienced. The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, and that decline shows no signs of slowing down. We are forcing animals and plants to extinction by removing their habitats. Future geologists will likely 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.
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