Over six years and throughout 4 continents, the London-based documentary photographer Zed Nelson has examined how people have immersed themselves in more and more simulated environments to masks their damaging divorce from the pure world. That includes every part from theme parks and zoos to nationwide parks and African safaris, his photos reveal not solely a determined longing for a connection to a world we now have turned our again on but additionally a world phenomenon of denial and collective self-delusion. “Individuals could have flocked to see them to see the unfamiliar and the unique,” he says. “Now they might go to see what’s not on the market, what’s endangered, what we now have misplaced.”
In his new picture ebook, The Anthropocene Phantasm, Nelson writes, “In a tiny fraction of our Earth’s historical past, we people have altered our world past something it has skilled in tens of thousands and thousands of years.” His photos doc our more and more futile makes an attempt to create a simulacrum of an Edenic pure world that none of us have really skilled. The variety of wild animals on Earth has halved up to now 40 years, and that decline exhibits no indicators of slowing down. We’re forcing animals and crops to extinction by eradicating their habitats. Future geologists will probably discover proof within the rock strata of an unprecedented human influence on our planet—large concentrations of plastics, fallout from the burning of fossil fuels, and huge deposits of concrete used to construct our cities.
But deep inside us, the need for contact with nature stays. So we now have change into masters of what Nelson calls “a stage-managed, synthetic ‘expertise’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle.”
“Charles Darwin diminished people to only one other species—a twig on the grand tree of life,” Nelson writes in his ebook’s afterword. “However now, the paradigm has shifted: humankind is not simply one other species. We’re the primary to knowingly reshape the residing earth’s biology and chemistry. We’ve got change into the masters of our planet and integral to the future of life on Earth. Surrounding ourselves with simulated recreations of nature paradoxically constitutes an unwitting monument to the very factor that we now have misplaced.”
As Jon Mooallem noticed in Wild Ones, his cultural historical past of untamed animals and our relationship to them, “We’re in all places within the wilderness with white gloves on, directing visitors.”
