“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.”

This is the opening sentence of a photobook by a London-based, award-winning documentary photographer, Zed Nelson,  The Anthropocene Illusion, published this year by Guest Editions. Nelson spent six years travelling across four continents to examine “how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly simulated environments”, created in denial and self-delusion, masking the destructive divorce from the natural world. A world that we, at the same time, long for. In this twisted world-recreating action, while wiping out ecosystems and the species relying on them, we are creating artificial, man-made experiences of nature. Such fabrications are not harmless theatre; they mirror the broader substitution of ecological function with simulation.

The Spaceship Earth at EPCOT, a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort, has just reopened after refurbishment. Inside the geodetic dome of Spaceship Earth, a train ride moves from holographic stardust to planet formation, the mammoth ice age, cave rituals, ancient Egypt and Greece, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and Christianity, arriving directly into the steam-engine era, electrification, the moon landing and popular culture. The ride presents history as seamless progress, collapsing geology, culture and technology into entertainment. Through the Matrix, one enters space, looking back at Earth from a spaceship that is no longer Earth. Before returning, visitors are asked to select their core interests, choosing between (urbanistic principles of) Home, Work, Health and Leisure. The program then builds a personalised animation of your future, where “a city will be a great place to work” while your avatar drives headlessly in a self-driving car. It is a miniature Anthropocene — a managed planet reduced to menu options.

The Anthropocene, still a provisional geological term, has become a cultural “working title”.

In his book, Nelson quotes Guy Debord: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation”, now simulated in national parks, zoos, safaris and fake-snow ski resorts, while only “three percent of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations.” Nelson’s images of fakes urge us to rethink “humanity’s relationship to the natural world — requiring intentional acts of culture, with paradigm shifts in priorities and empathies.” The disillusionment collides with a new discourse of design. The Anthropocene, still a provisional geological term, has become a cultural “working title”.

The decline of ‘ecosystem services’ implies a trajectory of increasing dependence on human-engineered substitutes.

Conservation scientists bring forth the idea of a “good Anthropocene” framework, arguing that since planetary transformation is irreversible, we should steer it intentionally, ethically and with ecological literacy. Using phrases such as “nature’s contribution to people” instead of “ecosystem services” would, they claim, “promote a connection between individuals and the natural world around them.”

This accounting of nature’s contribution to people is valued in trillions lost annually due to declining productivity and health effects linked to global ecological degradation, according to the WHO. Over 75 percent of global food crops rely on animal pollinators, contributing between 235–577 billion US dollars annually. What is the price for a river to flow and a bird to sing? The decline of such processes implies a trajectory of increasing dependence on human-engineered substitutes.

Almost half of the biomass production occurs “within cultivated and substantially populated biomes — dense settlements, villages, croplands and residential rangeland”.

While the classic terrestrial biome classification includes biomes such as desert, tundra, taiga, savanna, forests, grasslands and steppes, researchers in ecology have long stressed that it crucially excludes humans. In the 2008 article Putting People in the Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World, Ellis and Ramankutty observed that more than 75 percent of Earth’s ice-free land “showed evidence of alteration as a result of human residence and land use, with less than a quarter remaining as wildlands”, calling for a revision of biome classification. Of wildlands, more than 36 percent are barren, and only 20 percent are covered with forests. Further, wildlands support only about 10 percent of terrestrial net primary production (NPP), meaning the carbon used for biomass production — “growing stems, leaves and fruit, labile carbohydrates such as sugars and starch” — the food for other organisms in the chain. The rest of the NPP is produced in anthropogenic biomes, or anthromes, as they conceptually call the man-made lands, which include 80 percent of global tree cover. However, almost half of the NPP occurs “within cultivated and substantially populated biomes — dense settlements, villages, croplands and residential rangeland”, meaning that croplands and populated mosaics together sustain almost half of Earth’s biological productivity. In short, the planet’s metabolic core is already anthropogenic, yet public imagination still clings to wilderness as default.

Biocultural landscapes are characterized by anthropogenic pattern features that historically appeared in landscapes after the invention of agriculture. In Anthropogenic Effects in Landscapes: Historical Context and Spatial Pattern, the authors state that their analysis shows a sequence of landscape dynamics with three stages, in which a natural landscape matrix is initially substituted by an agricultural one; urban patch types later dominate the matrix as a consequence of ongoing urbanization. In recent research, Junli Sha models the evolution of landscape patterns in Suzhou, China, predicting that after significant changes in road landscapes, by 2026, “architectural, built, and green landscapes will increase, while agricultural and forest landscapes will decrease, trending towards stability.”

Changing landscape patterns due to an expanding urban land area, which is expected to triple by 2050 relative to 2000 levels, indicate the loss of biocultural landscapes — landscapes in which human cultures are tied to ecological cycles. And it is true: without contact with natural environments, one does not know them. Naturalness and artificiality become a blur.

Urban, agricultural, and industrial metabolisms are inseparable from climatic and biogeochemical cycles. The distinction between natural and artificial has become bureaucratic rather than ecological. What about the rest of ecological provisioning? If terrestrial food provision is mainly supplied from anthromes, what happens when ecosystems fail to provide freshwater, cease producing habitats and genetic richness — is that when the “working title” becomes justified? The term “good Anthropocene” carries an optimism that sits uneasily with the evidence, yet it names a necessary provocation: that design, if it is to matter at all, must expose the contradictions of a civilisation re-engineering its own habitat while mourning the loss of the original. Designing Spaceship Earth, then, is less an act of care than an act of survival. Which governing body will supply ecological provisions?

To get Zed Nelson’s book, visit: The Anthropocene Illusion.