THE ANTHROPOCENE ILLUSION
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 become masters of a stage-managed, artificial ‘experience’ of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.
This work reflects on how, at a time of increasing environmental crisis, we retreat into a consoling, illusory version of ‘Nature’.
Over six years, in fourteen countries across four continents, I have examined how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly choreographed and simulated environments to mask our destructive impact on the natural world.
From theme parks, zoos, and natural history museums to synthetic beaches, indoor rainforests, national parks, African safaris and alpine ski resorts, this 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.