Six years ago, the British photographer Zed Nelson began a project about “how humans have created curated versions of nature, while destroying the real thing”.
Nelson, who since 1990 has won numerous awards for his film and photographic work, could see that human beings are now alienated from the land and from other animals, but that “somewhere deep within us the desire for contact with nature remains”.
This, he believed, was manifesting itself in an ever-increasing array of stage-managed, artificial experiences of nature that provided “a reassuring spectacle, an illusion”.
These experiences include zoos in which captive animals appear before painted backdrops depicting their natural habitats, national parks people drive through in air-conditioned cars, ski slopes dependent on artificial snow and lion farms in which tourists hunted tame lions for sport.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis accelerates and man’s war on the natural world continues. In 2021, a study found that just three percent of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals in place.
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One early destination for his project was clear to Nelson.
“Dubai felt like an obvious place to visit because it was the epicentre of a lot of this phenomenon,” the London-based photographer tells Middle East Eye today, on the publication of a new book about his project, The Anthropocene Illusion.
The book features photographs from 14 countries on four continents – “There’s no corner of the world we haven’t destroyed or commodified,” Nelson says.
Artificial islands and fake snow
What he found in the United Arab Emirates in June 2018 was a vivid blueprint for a human-dominated world in which nothing is real and everything is unsustainable.
Oil was discovered in Dubai in 1966, when it was part of the Trucial States, the British protectorate that preceded the UAE.
The small desert town was inhabited by around 46,000 people. By the end of 2025, the city’s population is expected to reach four million.
In that time, Dubai has become a gleaming symbol of late capitalism, a place in which everything the world has to offer can be found – in replica.
Nelson, who was born not long after that discovery of oil in Dubai, visited Sweden Island, described in promotional literature as a “private island containing ten ultra-luxury Swedish-inspired villas”.
It is one of the World Islands, an archipelago made in the shape of a world map from 386 million tonnes of rock and 321 million cubic metres of compressed sand.
The project stalled at the time of the 2008 financial crisis and remains incomplete. Sweden Island is part of the Heart of Europe, which, Nelson writes, was meant to create a fully immersive “European experience”, complete with outdoor snow and artificial rainfall triggered once the outdoor temperature exceeded 27C.
“There was a multimillion-pound house with a snow-making machine inside the house, attached to the sauna,” Nelson says of Sweden Island.
He then went to an ice bar, maintained at -6C while outside, in the hottest months, the average temperature is around 36C – and only getting hotter.
“Dubai has an enormous aquarium, an indoor ski slope, a zoo, a safari park, artificial islands,” Nelson says. “You can live a life where you shuttle between these places, almost permanently in air conditioning.
“When you start building ski slopes and a snow world in those conditions there is a staggering environmental cost.”
This situation is mirrored in Europe, the continent where skiing began, where snow cannons fire away all season long to make up for the loss of real snow brought on by climate change.
Nelson visited a ski resort in the Italian Dolomites that is completely dependent on this. “We make better snow than the natural stuff,” the owner told him. “In the past 20 years, the tourists have come to expect perfect quality champagne snow.”
Trapped polar bears and tame, hunted lions
The photographs found in The Anthropocene Illusion are haunting, moving and often disturbing.
We see a polar bear next to an Arctic backdrop painted onto a wall at a zoo in China. The bear sits next to the wall, staring into it. Behind this majestic white beast there are two doors, presumably leading out of the enclosure.
The scene is reminiscent of The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey’s protagonist comes to realise that he is the star of a reality TV show and has been living in an entirely artificial world his whole life.
Eventually, he steps through two very familiar doors and out into a world he doesn’t know.
An equally jarring scene can be found in South Africa, where Nelson visited a “lion farm”, at which visitors can “walk with lions”.
The creatures are taken from their mothers after they are born and then bottle fed at the farm. Tourists then visit to pet the semi-tame lions.
But when they get older, lions like these are often sold to be hunted by visitors seeking an “authentic” but completely safe and stage-managed experience.
The hunters keep the head and skin of the lion they kill, and the bones are sent to China, where they are used in “traditional medicine” products.
Capitalism and colonialism
This high-end, profit-driven experience can also be found in the Out of Africa champagne picnic experience put on as part of luxury Masai Mara safari tours in Kenya, and in polar bear-seeking explorations of Canada’s Arctic regions, where guests are transported in diesel-guzzling trucks.
“During the period of European colonial expansion, nature came to be seen as a dangerous, wild, primitive space in need of conquering and taming, or simply as a space awaiting exploitation,” Nelson writes in The Anthropocene Illusion, which is studded with his own thoughts and quotes from thinkers including John Berger and Guy Debord.
Nelson also includes a smattering of facts that attest to the damage that human-driven capitalism has done to the world, including that the “estimated five trillion plastic particles in the sea now weigh more than the entire biomass of the human species”, and that “the number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years”.
All the while, the photographer and filmmaker seeks to interrogate the psychological motivations behind this destruction and artificial recreation.
“Dubai has become a playground to visit,” he tells MEE.
“Is Dubai a symptom of what people desire? Did they generate that desire or are they servicing a contemporary human need for spectacle and entertainment?”
This is a world shaped irrevocably not so much by humans, but by capitalism.
It is a world in which everything is commodified, in which the natural world has been conquered.
Perhaps human beings maintain an insecurity from our time as animals in the middle of the food chain – it could be that this feeling is part of why we have so thoroughly subdued our fellow creatures.
A lost connection to nature
Being animals ourselves, though, the desire for connection with the world around us will never leave.
Some of the poignancy of Nelson’s images come from this tension. Animals that are adored and revered by human beings are nevertheless trapped by them in artificial conditions.
Mountains, lakes, rivers and other wild spaces that make the heart soar are looked at from cars and viewing spots, or recreated using artificial substances.
“We create an illusion to satisfy a connection to nature that we have lost. It gives us an echo of what we had and hides what we have done,” Nelson says. And so we get nature “but with no thorns and insects… smooth walkways and picnic spots, a consumer version”.
In the Gulf, where you can’t walk on the grass, where life is close to impossible without air conditioning, where huge glass towers that have no relation to the landscape they are in remain lit up despite being unoccupied, this is all too clear.
‘We create an illusion to satisfy a connection to nature that we have lost. It gives us an echo of what we had and hides what we have done’
– Zed Nelson, photographer
“In the numerous theme parks and zoos I visited, I realised a strange thing: in these places, nothing happens. There are no surprises… Everything repeats itself,” Nelson writes in the book.
Two stories in The Anthropocene Illusion jump out. The first is that of William Temple Hornaday, a taxidermist from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington who in 1886 travelled to the American west to hunt bison for a new display.
Hornaday wrote that “we killed very nearly all we saw and I am confident there are not other thirty-head remaining in Montana, all told.
By this time next year the cowboys will have destroyed about all of this remnant.”
The taxidermist was not troubled by this at the time. Rather, he celebrated the killing and capture of the iconic bison “just in the nick of time”, so he could create a “series of mounted specimens that will be envied by all other museums”.
The story finds an echo in the fate of Harambe, a famous western lowland gorilla on display at the Cincinnati Zoo.
After a three-year-old boy climbed into his enclosure in 2016, Harambe went over to investigate the child but became increasingly agitated by the constant screams of onlookers. The gorilla was shot by zoo officials.
“The following year,” Nelson writes, “the zoo created a new indoor habitat where the public view the gorillas from behind thick safety glass.”
The Anthropocene Illusion by Zed Nelson is published by Guest Editions.
