EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial collection dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges dealing with our planet, along with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and schooling round key sustainability points and to encourage constructive motion.
Zed Nelson spots the portray on the wall behind me virtually as quickly as we start our interview.
“It’s perfect,” he mentioned.
The canvas depicts a sleeping tiger draped throughout a velvet cushion, floating amongst pastel-shade leaves and flowers. The London-based photographer doesn’t imply “perfect” as in “masterfully painted;” he means it’s the excellent metaphor for the idealized, human-centric relationship we’ve cultivated with nature.
The portray reminds him of one other paintings, “A young Tiger Playing With Its Mother,” by the French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, who used a captive tiger at a zoo and his pet cat as fashions.
“The Romantic movement in painting began with the human divorce from the natural world. As we removed ourselves from nature, and it receded from our imagination, we reenacted these hyper-romantic versions of nature,” mentioned Nelson.
It’s the central thesis of his newest mission, “The Anthropocene Illusion,” which earned him Photographer of the Year at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards. Captured throughout 14 international locations and 4 continents over six years, the photographs present nature as imagined by people: staged habitats in zoos, manufactured ski slopes, indoor rainforests, and synthetic seashores.
In his earlier mission, “Love Me,” Nelson explored the homogenization of magnificence requirements. “There’s some echo of that here. It’s about how this artificial, idealized version of nature is being — I mean, I want to say sold back to us, but we’re willing participants in it, too,” Nelson defined.
“While we destroy the real thing, we seem to be creating more and more artificial or choreographed, curated versions of nature.”
It’s this “psychological disconnect” that Nelson is most excited about exposing. The assortment is equal elements ironic (a Maasai tribesman posing beside a picnic blanket for an “Out of Africa” champagne brunch in Kenya) and dystopian (a toddler perched on a fiberglass rock at a seashore in the world’s largest indoor rainforest, the canvas of the sky barely ripped behind him).
“That’s very sort of Truman Show-esque. He’s gone to the very edge of that artificial world,” mentioned Nelson of the photograph.
More than something, although, there’s a sense of disappointment that permeates the assortment: taxidermied museum dioramas of endangered species; vibrant fish shoals swimming in darkish aquariums with plastic pipes, captive elephants paraded to a showering spot for the profit of flocks of Instagram influencers; a caged polar bear crouched beside a mural depicting an Arctic panorama it is going to by no means know.
“What we replaced real nature with becomes an unwitting monument, really, for what we’ve lost,” Nelson noticed.
The time period “Anthropocene” refers to the age of humans. It’s not an official epoch — but. But Nelson believes firmly that, in years to come back, immediately’s society will mark the starting of this new period, evident in elevated carbon dioxide ranges from fossil fuels, an abundance of microplastics, and layers of concrete.
“The usefulness of renaming an epoch, in this instance, would be to focus people’s attention on our impact on the planet,” mentioned Nelson. As he sees it, “the language of (environmental action) has become sort of tired or stale; you become kind of immune to it.”
He needed to counter this collective numbness with visuals that “make you think or feel differently.”
Bleak however lovely, his pictures reveal a paradox.
Less than 3% of the world’s land stays ecologically intact, according to a 2021 study, but nature-based tourism and biophilic structure, a design philosophy that mimics nature, are surging in recognition. Global wildlife populations have dropped by a median of 73% in the last 50 years; in the meantime, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, globally.
Arctic ice sheets are on track for catastrophic “runaway melting” that may see rising sea ranges devastate coastal communities. But at the identical time, cocktail bars in Dubai are importing ancient glacier ice from Greenland to offer the rich with pollution-free drinks.
“We’re engaged in creating an illusion for ourselves; either to hide what we’re doing, or as something that we can retreat into for reassurance, because we crave the very thing that we’ve lost,” mentioned Nelson.
There’s a spectrum to the phantasm, starting from managed out of doors landscapes to contrived scenes that merely evoke the concept of nature.
Nelson likens it to quick meals: “We don’t want to grow it and prepare it; we just want it delivered to us with no thorns, no danger, with a nice walkway in a car park. We want to consume it and then come home. We are complicit in it.”
Despite his criticisms of the “consumerist” qualities of immediately’s manufactured pure experiences, Nelson emphasizes that he’s not essentially in opposition to any of these items: folks ought to take pleasure in safaris, be awe-inspired at aquariums, relish their time in an area park, and never “destroy ourselves with guilt.”
“We have this enduring craving for nature, for a connection to the natural world. That’s real,” he noticed.
There’s a restrict to what the particular person can do, too: the sort of sweeping change required to guard the setting wants to come back from main companies and political leaders, which, in Nelson’s view, is sorely missing.
“It’s important to remind ourselves, it’s not that we don’t have ideas for things that can be done,” he mentioned, reeling off an extended checklist of environmental insurance policies that would change the course of local weather change.
Perhaps this e book, with its stark juxtaposition of astonishing wildlife and human interference, is usually a reminder of simply how in management of the world we’re — with the energy to rework it in our personal picture, or shield and restore the landscapes we really feel so related to.
“When you’re surrounded by something so much, it can become utterly invisible,” Nelson mentioned. “Photography is a way of trying to make it visible again, trying to expose it for what it actually is.”
After the name ends, I can’t unsee the Anthropocene phantasm in my dwelling. It’s not simply the anthropomorphic tiger on the wall. It’s a Himalayan rock salt lamp, a plastic monstera plant and paper carnations. A cockatoo-shaped ceramic jug subsequent to pine-scented candles and an aluminum “lemon-wedge” bottle opener. Floral-print cushions and a jungle-themed throw.
It’s onerous to shake Nelson’s phrases about our collective complicity; our willingness to take part in reconstructing the pure world, as an alternative of saving it.