#zed nelson

Humans have concentrated in cities. We have separated ourselves from the land we once roamed – and from other animals. But somewhere deep within, a desire for contact with nature remains. So, as we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial experience of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Over the past six years I have visited 14 countries across four continents, observing how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly artificial landscapes. We holiday on synthetic beaches, attend zoos that display living animals in artistically rendered dioramas of their natural habitats, and visit amusement parks that offer a “jungle experience”. We gaze at aquatic creatures in artificially lit sea-worlds, and at polar bears in Chinese shopping malls, pacing out their existence in glazed enclosures of plastic ice and snow. We ski on artificial slopes in Dubai, while outside the desert temperature is 48C.

Walt Disney World in Florida covers more than 39 square miles (100 sq km), making it almost the same size as Paris. Completed in 1971, it is the largest and most visited theme park on the planet. In 2022, more than 47 million people visited Walt Disney World, where total revenue was $28.7bn. Nine million of those people visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It was here that I visited Disney’s version of Africa, where you can observe elephants, rhinos and fake villages (without leaving your electric mobility scooter with built-in cup holder). Experiences on offer include Kilimanjaro Safari and Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail, offering safe views of the world’s largest primates, set to music. At the Tusker House restaurant you encounter Donald Duck in a colonial-era safari suit and pith helmet, before setting off on the Wild Africa Trek to see the rhinos.

In the numerous theme parks and zoos I visited, I realised a strange thing: in these places, nothing happens. There are no surprises. There may be a wave machine, or a volcano that puffs smoke on the hour, or a rollercoaster offering momentary thrills. But nothing changes, good or bad. Everything repeats itself. Nothing happens unless it’s part of the show. Here, nature is made safe – no thorns, biting insects, flooding or unpredictable creatures. This is nature only as spectacle.

Even the surviving scraps of nature in the real world are becoming packaged for our consumption.

Yosemite national park in California receives more than 4 million visitors a year, almost all of whom arrive by car. I found myself in a long traffic jam of SUVs crawling through the park, engines and air-conditioning running. Occasionally, a window glides open and an arm extends out to take a photo on a smartphone.

Ski tourists are becoming more demanding, too. Everybody wants a winter wonderland, despite warming temperatures. According to the European Environment Agency, the length of snow seasons in the northern hemisphere has decreased by five days each decade since the 1970s. In Italy, 87% of ski slopes were kept operational with artificial snow in 2018, the first year I visited. Many ski resorts use artificial snow to extend their seasons, and some now rely almost entirely on artificial snow production.

Hotels in Asia offer live penguin encounters in restaurants, while South African lion farms offer tourists the chance to pet lion cubs and walk with tame adult lions. Later these same animals will be sold to visiting trophy hunters who want an effortless experience of hunting in “the wild”. Even the great previously untamed places are under assault.

Just 3% of the world’s land now remains ecologically intact, with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat.

Charles Darwin controversially recategorised man as just another species – one twig on the grand tree of life. But modern humans are no longer just another species. We are the first to reshape the Earth’s ecosystem. We have become the masters of our planet and pivotal to the destiny of life on Earth. But it seems we are not prepared – ethically, emotionally or scientifically – for the enormous side-effects of our new and recklessly wielded power over our planet. In his 1989 book, The End of Nature, the writer Bill McKibben predicted a day when our changed environment would surpass the capacity of our environmental vocabulary. The remade Earth, he argued, would set record after record – hottest, coldest, driest – before people would be forced to seek new ways of describing and understanding events. For a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would simply refuse to change their minds.

LS 28 | Leisure Time          

Zed Nelson - Leisure World

LS 28 | Leisure Time          

Zed Nelson - Leisure World