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“The Anthropocene illusion” refers to two different things: Zed Nelson’s 2025 photography project about curated encounters with nature, and Peter Haff’s 2018 argument about agency in the technosphere. Nelson’s work asks what managed, staged experiences of nature reveal about our longing for connection while environmental destruction continues. Haff uses the phrase for a belief that agency belongs only to humans. The distinction matters: one is a visual documentary project; the other is a theoretical claim.
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What is Zed Nelson’s The Anthropocene Illusion about?
Nelson’s project examines the tension between the human desire to connect with nature and the ongoing destruction of natural environments. It looks at places where nature is encountered through designed or managed settings, including theme parks, zoos, natural history museums, national parks, safaris and alpine resorts. These settings are not presented simply as fake nature; they are a lens for considering how people seek contact with the natural world through experiences shaped by human choices.
Made over six years and across four continents, the project was published as a casebound photography book with 196 pages, 75 colour images, extended image descriptions and an essay by Nelson. The Sony World Photography Awards’ 2025 announcement recognized Anthropocene Illusion in its Professional competition. The Anthropocene Illusion by Zed Nelson is the directly relevant book edition; retail availability can change.
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The project’s visual argument is interpretive, not a statistical demonstration of environmental trends. Its photographs invite readers to consider the distance between staged or managed encounters with nature and the wider environmental conditions around them; claims about those conditions require evidence beyond the images themselves.
What did Peter Haff mean by “the Anthropocene Illusion”?
In a 2018 essay, technosphere researcher Peter Haff used the same phrase for a different idea: “The Anthropocene Illusion is the belief that agency is a property exclusive to humans and is lacking from technological artifacts and systems.” In Haff’s account, people often treat the modern world as the result of human intentions alone. He argues instead that technological systems and artifacts participate in the dynamics of the technosphere.
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That is Haff’s theoretical position, not a settled scientific consensus and not the subject of Nelson’s photography book. Haff’s related essay makes the point that assigning all agency to human wants overlooks other sources of agency in the world. His argument asks readers to reconsider how agency is distributed across people and technological systems; Nelson’s project examines how people stage and experience nature.
How the two uses of the phrase differ
| Aspect | Zed Nelson’s project | Peter Haff’s concept |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Curated or managed experiences of nature and the human desire for connection. | Assumptions about agency and the technosphere. |
| Form | A documentary photography project and physical book. | A conceptual argument in a 2018 essay and follow-on writing. |
| Kind of claim | A visual and interpretive critique. | A systems-level theoretical account of agency. |
| Best evidence for its claims | The project description and the book’s photographs and text. | Haff’s essays for his argument; environmental statistics should be supported separately. |
Why the “Anthropocene” matters here
“Anthropocene” is often used broadly to describe the scale of human influence on Earth. That use does not by itself establish that the term has formal geological-epoch status. The European Environment Agency’s discussion of human influence is framed independently of that classification question.
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The EEA briefing describes environmental change through climate, biodiversity and ecosystem disruption. It cites estimates that humans account for 36% of total mammal biomass, livestock 60% and wild mammals 4%, attributed to Bar-On and colleagues in 2018. It also reports the IPBES 2019 assessment that 75% of terrestrial and 66% of marine environments were “severely altered” by human actions. These are attributed estimates and findings, not timeless measurements.
The same EEA briefing summarizes the IPCC’s 2022 assessment as finding that human activities caused approximately 1.2°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels on average. The figure belongs to that assessment and its period; it should not be mistaken for a current temperature reading. The briefing also notes that biodiversity loss and climate change share underlying drivers and can interact, attributing that formulation to Pörtner and colleagues in 2021.
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How to read Nelson’s images alongside the environmental evidence
Nelson’s project can prompt questions about what people seek from nature and how built environments shape that encounter. The environmental statistics offer a separate kind of evidence: they describe impacts and trends as attributed by organizations and authors. Keeping those forms of evidence distinct prevents two common misreadings: that every managed nature experience is necessarily meaningless, or that photographs alone establish the scale or cause of environmental change.
The EEA also presents ideas such as the Symbiocene, Chthulucene or “tentacular” thinking, deep ecology and strong sustainability as ways to reconsider relationships between humans and nature. These are interpretive frameworks, not established geological periods or universally accepted scientific conclusions. They can help frame questions raised by Nelson’s work, but they are not claims made by the photographs themselves.
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