I travelled the globe to document how humans became addicted to faking the natural world. Here’s what I found | Climate crisis

TAnthropocene is a new term used by scientists to describe our age. While scientific experts compete for the start date, many indicate about 200 years ago, when the accelerated effects of human activity on the ecosphere were turbocharged by the industrial revolution. Our planet would have crossed a new era: from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, the age of the human.

The layers of rock created under our feet today reveal the impact of human activity long after our departure. Future geologists will find radioactive isotopes from nuclear bomb tests, huge plastic concentrations, the spinoffs of the fossil fuel fire and large cement deposits used to build our cities. Meanwhile, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the British Zoological Society shows an average decrease of 73% of wild animal populations on earth in the past 50 years, while we push creatures and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.

Humans have concentrated in cities. We separated from the earth that we have once traversed – and other animals. But somewhere deep, a desire for contact with nature remains. Thus, while we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of an artificial experience managed by scene of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Over the past six years, I have visited 14 countries on four continents, observing how we humans dive into increasingly artificial landscapes. We vacation on the synthetic beaches, assist the zoos which present live animals in artistic dioramas of their natural habitats and visits amusement parks which offer a “jungle experience”. We look at aquatic creatures in the world of sea artificially lit and polar bears in Chinese shopping centers, reducing their existence in glass enclosures of plastic and snow ice. We skied on artificial slopes in Dubai, while apart from the temperature of the desert is 48 ° C.

Tropical Islands Holiday Resort in Germany is a short trip by train from Berlin. Installed in a large hermetically sealed dome, the station offers a sandy beach, an interior tropical forest of 10,000 square meters, a waterfall and a marsh of mangrove with living turtles, dragon fish, flamingos and macaws. It is so large that you can roll in a hot air balloon inside the dome, hovering above the crowd on the synthetic beach below.

Walt Disney World in Florida covers more than 39 square miles (100 km2), which is 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 income was $ 28.7 billion. Nine million of these people visited the Disney animal kingdom. It is here that I visited the Disney version of Africa, where you can observe the elephants, the rhinos and the false villages (without leaving your electric mobility scooter with an integrated cup holder). The proposed experiences include Kilimandjaro Safari and Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail, offering a sure view of the biggest primates in the world, set to music. At the Tusker House restaurant, you meet Donald Duck in a safari costume and a colonial marrow helmet, before leaving for the wild trek of Africa to see the rhinos.

In the many themed parks and zoos that I visited, I achieved a strange thing: in these places, nothing occurs. There is no surprise. There may be a wave machine, or a volcano that blows smoke per hour, or roller coaster offering momentary sensations. But nothing changes, good or bad. Everything is repeated. Nothing happens unless it is part of the show. Here, nature is safe – no thorns, biting insects, flooding or unpredictable creatures. It is only nature that the show.

Even the surviving remains of nature in the real world become excited for our consumption.

The Yosemite National Park in California receives more than 4 million visitors per year, all of which arrive by car. I found myself in a long traffic jam of SUVs crawling in the park, engines and air conditioning. Sometimes a window opens and an arm extends to take a photo on a smartphone.

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

I saw whole hills covered with snow pistols working all night. A typical complex that I visited in the Italian dolomites had a power plant of five megawatts to manage its 250 snow cannons. The owner said to me: “We are doing better snow than natural things. Over the past 20 years, tourists expect perfect quality champagne snow.”

Hotels in Asia offer live penguin meetings in restaurants, while South African Lion farms offer tourists the opportunity to pet lions and walk with tamed adult lions. Later, these same animals will be sold to visiting trophy hunters who want an effort without hunting effort in “The Wild”. Even large, previously saved places are assumed.

Only 3% of the land in the world now remain ecologically intact, with healthy populations of all its animals of origin and non -disturbed habitat.

Charles Darwin has remedied man like any other species – a twig on the big tree of life. But modern humans are no longer just another species. We are the first to reshape the Earth ecosystem. We have become the masters of our planet and pivot of the destiny of life on earth. But it seems that we are not prepared – ethically, emotionally or scientifically – for the enormous side effects of our new reckless power on our planet. In his 1989 book, The End of Nature, the writer Bill McKibben predicted a day when our changed environment would go beyond the capacity of our environmental vocabulary. The refused land, he argued, would establish a record after record – the hottest, cold, driest – before people are forced to seek new ways to describe and understand events. For a long time, he suggested, confronted with evidence of a changing world, humans would simply refuse to change their minds.

Social media and the incessant flow of visual stimulation and internet information gave birth to a state of unreality, where we no longer seek the truth, but only a kind of astonishment.

Our future as a species depends on new urgent evaluations of the relationship of humanity with the natural world. We have divorced nature, but we want a link with the very thing on which we turned our backs. By surrounding us with simulated recreation of nature, we create involuntary monuments to the very things that we have lost.

We will need a paradigm shift in our priorities and empathies to change. But it is at an industrial and political level that change must occur. We already have a list of large ideas: protected natural habitats, re -enact, sustainable agricultural practices, animal ethical treatment, renewable energies and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and plastic pollution.

We know what can be done. We just need to find leaders and captains of industry who want to do so.