Altered Landscapes at the Nevada Museum of Art Shows Humans’ Impact on the Environment

There is no more wilderness -- almost everything, everywhere on this planet has been affected directly or indirectly by humans. Futurist Bruce Sterling put this idea forward at the recent A + E Conference at the <a href="http://www.nevadaart.org/ae/center">Nevada Center for Art and Environment</a>. Fittingly, that same weekend the Center debuted its photo exhibition "<a href="http://www.nevadaart.org/exhibitions/detail?eid=197">Altered Landscapes</a>," a collection of works by photographers documenting, examining, celebrating, and condemning our overwhelming impact on the planet. Above, Pipo Nguyen-duy's "Lazy Boy" shows an arm chair is the middle of a forest. Click on to see more of these stunning images.

The scope of the exhibition covers everything from mining, development, and munitions research to the simple and strange, like a deer getting caught in a barbed wire fence.

While it's easy to look at a lot of human impact as negative, or catastrophic, the exhibition paints a picture of complexity.

That's a fake coyote. But the sentiment strikes an eerie chord. In Amy Stein's "Howl," the animal cries at a false moon-- the streetlight of a parking lot.

In David Maisel's "Terminal Mirage 13," industrial runoff becomes something translucent and gorgeous.

The exhibition takes place on the top floor of the Nevada Museum of Art, which also houses the Center for the Art and Environment, a very rare an unique institution.

Most of the photographs are pulled from the museum's signature collection, entitled, appropriately, “The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection." This collection includes almost nine hundred photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a big, heavy book-- a publication examining the depth of the collection and the extent to which humans have altered the planet.