We tend to view the world as though there's a line drawn through the middle of it, separating the human from the natural. For photographer Lucas Foglia, the line is faint, if present at all, just he uses the meeting point of the 2 forces information technology's meant to divide as the footing for his new collection of work, Human Nature, which will be published in the U.S. in October.

"With photography, I create stories nearly the conflicting forces of modernity and nature; how nosotros dispense the Globe to sap its resources, and how some seek to restore information technology," Foglia tells Fast Company in an electronic mail. In Human Nature, we see a McDonalds covered with a grass roof, and a lush aviary in Singapore enclosed in drinking glass. We come across a lumber mill in the basin of evergreen-filled mountains in Oregon; we come across a controlled burn eating through the forests in California. The photographs move through cities, forests, farms, deserts, and oceans, documenting the subtle and not-so-subtle traces of human dependence and interference.

Homo Nature is available now hither. [Photo: courtesy Nazraeli Printing ]

Human Nature traces the various means that we collaborate with landscapes we think of equally "natural," and our attempts to bring the natural earth into the environments we've built for ourselves. Throughout all of the images, there's an obvious tension between the sheer vastness and power of the wilderness and our pocket-size attempts to control information technology: In the midst of a giant conifer forest in Oregon, for example, a lone woodcutter appears as a tiny speck. Looking at that image, yous might wonder how humans could mayhap make a dent in nature. Just Foglia'south photographs strength a confrontation with how all of our individual actions–and years of disregard and destruction–have amounted to the state of environmental deposition we're currently facing. And at the same time, Foglia manages to capture how, despite all of our human-built progress, we're even so dependent on the natural world for our health and livelihoods.

Foglia, whose previous projects focus on people who have left cities and suburbs to live off-grid, and the current economy in the rural American West, grew upwards on a small farm around 30 miles east of New York City. A large forest bordered the property, and he remembers playing there as a kid while his neighbors ignored information technology, commuting instead each day into Manhattan. He ever had the thought that his family and their farm was shielded by the forces of urbanization and suburbanization swirling simply outside. But when Hurricane Sandy flooded the farm and blew downwards the oldest trees in the nearby forest, Foglia began to reckon with the pervasive achieve of those forces. "Scientists linked the storm to climate change acquired by human being activity," Foglia says. "I realized that if humans are changing the weather, then there is no place on World that is unaltered past people."

Kenzie inside a Melting Glacier, Juneau Icefield Enquiry Program, Alaska. [Photograph: Lucas Foglia]

Sandy sparked the idea for Human Nature, and as Foglia began traveling to produce the series, he encountered the visible effects of climatic change: melting glaciers, dried-upward lands, overflowing rivers. Scientists are familiar with these warning signs, Foglia says, but "amid all of the news stories and political arguments virtually climatic change, most people don't know what the procedure of the scientific discipline looks like." He began photographing the researchers whose job it is to measure the air, water, and land to amass the data to back upward the changes facing that political scrutiny. He captured a scientist measuring the velocity of a glacier in Juneau, Alaska, and some other taking sample readings from the Geysers in California. In a wide-open field in Colorado, he photographed two researchers preparing to launch a conditions balloon to measure weather in the atmosphere.

But Foglia also captured a woman perched on a mountaintop in Utah, hooked up to an EEG automobile measuring her cognition in the wild, and the subject of a stress-reduction study seating in a lab in Sweden, staring at a wood through a virtual reality headset. "In a time when Americans spend 93% of their lives indoors, I photographed neuroscientists measuring how time in nature benefits us, using science to encourage people to become outside," Foglia says.

The tension in Foglia'south images is undeniable. Humans both underappreciate nature in its purest state and exploit its resource to farther their ain pursuits. Human Nature captures flesh and its surroundings at the time when homo activity has begun to eat its ain tail by damaging the country from which we take our livelihoods. Foglia'south piece of work is not prescriptive: He's not using his images to button an agenda or make any sweeping claims. But if we were to look for visual evidence of when our subversive reliance on nature tipped toward besides much, his photographs might just be it.