Once there was Nature: It was awful. Cold made people live in caves. Heat destroyed their crops. There were floods and droughts and hurricanes and earthquakes. Dread animals stalked the forests and savannas. People made sacrifices — sometimes each other — to placate Nature.

Then they learned to build comfortable shelters and cisterns. Poets wrote lyrically about mountains and clouds and flowers and birds. Artists found Nature sublime. Animals were so Disneyfied people stopped eating the critters and became vegetarians. Nowadays Nature is man-made.

“Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video” has many examples of manmade Nature. Noriko Furunishi uses digital technology to create landscapes. “Untitled (Grey Dry Stream)” and “Untitled (Tecopa L)”, both 2005, were patshkied together from images of the Southern California desert. We see sand and scrub and rocks, layers of tan and gray and pale green, but they are askew because the constituent parts were taken at different angles.Some are upside-down as if you were looking at this fictive vista standing on your head.

Harri Kallio’s “Domain du Chasseur #1, Mauritius” (2001), “Lion Mountain #1, Mauritius” (2001), and “Lion Mountain #5, Mauritius” (2004) document the dodo and its habitat. The dodo is famously dead, so Kallio has constructed models of the extinct bird and photographed them on the island in the southwest Indian Ocean where they were discovered in 1598. The dodo is an interesting looking creature, with a peculiar beak, and Kallio’s pictures give it as much character as Sir John Tenniel’s drawing in Chapter 3 of “Alice in Wonderland.” There are a bevy of dodos in the foreground of “Domain du Chasseur #1”: They are dramatically backlit, but because the scene behind them is frontlit there is an air of artificiality about the picture, as if it was a diorama at the Museum of Natural History.

The three stagy black and white landscapes created by Joan Fontcuberta are the product of Terragen, “a computer program originally created for military and scientific uses that turns maps into images of three-dimensional terrain.” Instead of maps, Ms. Fontcuberta feeds the computer pictures by well-known photographers, so Bill Brandt’s “Gull’s Nest, Isle of Skye” (1947) becomes her “Orogenesis: Brandt” (2006). Ms. Fontcuberta’s images all look like mountain ranges on the covers of paperback sci-fi novels, and none of the examples at ICP is as absorbing as the work it was derived from.

“Rabin Park” and “The Saints’ Forest” (both 2005), by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, are two pleasant but unexceptional pictures of forests in Israel. What is creative is the wall text. The paragraph discloses a purported Israeli policy of destroying Palestinian villages and then planting the land with pines. Messrs. Broomberg and Chanarin have elsewhere described their work as “forensic,” implying we are at the scene of a crime. The wall text tells us “The depopulated stillness of ‘Rabin Park’ and ‘The Saints’ Forest’ reads as a metaphor for historical erasure … ” Is “historical erasure” a euphemism for “ethnic cleansing”? Is there some rhetorical line ICP is too delicate to cross? This scabrous innuendo would more properly be dealt with on the editorial pages of this paper than in the arts section, but it is consonant in general with the politics of the museum. When ICP exhibits a photograph of the tens of thousands of acres of forest that have deliberately been torched by Arabs, I will upgrade my membership.

“Ecotopia” has works by about 40 artists from around the world, although most are American or European. Its burden is to “shatter … the stereotypes of landscape and nature photography,” to “boldly examine … images of destructive ecological engagement,” and … like that. But there seems to be some confusion. As detailed above, many of the artists are more interested in their ersatz constructions than in the actual world, what’s really out there. Or consider “Rescue Effort” (2006) by brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez, a picture of a man lying face down in mud from which other men are trying to lift him. A tsunami victim? A Katrina casualty? No, the picture is “elaborately staged.”

Even more bogus is Wang Qingsong’s “Come! Come!” (2005), three chromogenic prints each 90 1/2 inches by 72 inches. That means it covers well over 135 square feet. All this wall space is given over to a “mock demonstration”: In the first image the rather amused “protestors” carry signs from China’s political past; in the third “we see that the reverse sides of their placards bear advertising slogans boosting … consumer products.” The middle panel is “an image of the debris the protesters have left behind.” Or rather, the debris the photographer has placed as if it was left behind. What am I supposed to learn from this put-up job?

Am I alone in thinking there is something bizarre about Simon Stalling’s “One Ton, II” (2005)? Next to his five identical platinum/palladium prints, the text tells us:

Mr. Stalling “demonstrates an abiding interest in ecologically sound creative practices through both his subject matter and his mode of production. The title of ‘One Ton, II,’ a group of five identical handmade platinum prints, refers to the fact that one ton of ore was needed to produce the few precious ounces of platinum used to make these prints. Putting an even finer point on his critique, the prints depict the South African quarry from which the ore was extracted, and the miners whose toil on the site produced the materials from which these prints derive. Starling’s work encourages us to be skeptical of the popular notion that art emerges from an insular, creative bubble, and suggests the complex networks of historical, economic, and geopolitical forces that bring artworks into existence.”

Then why waste “the few precious ounces of platinum”on five prints which are all exactly alike, and none intrinsically interesting?

Most of the photographers in “Ecotopia” have used Nature for their own ends as surely as any tract housing developer or industrial polluter. There are a few exceptions — some quite wonderful, such as Alessandra Sanguinetti, Mitch Epstein, and Catherine Chalmers. But nearly all the others produce works that are conceptual — that is, art in the head — and have about them a hectoring, smarmy didacticism. The show means to distance itself from Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Edward Weston, Minor White, et al., but what those artists brought to their work that seems absent at ICP is a profound sense of awe before the created world.

Until January 7 (1133 Sixth Ave. at 43rd Street, 212-857-0000).