This Land Is My Land; Capturing humanity's conflict with nature.(Ecotopia)

Byline: Jennie Yabroff

There are few glimpses of utopia in "Ecotopia," the new show at the International Center of Photography in NewYork. A more apt title might be "Man vs. Nature," as the message of nearly all the works is that our relationship with the environment has become dangerously antagonistic.

The show opens with Robert Adams's stark, archival-looking photographs of decimated tree stumps in a clear-cut Oregon forest. The images, part of his "Turning Back" series, were made on a trip Adams took retracing Lewis and Clark's Northwest expedition along the Columbia River--an early American example of man's encroachment on the natural environment. On an adjacent wall, Mitch Epstein's large-format color print "Biloxi, Mississippi" shows nature getting revenge: a mattress, sheets, torn plastic and other debris hang from a tree like ragged leaves, the work of Hurricane Katrina.

"Ecotopia" (through Jan. 7) includes the work of 39 artists representing 14 countries; most consider the tension between civilization and the environment from a global perspective. The team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla trace industrialization along the banks of China's Pearl River for their video "Amphibious." Mary Mattingly's staged, digitally manipulated photographs imagine a borderless future where nomads roam the earth in "global uniforms." And Lou Dematteis and Kayana Szymczak's digital image projection "Crude Reflections" documents ChevronTexaco's disposal of oil waste in the Ecuadoran Amazon.

That work, for one, comes across as heavy-handed; the charged language of the accompanying text blunts the effect of the images. A photograph of an old man on his deathbed is arresting for its painterly composition, the cheery striped hammock a brutal contrast to the man's sunken eyes. But a paragraph linking the man's stomach cancer to the oil deposits feels unconvincing, and unnecessary.

The more eloquent pieces allow the images to speak for themselves, and inject a note of humor--even ...