WASHINGTON — The animals depicted, directly or indirectly, in the National Museum of Natural History’s “Unsettled Nature” include birds, snakes and elephants. But the creature that dominates, while unseen in any of the artworks, is the one invoked in the show’s subtitle: “Artists Reflect on the Age of Humans.”

The first art exhibition of its kind in the museum’s 111-year history, the show is an unprecedented endeavor prompted by extraordinary developments – none of them favorable to the continued study of natural history. The museum staff decided the situation is so complex that they had to turn to photography and conceptual art to address it.

The organizers didn’t want to provide “a simple answer,” according to co-curator Scott Wing during a recent walk-through of the show. Still, Wing added, “The thing that you shouldn’t conclude is that you can ignore your relationship to the environment.”

Just seven artists are featured, but their pieces are large and powerful. Chosen with the aid of co-curator Joanna Marsh, who works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the contributors include well-established as well as lesser-known artists.

The most prominent are Edward Burtynsky and David Maisel, who make large-format aerial photographs of industrial scars on natural landscapes. These can be extremely, if disturbingly, beautiful. Maisel’s view of an open-pit American gold mine shows a pool of mercury-laced water edged in an astonishing green. Similarly vivid shades characterize Burtynsky’s picture of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill painted the water with inky patterns.

Both photographers peruse Chile’s bone-dry Atacama Desert, where lithium mining has left a patchwork of rectangular pools whose water glistens in various shades of poison. Yet the devastation, Wing noted, allows the manufacturing of batteries that power cleaner technologies.

Bethany Taylor also employs aerial photos, although she turns them into tapestries such as “Unraveling Ecologies – Northeast,” which depicts the brawn of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Digital images are woven into fabric with an automated Jacquard loom and surrounded by what the Florida-based artist calls “fiber drawings” of animals – sometimes in skeletal form – and linked by lengths of thread to represent nature’s connective web.

Ellie Irons and Dornith Doherty both use photography, albeit in different ways, to celebrate the indomitability of plants. Irons documented two of what she terms “feral landscapes” in Brooklyn, showing them alternately lush with weeds and stripped of them. She presents the pictures out of chronological order, so observers can’t tell whether these plots are returning to nature or being forced back into concrete straitjackets.

Doherty takes the micro view, depicting specimens from international seed banks in standard or X-ray photos. The Texan’s subjects include blight-resistant potatoes and Wollemi pines, which grow naturally only in a section of Australia recently threatened by massive wildfires. Considered long-extinct until 1994, the tree is now cultivated in special collections worldwide, including at the U.S. Botanic Garden across the National Mall from the museum.

Andrew S. Yang works with animals as well as plants, pursuing an idea that’s at once ingenious and chilling. He gathers a few of the hundreds of millions of birds killed in collisions with buildings annually, and retrieves from their stomachs some of the seeds they ate. The Chicago-based artist’s “Flying Gardens of Maybe” arrays photos of dead birds from Washington, Baltimore and the artist’s hometown, interspersed with mirrors. These can represent the windows and walls that killed the animals, but also implicate the viewer. Nearby are a few plants germinated from the recovered seeds, offering tiny rebirths amid the lethal tableaux.

While Yang’s project can be seen as partly hopeful, Jenny Kendler’s is entirely grim. “Music for Elephants” is a 1921 player piano whose keys are made, of course, from elephant ivory. Contemporary piano keys use synthetic materials, but ivory poaching continues and is even increasing. So the Chicago-based artist converted projections about the killings into a mournful, skittering tune designed to conclude in 25 years, when all wild African elephants are likely to be dead. That’s the harshest message delivered by this show, but it’s hardly the only one to be deeply unsettling.