Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

In this event, Allison Carruth will speak about her new book, Novel Ecologies, in conversation with Vinson Cunningham.

Novel Ecologies investigates a distinctly California paradigm shaped by the tech industry—what Allison Carruth terms Nature Remade. Through three case studies—synthetic wildlife, the digital cloud and space colonization—the book challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with planetary-scale technological intervention. Against the world-building gambits of Google, Open AI, SpaceX and a host of start-ups, Carruth marshals the work of writers and artists who imagine provisionally hopeful futures while refusing to forget histories of power and exploitation that have made the world what it is.

Speakers

Allison Carruth is professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads the environmental media and climate storytelling studio Blue Lab. From 2016-2020, she was the founding director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of an environmental media collaboration featuring essays and documentary films developed in partnership with and distributed by KCET/PBS SoCal. She is the previous author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food.

Vinson Cunningham is a Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities Council, a McGraw Professor of Writing in the Program in Journalism, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2024 and was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2021-2022. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and is a co-host of Critics at Large, The New Yorker’s weekly podcast about culture and the arts. His début novel, Great Expectations, came out in 2024.