Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

Tracing the convergence of ecology and engineering over the last three decades, this book pinpoints a new environmental paradigm that the author calls Nature Remade.

Allison Carruth’s Novel Ecologies shows how the tech industry has taken up the wilderness mythologies that shaped one strain of American environmentalism over the last century. Calling this twenty-first-century environmental imagination Nature Remade, Carruth describes a distinctly West Coast framework that is at once nostalgic and futuristic. Through three case studies (synthetic wildlife, the digital cloud, and space colonization), the book shows Nature Remade to be a quasi-religious belief in venture capitalism and big tech. This paradigm thus imagines a future in which species, ecosystems, and entire planets are re-generated and re-created through engineering.

Novel Ecologies challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with ever larger-scale forms of technological intervention. Against the new worlds conjured by Google, Meta, Open AI, Amazon, SpaceX, and a host of lesser-known start-ups, Carruth marshals writers and artists who imagine provisionally hopeful environmental futures while refusing to forget the histories that have made the world what it is. On this track of the book, Carruth discusses the works of Octavia Butler, Jennifer Egan, Ruth Ozeki, Tracy K. Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, and and many more. Their novels, poems, installation artworks, and expressive media offer a speculative world built on livable communities rather than engineered lifeforms.

Allison Carruth is professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. She is the cofounder and faculty director of Blue Lab, an environmental media, art, and research group at Princeton. Since 2017, she has produced original environmental documentaries and multimedia story series in collaboration with filmmakers, journalists, artists and others. She is the author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food and coauthor with Amy L. Tigner of Literature and Food Studies. Eliza Griswold is the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church.  Her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She writes for The New Yorker, and is the Ferris Professor and Director of the Program in Journalism at Princeton University.