Novel Ecologies - by Allison Carruth (Paperback)

About the Book

"Allison Carruth's Novel Ecologies traces the convergence of ecology and engineering through three decades of literature, art, and popular writing. It pinpoints a new environmental imagination that Carruth calls Nature Remade, a distinctly West Coast framework drawing on fields from architecture and civil engineering to molecular biology and geoscience. At once futuristic and backward looking, Nature Remade at its worst is a quasi-religious conviction that only a redoubled capitalism can save us from ecological collapse. Carruth's account of this new, high-tech environmental disposition ranges across synthetic biology, de-extinction, and the Mars race to the feverish imaginations of players within Google, OpenAI, and many less well-known labs. Alongside these, Carruth discusses world-making powers of some remarkable recent fictions, most notably the multispecies multiverse of Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being; the radical, post-tech future of Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot novellas; and Jeff VanderMeer's dystopian Borne series. Other storytellers figuring in Carruth's book are Saya Woolfalk, Jennifer Egan, Richard Powers, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro), Natalie Jeremijenko, T. C. Boyle, Tracy K. Smith, and Octavia Butler"--

Book Synopsis

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, Becky Chambers, Jennifer Egan, Ruth Ozeki, Craig Santos Perez, Tracy K. Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, Saya Woolfalk, and many more. Their novels, poems, installation artworks, and expressive media offer a speculative world built on livable communities rather than engineered lifeforms.

Review Quotes

"The climate catastrophe is here: with that knowledge confirmed, the next major question is about how humans should respond. . . . Novel Ecologies [is] a kind of allegory for the way Carruth understands the relationship between humans and their environments. The book is not arguing for a mode of progress or growth; it is not building toward a solution to climate catastrophe. Instead, Carruth lets readers pause and think through their assumptions about their own relationship with technology and their surrounding environments, building toward 'the slow, collective, revolutionary work of repair.'"

-- "ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment"

"This seemingly contradictory blend of environmental romanticism, techno-optimism, conspicuous 'green' consumption, and eco-hubris that occupies Allison Carruth in her new book . . . Novel Ecologies is born of an act of rethinking and deliberate refusal: though she initially imagined her book as dedicated to careful documentation and critique of Nature Remade, Carruth pivoted her focus to alternative projects for describing our current environmental crisis, our tangled relationships with it, and the kinds of futures we want to work toward for ourselves and other inhabitants of the Earth."-- "Imaginary Papers"

"Novel Ecologies is the first full-scale study of a pervasive but under-examined phenomenon: Silicon Valley eco-optimism: a tech-driven, future-colonizing enterprise eager to replace a damaged planet with Nature Remade. Against this fantasy of green capitalism, Carruth contrasts the work of novelists and poets--Ruth Ozeki, Becky Chambers, Jeff VanderMeer, Octavia Butler, Tracy K. Smith and others--who foreground the relational fabric between the human and nonhuman worlds. This eye-opening account transforms environmental humanities, redefining it as a public-facing, urgently actionable field."-- "Wai Chee Dimock, author of "Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival""

"Carruth deftly interrogates the utopianism of technoculture, demonstrating the fractious intimacies of worldmaking and world-destruction in technological developments and their artistic reconfigurations. Novel Ecologies is on firm ground with science and technology without being beholden to their superiority framework and infallible logic. Carruth's inspiring analysis of the power of artistic practices to disrupt and reroute critical energies toward planetary flourishing, is breathtaking. In this ode to livingness amidst a reckoning with devastation, Carruth has written a book that we need now and that is a testament to the future."-- "Cajetan Iheka, author of "African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics""

"This book charts the expansive digital ecologies that permeate contemporary life, from the technological imaginaries of Nature Remade to the fictional storyworlds that dwell in alternate ways of living. Novel Ecologies is a beautifully-written and carefully-articulated vision that gives us seeds of possible futures yet to be grown. An essential text for the environmental humanities today."-- "Nicole Starosielski, author of "The Undersea Network""

About the Author

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.