Novel Ecologies

Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

Professor Allison Carruth

$190.95

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Chicago Press
25 March 2025

The Arts: General & Reference; Literacy; Semiotics & semiology; Teaching of a specific subject

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. Coining this twenty-first-century environmental imagination Nature Remade, Carruth describes a distinctly West Coast framework that is at once futuristic and backward-looking. 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.

By: Professor Allison Carruth
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780226837727
ISBN 10: 0226837726
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 25 March 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

List of Illustrations Prologue Introduction 1. A Tale for the Time Being 2. The Nature of Tech 3. A Psalm for the Wild-Built 4. Wilderness by Design 5. The Strange Bird 6. Life after Earth Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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.

Reviews for Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

“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"" * “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"" * “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"" *