Novel Ecologies

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.