Synopsis
Allison Carruth in conversation with Eliza Griswold to discuss Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech
Novel Ecologies investigates a distinctly California environmental imagination shaped by the tech industry. Through three case studies—synthetic wildlife, the digital cloud and space colonization—Allison Carruth challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with ever larger forms of engineering. Against the worlds conjured by Google, Open AI, SpaceX and a host of start-ups, the book marshals writers and artists who imagine provisionally hopeful environmental futures while refusing to forget the histories that have made the world what it is.
“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 eye-opening account transforms environmental humanities, defining it as a public-facing, urgently actionable field.”—Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival
“Novel Ecologies is a beautifully-written vision that gives us seeds of possible futures yet to be grown.”—Nicole Starosielski, author of The Undersea Network
Eliza Griswold is a poet, a translator, and a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. Her books include Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (2024), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Griswold is a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Journalism.