Novel Ecologies investigates a distinctly California paradigm shaped by the tech industry—what Allison Carruth terms Nature Remade. Through three case studies—synthetic wildlife, the digital cloud and space colonization—the book challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with planetary-scale technological intervention. Against the world-building gambits of Google, Open AI, SpaceX and a host of start-ups, Carruth marshals the work of writers and artists who imagine provisionally hopeful futures while refusing to forget histories of power and exploitation that have made the world what it is.
EARLY PRAISE
“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
BIOS
Allison Carruth is professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads the environmental media and climate storytelling studio Blue Lab. She is the previous author of Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food.
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.