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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.
“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.
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer at The New Yorker and co-host of The New Yorker's Critics at Large podcast. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2024, and was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2021-2022. He teaches at the Yale School of Art and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His début novel, Great Expectations, came out in 2024. He is currently a Ferris Professor of Journalism and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton.
SPONSORS
The event has been generously supported by the Effron Center for the Study of America, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, The Humanities Council, The Program in Journalism and Princeton Public Lectures