PRAISE & REVIEWS
“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
"The climate catastrophe is here: with that knowledge confirmed, the next major question is about how humans should respond. . . . Novel Ecologies [is] a kind of allegory for the way Carruth understands the relationship between humans and their environments. The book is not arguing for a mode of progress or growth; it is not building toward a solution to climate catastrophe. Instead, Carruth lets readers pause and think through their assumptions about their own relationship with technology and their surrounding environments, building toward 'the slow, collective, revolutionary work of repair.'" —ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
"Novel Ecologies is a rigorous, formally attentive, and politically committed analysis of how Nature Remade functions as a representational formation with material consequences for ecological governance at planetary scale. Its significance extends well beyond its primary North American context, precisely because the representational formations it analyzes are global in their reach even if Californian in their origin." —H-Net Environment
"Carruth takes the promises of Silicon Valley gurus to task and uses modern art, literature, and poetry to do so. This
book is perhaps the most powerful part of Carruth’s own work at bridging the two cultures." —Canadian Field Naturalist
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 third book, Novel Ecologies, shows how the tech industry has taken up the wilderness mythologies that shaped one strain of American environmentalism over the last century. Calling this twenty-first-century environmental imagination Nature Remade, Carruth describes a distinctly West Coast framework that is at once nostalgic and futuristic. 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.
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published by University of Chicago Press (2025)
