Novel Ecologies : Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

"Allison Carruth''s Novel Ecologies traces the convergence of ecology and engineering through three decades of literature, art, and popular writing. It pinpoints a new environmental imagination that Carruth calls Nature Remade, a distinctly West Coast framework drawing on fields from architecture and civil engineering to molecular biology and geoscience. At once futuristic and backward looking, Nature Remade at its worst is a quasi-religious conviction that only a redoubled capitalism can save us from ecological collapse. Carruth''s account of this new, high-tech environmental disposition ranges across synthetic biology, de-extinction, and the Mars race to the feverish imaginations of players within Google, OpenAI, and many less well-known labs. Alongside these, Carruth discusses world-making powers of some remarkable recent fictions, most notably the multispecies multiverse of Ruth Ozeki''s A Tale for the Time Being; the radical, post-tech future of Becky Chambers'' Monk and Robot novellas; and Jeff VanderMeer''s dystopian Borne series. Other storytellers figuring in Carruth''s book are Saya Woolfalk, Jennifer Egan, Richard Powers, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro), Natalie Jeremijenko, T. C. Boyle, Tracy K. Smith, and Octavia Butler"--

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. 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.