Allison Carruth in conversation with Eliza Griswold Novel Ecologies at Labyrinth Books
Events @ Labyrinth
Tuesday 3/4 at 6:00pm
Labyrinth Books
122 Nassau Street
Tracing the convergence of ecology and engineering over the last three decades, Novel Ecologies pinpoints a new environmental paradigm that the author calls Nature Remade.
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
Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold, 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 and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Griswold has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation, among others, and has received awards including the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and the Rome Prize for her poetry. She is a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Journalism.
This event is cosponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council, Princeton’s Program in Journalism, and Labyrinth Books.
