Author and Princeton University Prof. Allison Carruth shared her breadth of environmental knowledge with students and Northwestern’s English Department on Monday, celebrating the release of her most recent book, “Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech.”
Gathered in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, attendees gained an “entirely new understanding of the way technology and environmental thought intersect in the 21st century,” said NU English and environmental policy Prof. Sarah Dimick, who moderated the discussion.
“Novel Ecologies,” published in early March, is Carruth’s third book. Her two previous books, “Literature and Food Studies” and “Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food,” focused on food in an environmental context.
Carruth has also published a variety of other academic works, aiming to “bridge the work of environmental imagination and that of the natural sciences,” according to her website.
The new book diverges from her previous books on food-based themes and dives into a California-centered paradigm she terms “Nature Remade.”
“This book, above all, is a love letter to California,” Carruth said. “I felt like I needed to tell my own story as a person of the Western states.”
According to Carruth’s website, her newest work “challenges the conviction that climate change and other environmental crises must be met with planetary-scale technological intervention.”
During Monday’s conversation, she added that “world building and world destroying often go hand in hand.” She said she seeks to challenge the notion that “the Earth is already a lost cause.”
Carruth discussed the mindset of “Nature Remade,” which she said is a contemporary thought process originating in California that puts large-scale technological innovation at the center of an optimistic climate future, in contrast to schools of thought that focus more on repairing damage done to the environment.
Throughout her book, Carruth investigates and questions the underlying assumptions present in this way of thinking, she said.
Carruth’s book is the first substantial investigation into this mindset. Nature Remade is a contemporary spin on a longstanding wilderness narrative that puts a capitalist lens on environmental problems, she said.
In conversation with this paradigm, Carruth questioned what utopias might come from this “remaking.”
Fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in English Govind Narayan also noted the importance of Carruth’s distinction between techno-optimism and techno-utopianism.
“Like (Carruth) said, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia,” Narayan said. “So it introduces some variety into perspectives on technology.”
Even during an age when some say the Earth is already too far gone, Carruth offered “the slow, collaborative, revolutionary work of repair” as a solution to the growing threat of climate change.
In Monday’s discussion, she emphasized the dangers of urging humanity to look to outer space for a livable world.
Clarification: This article has been updated to better reflect the subject of Prof. Carruth’s academic works and her definition of “Nature Remade.”
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