Novel Ecologies Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech

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. Coining this twenty-first-century environmental imagination Nature Remade, Carruth describes a distinctly West Coast framework that is at once futuristic and backward-looking. 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 int