Creative Ecology: Environmental Imagination and Invention in an Age of Crisis

Allison Carruth
English
UC Los Angeles

Creative Ecology investigates emerging models of environmental art, literature, and public/citizen science that depart from the prevailing frameworks of ecological crisis and conservation biology that have shaped environmental thought in the United States since the 1950s. In particular, it examines cultural works and scientific initiatives that confront pressing environmental challenges—from urban biodiversity and water sustainability to climate change and seed patenting—by adapting the tactics of the historical avant-garde, performance art, and other forms of twentieth-century cultural experimentation. At the same time, these models of “creative ecology” that the book investigates variously deploy, hack, and subvert the digital technologies that increasingly structure mainstream environmental knowledge production in the twenty-first-century.