EHP: Research Talks: The Ocean Remade

With Guest Speaker Allison Carruth (Professor of American Studies and Environmental Studies, Princeton University)

In this century, consequential visions of climate action have emerged from the domain of Big Tech: self-driving electric cars fueled by rare earth minerals, global cooling brought about by releasing sulfur into the stratosphere, floating cities built from whole cloth to weather rising seas. This techno-utopian paradigm is now turning to the ocean, at the same time that marine scientists and stewards are reimagining established approaches to oceanic protection, restoration and rewilding. Such imaginaries and investments are the subject of “The Ocean Remade.” Building on the framework of Carruth’s book Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (2025), “The Ocean Remade” documents Pacific Ocean rewilding and geoengineering endeavors as they are unfolding in real-time and explores the stories that variously advance, animate and oppose them. These case studies include Indigenous-led marine protected areas, university-housed captive breeding experiments, large-scale artificial reef developments, marine cloud start-ups and deep sea mining ventures. “The Ocean Remade” thus moves from intertidal to benthic waters and from California’s coastline to the Clarion-Clipperton zone and the Mariana Trench. Opening with Richard Powers’ novel Playground and closing with Craig Santos Perez’s poetry volume Call this Mutiny (both published in 2024), the keynote will offer an extended comparison of two, very different examples of ocean remaking: on the one hand, a kelp forest restoration experiment in the Channel Islands that is running out of funding and, on the other, the deep sea mining gambits of a Vancouver-based, Silicon Valley-launched corporation called The Metals Company.

RSVP HERE for Research Talks: The Ocean Remade