2026 Scott A. Margolin '99 Lecture

The Scott A. Margolin ’99 Lecture in Environmental Affairs takes an interdisciplinary approach to the natural environment and human interaction with it.

In 1998, the Environmental Affairs Lecture was named in honor of Scott A. Margolin, of the Middlebury College Class of 1999. In his one year here, Scott established himself as a dedicated student of Environmental Studies, a leader in Environmental Quality and other student affairs, and an outstanding writer. He lives in our memory.

The 2026 Scott A. Margolin Lecture in Environmental Affairs presents Allison Carruth, Professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; Director of the Program in Environmental Studies, and Director and PI at the Blue Lab giving a talk titled “The Ocean Remade.”

“The Ocean Remade”
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” moves from intertidal to benthic waters and from California’s coastline to the Clarion-Clipperton zone and the Mariana Trench. 

Allison Carruth is on the faculty at Princeton University, where she is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. At Princeton, she directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, a research-driven media production studio focused on climate and environment storytelling. Her fields of research and teaching encompass the environmental humanities, environmental media, and science and technology studies. From 2016-2020, she was the founding faculty director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of a documentary series that produced films and web stories about L.A. environmental challenges. The series was developed in partnership with KCET/ PBS SoCal, the country’s largest public media outlet.

She is the author of three books: Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food (Cambridge UP 2013); Literature and Food Studies, with Amy L. Tigner (Routledge 2018); and Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech (University of Chicago Press 2025). Her articles have appeared in American Literary History, ASAP/Journal, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/ modernity, npj: Climate Action, Parallax, Public Culture, Public Books, PMLA and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, among other places. Her projects and collaborations have been supported by ArtPlace America, the National Science Foundation, Princeton University, UCLA, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.