Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2021 AHA John H. Dunning Prize
Longlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Nature, NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews
"A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created." —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved?
Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this detailed, sometimes poetic exploration of the Bering Strait, Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, reveals the area is not, as people sometimes imagine, a "beautiful but essentially static place... untouched by people." While tracing the life cycles of wild animals there, including foxes, walruses, and whales, she also moves across the Chukchi and Seward peninsulas in Russia and Alaska, respectively, tracking the lives of their human inhabitants. Throughout, Demuth emphasizes the Bering Strait as a point of intersection between the human and natural worlds. Early chapters, for example, deal with how, in the 19th century, the blubber of bowhead whales "lubricated a mechanizing country: first, greasing sewing machines and clocks, and then the cotton gin and power looms." Subsequent discussions focus on the Beringian land itself "too cold for corn, or wheat, or even, in most places, potatoes" and the reindeer that thrived there. Later sections on how the early 20th-century gold rush in Nome, Alaska, attracted hopefuls from around the world prove equally fascinating. They speak to the complexity of the area in general and to its fascinating legacy, a history Demuth's authoritative chronicle conveys with both insight and, in an era of climatic peril, urgency. With 18 photos and 7 maps.
