Bathsheba Demuth > Quotes

“Perhaps because there was so little impediment to human desires underground, mining saw the United States and the Soviet Union at their most distinct, and most contradictory. The American gold rush brought desperate people north on the hope of liberty through personal property. Most experienced inequality that left them feeling less free. The Soviet Gulag pursued socialist freedom through imprisonment and exploitation. And, eventually, both contradictions were ignored as the underground fed a new resource, that of national myth: Chukotka as real, existing socialism, Alaska as the last frontier.”
― Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“The nature of history when nature is part of what makes it is cacophony: not harmonious but revealing both a linear ugaluktuaq story and many cyclical unipkaaq, converging. We all live in more than one time, even if we are taught to refuse the idea. The evidence is all around us, in the layered world: a mossy, decaying mission store in Gambell, built near an ancient whale-butchering place, across from a row of tidy new homes. Or, as I saw in Lavrentiya, a house with Soviet concrete walls, but a roof made of walrus hide so fresh, it smelled.”
― Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“In their great herds, caribou and reindeer spread like the tributaries of a river; where the gray strands pool, they are indistinguishable at a distance from the land. It is more than an illusion. In life, as the herds paw and yank at their fodder, they churn nutrients and dead vegetation into the earth, where it rots in summer, raising the soil temperature. In the presence of scarce warmth, seeds germinate. A grazing herd, where it does not eat foliage to the quick, amplifies tundra productivity.' Alive, reindeer feed swarms of mosquitoes so massive, the insects can drain half a liter of blood in a day. In death, reindeer muscle becomes bears, eagles, foxes, lynx, people, ravens, wolverines, wolves. The wolf pup grows and drags down a reindeer. Around the stripped carcass, arctic poppies bud.

Rangifer migration is the tundra respiring, an oscillation of energy rather than air.”
― Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“That, too, was part of the long answer Beringians might have given, had Thomas Norton been able to ask in 1852, to the question What is a whale? It made the darkness of the polar nights visible, the cold bearable, and stomachs satiable. It was a soul in life, a gift assuring human survival in its death, a means to power, a site of communal labor, a set of expectations and ceremonies, a theory of history.”
― Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“And walruses were needed even where people did eat whale; families lived inside the hides of walruses stretched over the bones of whales, their homes made from what the sea gives the land and what death gives the living. Birth and laughter, sex and storytelling, dance and prayer, eating and dying formed a beating heart within these amalgamated coastal dwellings, reanimating skeleton and skin.”
― Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait