Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

by Bathsheba Demuth

Hailed as a scientific landmark, this nine-time award-winning book is the first comprehensive history of a frigid expanse of land and water between Alaska and Russia called Beringia.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is a 2019 book by Brown University historian Bathsheba Demuth. The book examines environmental and social change in the Beringia region surrounding the Bering Strait from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, focusing on the pursuits of American and Russian interests and their interactions with local Chukchi, Iñupiat, and Yupik peoples.

This borderland is a complex ecosystem of animals (whales, foxes, ravens, wolves), humans, natural resources (oil, gold), and ideologies (capitalist and communist) interacting in extreme conditions.

Praised for its stylistic qualities and original composition, which spans human and nonhuman life both above and below the surface, this book reminds us that we cannot disconnect from the world: the energy we siphon, the lives we take, the lands we alter, in turn shape us.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Environment, Science, Nature, Russia, Academic

416 pages, Hardcover

First published August 20, 2019

About the author

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the United States and Russia, and in the history of energy and past climates. She has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Floating Coast is billed as an environmental history, but it is also much, much more. In exploring how humans interact with our environment, Demuth takes a deep dive into the industrial dynamics of the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia. If you had told me that this book contained descriptions of gold mining in Alaska, or 20th century industrialized whaling, I may have given it a pass. It would have been my loss.

Bathsheba Demuth has divided this book into chapters exploring different aspects of the sea, coast, and land; from whales to walruses to reindeer to rocks and back again, covering the time period from 1848 to 1990. She is clearly an incredible historian and refracts her research through a broader discussion of how energy cycles through life forms, and how our politics (capitalism, communism) intersect with nature. We also live the experiences of massive upheaval of Yupik, Chukchi, and Iñupiat communities on both sides of the Bering Strait. The 19th century decimation of whales and walruses spelled starvation for many. The repercussions are ongoing.

Oh, to have lived in a world where the sea was teeming with whales. We know not what we do, but only because we refuse to examine our history.

[Greyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A prior reviewer called this book "beautiful" and that's exactly what it is, though I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on that adjective myself. It is beautiful for the prose and for the care Demuth takes in guiding us through the incessant human, animal, and environmental changes in northern Alaska and eastern Russia.

Maybe I am not reading the right books, but it feels like only in the last 2-3 years have 'serious' academic writers taken it upon themselves to make their books not only carefully researched and informative, but also lyrical and available to small personal interjections by the author (Stony the Road is another case of this). It is a welcome change from the on-high authority (and/or simply dry writing) of so many older histories.

I suppose the subject nature of this one makes it niche by default, but I'll be recommending it heartily for anyone remotely interested in the recent human history of the sub-Arctic and the "sensory immediacy" of the Tundra.

[Ben Goldfarb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Began 2020 by finishing the fabulous "Floating Coast," an environmental history that wears its erudition lightly. It's bracing—industrial whaling sounds like hell on both cetaceans and humans—but indispensable for anyone who cares about the Arctic.

[Tom Stanger · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a short review, everyone should read this book. As a friend of mine once said it's "an absolute blinder!"

I'll be writing a full review in Issue 3 of The Pilgrim magazine, out in September 2019.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that is not “about” indigenous sovereignty because it is a solid collection of evidence about the importance of indigenous sovereignty.

[RJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and challenging book that seeks to illuminate and break through the narratives of productivity, time, economics, and governance that have shaped the Arctic for the past two centuries. After Cronon's "Changes in the Land," probably one of the most important environmental histories to deal with the way that ideology shapes and distorts ecology in colonialist settings. Demuth deftly touches on certain themes and trends in academic literature by and about Indigenous peoples, and does a notably skillful job of allowing the concept of non-human persons to permeate the work without ever getting into the (often tedious) academic theory around this topic. She does an equally skillful job of treating all of the nations that share and/or occupy Beringia - Americans, Russian, Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi - with equal gravity, and allows them equal weight and agency in the telling of history. This is a book that treats its subject holistically in a way that is far too rare in the current era, and that treats writing with a joy and lyricism that is far too rare in current academia.

Recommended for anyone interested in Cold War history, Indigenous issues, the Arctic, whales, human-animal relationships.

[Jonas · Rating 5 out of 5]

in (manchmal etwas überkandidelter) wunderschöner Sprache geschriebene Geschichte der Beziehung zwischen Pflanzen, Tieren und Menschen in der Beringstraße, SO VIEL gelernt, krasse Perspektivwechsel (Wale geben sich den Jägern zum Töten hin, die Jäger geben das Fleisch den Bedürftigen, so gehört sich das - Grönlandwale haben sich gegenseitig erzählt, wie man Walfängern am besten entkommt und ihr Verhalten radikal geändert, Walrosse genauso), also perfekt, letztes Kapitel etwas lang imo, aber wenn ich jemals so über Natur schreibe wie sie schätze ich mich übermäßig glücklich

[Hank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing book....I hated reading it. Just like it says it is a history of the people living in Berengia on both sides of the strait. Unfortunately that also includes all of the exploitation of the environment that we humans are quite good at.

Part one and two: Lets start killing all the whales and walrus. I say start because there are more chapters to come. Early on we (humans) weren't all that great at it but we get better fast.

Part three: Lets add communism and try to herd reindeer. This part was less depressing for the animals and more depressing for the people.

Part four: Gold mining and adding capitalism to cultures that don't have much use for it and when it ulitmately fails, leave the people worse off. Fun.

Part five: Back to killing whales except now we are really, really good at it.

Demuth has written a truly amazing book filled with data from both sides of the dateline which I found incredibly intersting, particularly how the bolsheviks and communists tried to exploit Chukotka. The Russians were far more inept which meant they destroyed the environment less and the people more. Demuth writes all of this from personal experience having moved north of the arctice circle at the age of 18. Ok, not all since she started the story in the 1800s. Her writing is beautiful at times, I found myself savoring the first couple of paragraphs in every chapter where she evokes one image or another of arctic beauty, just before heading to the grimmer realities.

The epilogue was hopeful yet still very aware of human nature and how destructive it can end up. Whales seem to be in a better spot, walrus are much better, raindeer although in much smaller numbers without the incentives, still roam around, while gold miners are mostly doing their thing for tv shows. The impact of climate change looms which tempers the hope a bit.

The book suffers from a bit of information overload and some repetition but is extremely well researdched and written. I just had a hard time with the environmental costs.

The Russian parts and the reindeer herding were my favorites. I am not sure who to recommend this to but it really was an excellent book.

[Teddy Harvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Neither capitalist time nor socialist time fit the cycles of walrus life."

Very interesting appreciation of the ways in which different cultures, from American and Soviet to the Chukchi, Yupik and Iñupiat, interact with their environments and the different approaches they have taken to the fauna of the Bering Strait. Ultimately, it presents a beautiful story of how energy in the region is in flux, manipulated by humans in order to satisfy subsistent, industrial and/or ideological means.

Particularly I found the discussion of the Soviet Gulags in Chukotka to be profound, and how Beringia sits on an often forgotten, and quite different, Cold War frontier. The detachment that characterised U.S. and Soviet attitudes to the killing of whales, walruses, foxes, seals, deer and the like stood in stark contrast to the perspectives posited by the native Beringians. But what Demuth does not fail to do, is challenge every viewpoint; including the moral dilemma raised by allowing Natives to hunt endangered species but not allowing nations to do so.

Demuth refers throughout to this idea of changing energies, and particularly how each case involves enclosement of such energies. In this way, I found the case study of the Nome Gold rush to be very interesting, although admittedly at times throughout the book I did feel like I was losing interest. Personally, I was not a fan of the style of writing but that's probably just me.

[Andrei · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Beringia lähiajalugu" pole eriti mõjus müügiargument? Kuidas oleks: hingematvalt kaunilt kirjutatud esseistlik ülevaade kapitalistliku turumajanduse ja sotsialistliku plaanimajanduse laupkokkupõrkest traditsioonilise looduslähedase eluviisiga Beringi väina kallastel 19. sajandi keskpaigast tänaste tagajärgedeni välja. Ajalugu, mis ei räägi ainult inimestest, vaid keskkonnast ja keerulistest liikidevahelistest ökoloogilistest suhetest. Poeetiline ja nukker, selge ja jõuline. Imetlusväärne on ka autori suutlikkus hoiduda lihtsakoelistest tüpaažidest nagu kuri ärikas ja õilis metslane, näha selle asemel üle aastasadade, tuhandete kilomeetrite, rahvaste, riikide ja liikide seoseid, vastastikmõjusid ning loogikaid. 4.5/5

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the books Jeff Sharlet recommended from his extensive reading as a judge for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Bathsheba Demuth’s prose is precise, detailed, and often beautiful as she describes this region and the complex relationships between the land, the waters, the wildlife, the indigenous population, and the eventual colonial invaders of the Bering Strait.

[Aydan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really gorgeous, I think that this is a really amazing first book to get into environmental history (it was mine lol and now I want to read a ton more). Not only phenomenal prose, but super interesting and informative!!

[Michal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just as incredible as I was told it would be, if not more. The way it talks about time, land, culture, and energy is so !!!!! Truly a delight to read and so obscenely important. Changed my life in ways I’ve yet to put a finger on but I will be recommending it to anyone who will listen.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant and completely gut-wrenching. Fusing scientific precision and poetic lyricism, Bathsheba Demuth has written a natural history that transcends its genre and its subject. Objectively a book about the Bering Strait, ‘Floating Coast’ is a call for us to wake up to a way of living that is both out of touch with the natural world and ultimately unsustainable.

“Fossil fuels freed the use of energy from human toil, allowing human history to seem separate from the rest of time. It wrote concern for cyclical life out of most calculations of value; cycles, after all, have a peak and a decline, a season for birthing and for dying. They invoke mortality. Ideas of ever-increasingly growth emphasize the life phase, as if we as a social body are permanent adolescents, hungry and rising, immortal. This made a new idea of liberty, release from the constraints of then matter that made us, and from precariousness of being.”

6 stars.

[Kulbhushan Suryawanshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best book on environmental history. The research is extensive and in-depth. By focusing on a place like Beringia the author is able to explore the effects of both, Soviet Socialism and American Capitalism on the marine and terrestrial life in this region. The book shows how both created problems not only for the environment of this region but also the local people. This is a must read book for anyone interested in Environment, Arctic or the commodification of nature.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more impressive natural histories I have ever read and a great compare/contrast on the divergent fates of each side of the straits under capitalism and communism and how both eventually failed in their various projects. Stylistically impressive as well as erudite.

[Ivana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written book.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

In what is easily the best book I’ve read this year; Demuth’s Floating Coast is a deep dive into the ways that differing economic and social systems have shaped the land in Beringia. And in Demuth’s telling, there is a stark divide between systems that view the land from far distant centers of power as a resource to be utilized and optimized versus locally based systems where the hunters are stakeholders in the land.

In the first category is Russia and the US. These are specifically, imperial Russia and communist collectivist USSR on one side of the Bering Sea and US-style capitalism on the other. Under these systems, the land and the creatures who dwell within it are seen as resources to be managed and turned into profit—whether for the collective or for financial shareholders. Either way, the name of the game is short-term optimization of the land—not long-term sustainability.

This is in direct contrast to the native communities, who have hunted the land for thousands of years and are stakeholders and stewards of the place. As is well-known, arctic peoples survive mainly on meat. You can’t grow vegetables in the far north and so the peoples there have developed a culture that revolves around hunting animals. This practice revolves around elaborate customs and beliefs that result in hunting that is sustainable and fair. That means, that people don’t take more than they can use (and they use the entire animal). Even now, on federally managed lands, native communities are permitted to hunt walruses. Hunting in Alaska is highly regulated, but as I was told by our guide (an Alaskan big game hunter himself) man remains the walruses’ main predator.
“The government can’t exactly dictate to the native people how and what they can eat when they’ve been hunting here for thousands of years. That would be colonialist.”

I was particularly interested in her focus on energy. As she puts it, “to be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.” For Beringians—the Chukchi, Iñupiat, and Yupik —creatures/minerals/ice the world were not transferable sources of profit-- but part of an interconnected world to which they were a part. To which they depended on for survival. Mutual inter-dependence and co-survival. I was really interested in the traditional myths she described in which humans become walruses or whale come forth to be killed when they felt the humans were worthy and deserving of their offering.

The writing is very beautiful. Nature listed it as one of their top science reads the year it came out and I think it has also won writing awards. It is an extraordinary book.

From the New York Times review: “To be alive means taking up our place in a chain of conversions,” Demuth reminds us. “In order to live, something, some being, is always dying.” After centuries of humans’ industrial energy consumption, what will be next to go? This summer, Alaska had its hottest days ever recorded. Seas are rising, habitats are disappearing, and extreme weather events are on the rise. As people act, the climate reacts. Only by understanding that link might we survive.

[Laurie Jodice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this environmental history. The book is full of details and facts. Sometimes it felt like lots of facts all tossed in with some loss of context. But given how hard it used to be (in late 80s) to learn about environmental issues in Russia, this book was a huge research task and admirable accomplishment. I wonder why not much attention was given to commercial fisheries, including joint US and Russia activity in the later part of the 20th century (eg https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...) and more recent joint science ventures that were occurring, at least up until the recent Ukraine war.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent and should be on the shelf of those who wish to understand the history of the climate crisis (a slice of it at least) and the ways in which major powers and major ideologies filtered the earth's finite resources through a lens of linear growth and expansion.

We have hit the ceiling, friends.

[Timothy Fewless · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent academic book. The first I've had the time to read by choice in a while. I added this to my graduate school library.

[Anna Grace Wenger · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars but i'll round up. an absolutely stunning masterclass on environmental history. remarkable text. moving, beautiful, informative, accessible. quite literally exactly what i want in a book.

[Taylor Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful and enchanting book. The lyrical prose really captures the dynamic and wild place that is Beringia. I really enjoyed how each section of the book was based on a different resource. Also the juxtaposition of the Soviet Union and America was
Really well done. I want to visit beringia, but maybe I shouldn’t inflict anymore pain on the area.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not read this book — ahem — closely. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I had — she writes in a lyrical style rather different than a typical academic book, though she still has a clear argument and coherent direction. She balances the different aspects well and is a good storyteller. That said, I raised my eyebrows a few times when she writes about whales as though they are people (not metaphorically, I might add — I think she really means it). Example: "Their [the whales'] culture... became one of choosing not to die for the market. It was perhaps inadvertently, a political assertion." (43) Um, yes, insofar as whales make political assertions, I imagine they are inadvertent.

[JJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demuth is such a wonderful writer! This book unfolds as a series of small stories, each centered around a particular aspect of Beringian environment -- bowheads, walruses, reindeer, tin, etc. -- and how these were respectively viewed by indigenous Beringians, American politicians/businessmen, and later, Soviet officials. Demuth suggests that the linear, progress-driven ideologies employed by Americans and Soviets alike were out of step with the non-linear, cyclical time of the natural Beringian world. Native Beringians, who hunted for shelter and subsistence, and held deep respect for the non-human creatures of their environment, understood how to live in such a dynamic landscape, whereas the capitalist and communist systems did not, to destructive effect. With these descriptions, and a folkloric style of language that anthopomorphizes whales, walruses, and reindeer, Demuth seems to be arguing that the global masses would be wise to learn from indigenous lifestyles, particularly in tackling the environmental challenges that the world faces today.

[Ylva · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

WOW

[Rebecca Hearne · Rating 5 out of 5]

s t u n n i n g

[Boyd Cothran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating environmental history of the Bering Strait that presents a completely new way of looking at the region's past, present, and future. Although I would have liked a clearer, more consistent story, it is an impressive and beautiful book.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some fragmented thoughts about this book...

Beautifully written environmental history of Beringia spanning from 1848 (the arrival of commercial whaling) to the present. While Russia was one of the few places in Europe that did not experience the outbreak of revolution in 1848, the October Revolution of 1917 would come to not only shape Russia, but global politics writ large throughout the Cold War and beyond.

Beringia is not the first place that comes to mind when I think of Soviet history, which is precisely what makes this book so fascinating. Demuth has mentioned that Beringia is closer to Washington, DC than Moscow, and this borderland region serves as a really fascinating place that not only sat at the edges of the Russian, British and American empires, but also between the two Cold War powers, and within the territory of the Chukchi, Yupik, and Inupiaq nations.

There were a lot of things happening in this book: lyrical prose about the agency of ice and animals, fascinating depictions of energy flows and transformations coursing through the ecosystems of Beringia, capitalist processes of commodifying living beings and minerals deep beneath the cold earth of the north. All things I have been deeply fascinated by since visiting a friend in Whitehorse a couple years ago while reading Robert Service, Jack London, and Ivan Coyote—those northern landscapes made a deep and lasting impression on me.

But what I was most fascinated by in this book was the Soviet history of this region and the eschatological narratives that Demuth explores. I suppose it was once deemed a liberal affront to dismissively cast Marxist revolutionaries as sort of religious missionaries, but I happen to think it’s a very useful way of understanding political movements and social transformation, particularly revolutionary ones. Maybe I can lay the blame for the license I feel in this respect at the feet of Donna Haraway. It’s Haraway’s fault for calling socialist-feminism one of the evangelical traditions of United States politics, and speaking about blasphemy (a centrepiece of her ‘ironic faith’) as a form of combatting the ‘moral majority’ within. Ever since reading Haraway’s manifesto, I’ve had a bad habit of doing likewise.

So, I love it when Demuth describes her subjects as “young Bolshevik evangelists promising utopia” and I think Demuth extends this into her 2022 Melville-Nelles-Hoffmann Lecture, which I had the chance to attend and really enjoyed. She even pointed to Zoroaster as an origin point of the millenarian impulse that would find its way to Marx (the temporal tensions in this book stem from some Nietzschean bias towards cyclical as opposed to linear time; Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is a more useful image for me here). But this is one of the beautiful examples from Demuth’s book that captures the religious nature of modern political economy in a very fascinating way:

“New worlds and missionaries and conversion: the stuff of the American coast for thirty years. Except the Soviet kingdom was one where heavenly utopia was completely of the Earth, and everyone would belong to it equally. Marxism, especially the variant interpreted by Lenin, promised complete liberty, an escape from both natural caprice—there is no freedom in hunger—and from political contention. After all, if all wants were supplied equally, what strife could remain? The state was a necessary initial guide to this change, but would wither away along with the haggling over want that is politics…

For the Bolsheviks, history made this future visible… Conversion—which the Soviets called enlightenment—would begin, as Lenin said, with the “victorious revolutionary proletariat” engaging “in systematic propaganda in [the natives’] midst.” This was enlightenment through knowledge. Then, the government had to “assist them through all possible means”—that is, forge enlightenment through industrial development.”

It was fascinating to hear how early Bolshevik missions to the region went, as they encroached on a ‘frontier’ of American capitalism:

“A village also built by a “capitalist system,” Mikhail Mandrikov argued, a system that would “never save workers from capitalist slavery.” Mandrikov and his colleague Avgust Berzin, like young Bolsheviks everywhere, saw capitalism as irredeemably exploitive, divided at its functional core between the owning rich and the laboring poor. The solution was not tsarist enclosure and reform, but collective ownership. In Chukotka, they preached liberation, a future where “every person . . . has an equal share of all the value in the world created by work.”7 Their revolution was already two years old in Petrograd when Mandrikov and Berzin took control of the Chukotkan administration, seized fur storehouses, and proclaimed the First Soviet Revolutionary Committee, or Revkom.

Six weeks later, most members of the Revkom were dead. Bolshevik speeches against American traders like Charlie Madsen and their lines of credit—debt that doomed the poor “to a cold and hungry death”—left the Revkom with many enemies.8 But Anadyr’s merchant class was only temporarily better armed. Bolsheviks sailed and walked and took dogsleds north from Kamchatka. Small, nasty battles erupted with remnants of the empire. It was 1923 before the Red Army declared Chukotka liberated from “White [Army] bandits…”

I was particularly fascinated by a Yupik man named Mallu (or Matlu), who joined the Bolsheviks and became part of the local Soviet administration:

“Mallu learned as a child how not to die among the ridges and snaking leads on the ice near Ungaziq. He learned that wronged animals would seek retribution.58 He also learned Russian from the Chukchi coast’s lone Orthodox missionary. When the Bolsheviks came with their promises of “mastering the full use of resources” through “the socialist reconstruction of the northern economy,” Mallu’s comprehension was not limited by their terrible Yupik.59 What he heard was an escape from winters “when we had hunger, because the sea animals did not come,” leaving “children without fathers.” So, he wrote later, “I decided to organize a kolkhoz” named Toward the New Life. By 1928, Mallu and half a dozen other young Yupik men were elected members of the local Soviet administration. The Bolsheviks had converts. Mallu joined the revolution just as the revolution lost patience. Lenin was dead, taking the New Economic Policy with him…”

“The five-year plan hurtled toward a future only vaguely described by Marx or Lenin. The Stalinist method of substantiation was quantification: how many new kolkhozy, how many new people joining the kolkhozy. This was much of Mallu’s work: recruiting Yupik and coastal Chukchi by explaining that “a good life can only be built through a collective farm.” He also offered flour, ammunition, metal boats, and outboard motors. The capitalist sharks had finally been exiled from Chukotka, and the Soviets controlled supply, if imperfectly; even Mallu complained that there were no “cooking pots or needles.” But what the Soviets had, they gave to people in collectives. It was, Mallu admitted, an excellent reason to join a kolkhoz.

And the kolkhozy, rhetoric aside, did not look all that transformative. Members hunted walruses and seals in order to refine “fat which can be used for industrial purposes.” Yupik already hunted walruses and seals. The collective required hunting together and distributing the catch after the kolkhoz manager tallied it against the plan. Yupik already hunted in groups and distributed their catch. A collective wanted fox pelts in exchange for sugar and tea, an old rite of transmutation by 1930. No one in a collective could be substantially richer or poorer than anyone else. Among the Yupik and coastal Chukchi, no one was.”

Demuth published a piece in the New Yorker that mentions Mallu, in case you are interested in reading more about him.

This alignment of ideology was an exception to what generally played out though. There was a fascinating dynamic that emerged where individualist Chukchi practices of reindeer herding on the Soviet side were particularly resistant to Soviet collectivization efforts, and the collective Yupik and Inupiaq hunting practices on the Alaska side were particularly resistant to capitalist notions of private property.

I also enjoyed Demuth’s interpretations of Marxism even if I didn’t always agree with them entirely:

“The Bolsheviks had an answer—Marx’s answer—to the empire’s question: excise capitalism, take its industrial tools, and turn them to material liberation and moral transformation. For Marxist revolutionaries, the material and moral were linked by labor: under capitalism, poverty forced most people to sacrifice their ability to direct their own actions—to even conceive of directing them—because they had to earn the wages paid by the wealthy. Because life without conscious purpose deadened the soul, a worker became a thing, an object whose labor enriched someone else. But if all people worked according to their desires and ability and gained according to their needs, there would be no starvation and no reason to drink. It was a utopia of the exploited last becoming the enlightened first.

The vision of salvation the Bolsheviks brought to Chukotka required the elimination of private property and market exchange, as private property concentrated wealth unequally and markets aided such accumulation.”

During Demuth’s lecture that I attended, Boyd Cothran mentioned that a lot of the framing of Demuth’s work seemed very similar to James Scott’s work in Seeing Like a State, how the two competing modernities of the 20th century, socialism and capitalism, shared similar totalizing tendencies. I haven’t finished reading Scott’s book, but I think his book engaged with Lenin more than any other academic text I’ve encountered, and I think he does make some compelling points about the shortcomings of modernity, though I think I do subscribe to a certain form of modernity myself. I’m generally opposed to for example anarcho-primitivism or anti-civ anarchism, which I see as the logical conclusion of completely rejecting modernity. For example, Demuth in her lecture mentions the really horrible process of decarbonization that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, where buildings no longer could be kept warm, hospitals abandoned, and so on. She mentioned this type of shock therapy was not the model way to decarbonize and was in fact very traumatizing for people who lived there.

But I do recognize the very bad record modernity has with respect to its interactions with Indigenous communities, including in its socialist iterations. Though Demuth did mention a particularly interesting comment that Indigenous peoples on the Russian side did tend to have a more positive view of Bolshevik missionaries than those on the Alaska side had of Christian missionaries.

Anyway, Demuth makes a very good point about how in a similar way to how capitalists fetishized the commodity, the Soviet economy fetishized the five-year plan, in a harmfully inflexible way. But one of the big issues was how the Soviets felt like they needed to compete with capitalism and demonstrate the ability of socialism to out-produce capitalism:

“Soviet socialists arrived in Beringia feeling both that they were behind capitalism and the need to eclipse it, to leap beyond into a world of greater liberty and bounty. Their means of acceleration was directed collective production, where plans broke down the next year or five into the number of tractors to be manufactured or walruses killed, each year with more than the last. Making more in the same period indicated speed, and suggested utopia was imminent.”

The environmental consequences of trying to out-produce capitalism should be somewhat obvious as we see the consequences of capitalism all around us today. This is something I did not discuss as much in this review, but it is central to the book. Overall, a very interesting read with a lot to think about and with. I'm glad this was selected for my environmental history class, and all the students in my class who attended the lecture got a free copy of the book. Mine is still in the mail, but I'm looking forward to having this on my shelf.

postscript: There's a great interview Demuth did on the Jacobin podcast, The Dig in case it's of any interest also.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful if sometimes uneven book. Demuth chronicles five historical sequences on both sides of the Bering Strait: early whaling, fox and walrus hunting, caribou farming, mining, and later industrial whaling. Much of it centers on the interactions between the indigenous societies (the Yupik and Chukchi language groups on the Soviet side, Inupiat and Yupik on the American) It covers ground from 1848-1990 -- and it's a lot of ground.

The first chapters I found super compelling. These sharply show the contradictions between indigenous knowledge and practice and capitalist market practices and the destruction wrought by the latter. Bowhead whale overhunting eventually led to Indigenous famines which were worsened by the introductions of infectious diseases and alcohol, cutting local populations nearly in half over forty years.

The walrus and fox enter almost as afterthoughts: as whale stocks depleted, extra commodities were needed to make sparser hauls profitable -- enter walrus blubber and fox fur. This section deals less with the ecological side, however, and more with the ways that missionaries and later Bolsheviks attempted to assert sovereignty and assimilate indigenous peoples after the initial episodes of market anarchy. One point of contention I have here is with Demuth's characterization of the Bolsheviks as fellow "missionaries". She does describe the difference between them and their capitalist counterparts -- promising an earthly salvation rather than forcing a separation between the spiritual and the material (Christianity vs the market, in capitalism) -- but surely this means they are not at all "missionaries" in the conventional sense, their main similarities with their counterparts being zeal and a desire to assimilate the indigenous. Surely these colonial similarities could have been drawn out without the tired liberal trope of equating socialism to religion and disdaining both as such.

The section on caribou describes how the Soviets tried to collectivize domesticated reindeer herding, and how the Americans imported the practice from Russia and later struggled over what form they wanted to enforce on it: yeoman subsistence farming, indigenous profit-earning corporate cooperatives, and white-owned farms staffed by indigenous laborers. Eventually they settled on small farm set-ups, but justified them on grounds of indigenous tradition despite their being an imported practice. The Soviets first failed to adequately collectivize, then forced it through violence at the height of Stalinist rule. Indigenous peoples thereafter produced reindeer for national plans rather than their own use. Reindeer stocks grew rapidly but evened off with warm climates and wolves, though this decline is only sketched as an afterthought. As these practices pertain to indigenous livelihoods today, I would have liked to learn more about their contemporary state as well.

The chapters on mining contain some information readers of Jack London may find surprising: after the initial burst of activity by small "entrepreneurs" in the gold rush, which failed to earn many fortunes, capital-intensive industrial mining took over, leading to a brief explosion of socialist politics in Alaska later silenced by the state in the 1920s. The Soviets, looking for tin for industry and gold to sell for arms but lacking the industrial capacity for heavy mining, used forced gulag labor at the height of Stalin's rule. They later paid high salaries for geologists and miners as industrial mines were built. Shockingly, the gulag mines were some of the most productive in the country and supplied a huge proportion of the total production of those metals. As with the caribou section, however, the description of the environmental impacts of mining (streams filled with sediment, water depleted) is quite sparse. I think I was hoping for richer descriptions of these impacts throughout the book because of my recent reading of "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes", which treats this more as its central focus.

The final chapters pick things back up a bit after seeming to sag somewhat in the middle. They discuss 20th century industrial whaling, first by capitalist countries like Norway and Britain; then later, as whale stocks rapidly deplete and the US convenes a multilateral whaling commission post-WW2, by the Soviets, who are motivated only by their plans rather than profits, and care little for international whaling regulations. This industry fell away gradually only with building international environmentalist pressure as the Soviet Union slowed and collapsed. But this collapse left indigenous peoples on the Soviet side without the salaries and subsidies that they had come to rely on (though this too is underexplored because of when the book ends).

The book ends with a powerful meditation on the meanings of climate change and fossil fuel power, describing the use of fossil combustion as an attempt to break with natural cyclical time through the release of stored but finite energy. It also describes indigenous peoples in the region today as living within multiple temporalities: hunting for whale and walrus as they once did, but with outboard motors and guns; living by subsistence but also by the market. I sort of wish Demuth had identified this contradiction earlier and described it in its development rather than just describing events and then putting this out as a thesis at the end. This book has a propulsive energy to it and the thematic organization is excellent, but it still often trades off tracing processes for listing events.

One quibble I have with this book is its reticence in drilling down into the motivations of the Soviets and the reasons why the USSR was the way it was. Demuth frequently describes Soviets in terms of zeal and plan-obsessiveness, and her descriptions of the economic plans as a constantly ratcheting and quota-focused system was quite illuminating as someone who is quite unfamiliar with Soviet economics. But she doesn't analyze how this goal of breakneck growth related to a desire for security against far more powerful capitalist nations, only describing it as a spiritual vision of earthly liberation. And her descriptions of the gulags are truly horrific and eye-opening, but don't address why the USSR was so vulnerable to violent authoritarian domination.

Another quibble I have is that the lyrical writing, while often excellent, sometimes obscures what Demuth is trying to say, especially when she addresses scientific topics like whale and reindeer migration. I would have preferred these facts delivered straight before they are described poetically. Demuth has refrains around "energy" and "time" which I wish were more developed; she tells us that capitalists and socialists alike desired the killing of animals for their "energy" though in some cases it wasn't for food or heat but for uses like clothing (in the case of fox furs and whale baleen). Not all human uses can be reduced to energy. Time often refers to the reproduction time of animal life, but Demuth doesn't discuss this systematically.

But it makes sense that shortfalls like these might exist in such an ambitious and wide-ranging book. I learned so much about this region and the often destructive ways its species and indigenous peoples have been made and remade by outside social forces and ideologies that saw little value in its existing forms of social and ecological life, and strived to impose new practices and new ways of organizing knowledge that had little to do with what life there actually was, and what it needed. Indigenous societies lived in difficult conditions and sometimes waged bloody fights with one another, but recognized the interdependence of life and felt the importance of both cyclical and linear time, and the connectedness of life and death. The "modern" societies which seized their land and lives saw only the narrow human uses of land and lives, and demanded these resources when they wanted these needs satisfied.

This book is a masterful hymn to a region and the beings who have long called it home, and a warning to capitalists and socialists alike on what can happen when fine-sounding theories come into contact with a living world.