Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demuth
Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demuth
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Floating Coast
An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Author: Bathsheba Demuth

Narrator: Christa Lewis

Unabridged: 12 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/31/2020


Synopsis

The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great 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, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history.

Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

About Bathsheba Demuth

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

Goodreads review by Ben

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.......more

Goodreads review by Tom

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.......more

Goodreads review by Leah

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