Overview

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. 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.

Full Product Details

9780393635164

Table of Contents

Reviews

... Demuth has now herself written the history she calls for. Floating Coast is a historian's Moby Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time, into a marvelously readable narrative. -- Amitav Ghosh In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demouth has written a brilliant hybrid book about one of the most fragile and forgotten of Anthropocene front-line territories, the Bering Strait. Uniting ecology, anthropology, reportage and more, this is a superb work of environmental history, often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision. -- Robert Macfarlane

Bathsheba Demuth's history flows as richly and fluidly as Arctic waters. Floating Coast narrates the transmutation of nearly every object and idea into something else. As she tracks the dynamics of the modernist, ecological make-over of the Bering Strait, Demuth is inventing a new form of historical narrative. -- Kate Brown, Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed. Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all. -- Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea A poetic meditation on the devastations of modernity in the sea, on terra firma and, eventually, below ground. Whale hunters and reindeer herders, greedy capitalists and utopian planers, hopeful prospectors and raw material hungry government bureaucrats appear on the stage in this analytically powerful book, a monument to a people and their land just as much as an allegory of the world we have created. -- Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History Demuth does elegant justice to the social and environmental revolutions on land and sea that define the modern history of Beringia and to the many stories of indigenous communities and diverse newcomers, of gold rush and gulag, of whales and caribou. Her pleasing prose disguises her relentless research and highlights her profound sense of place. -John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun -- John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun Demuth emphasizes the Bering Strait as a point of intersection between the human and natural worlds.... [All sections of Floating Coast] 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 climactic peril, urgency. -- Publishers Weekly

Bathsheba Demuth's history flows as richly and fluidly as Arctic waters. Floating Coast narrates the transmutation of nearly every object and idea into something else. As she tracks the dynamics of the modernist, ecological make-over of the Bering Strait, Demuth is inventing a new form of historical narrative. -- Kate Brown, Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed. Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all. -- Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea A poetic meditation on the devastations of modernity in the sea, on terra firma and, eventually, below ground. Whale hunters and reindeer herders, greedy capitalists and utopian planers, hopeful prospectors and raw material hungry government bureaucrats appear on the stage in this analytically powerful book, a monument to a people and their land just as much as an allegory of the world we have created. -- Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed. Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all.--Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea A poetic meditation on the devastations of modernity in the sea, on terra firma and, eventually, belowground. Whale hunters and reindeer herders, greedy capitalists and utopian planners, hopeful prospectors and raw-material-hungry government bureaucrats appear on the stage in this analytically powerful book, a monument to a people and their land just as much as an allegory of the world we have created.--Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History Demuth does elegant justice to the social and environmental revolutions on land and sea that define the modern history of Beringia, and to the many stories of indigenous communities and diverse newcomers, of gold rush and gulag, of whales and caribou. Her pleasing prose disguises her relentless research and highlights her profound sense of place.--John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available