Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Bathsheba Demuth
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Bathsheba Demuth
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Demuth’s decision to portray the region’s energy exchanges is an inspired choice. In the frozen earth and teeming waters of the Bering Strait, there are many losses to tally. Grasping their relationship to one another is crucial.
The author's historical and environmental research is painstaking; coastal villages, whaling boats, Russian prisons, and American mining camps all come alive with detail. But the Arctic is measured by echoes and dramatic shifts — in seasons, in animals, in people and their politics — and the triumph of this book is how carefully Demuth pulls seemingly disparate threads together into a net of actions and consequences from which neither the whales, nor the Yupik, nor our children can escape. Nothing happens easily, and so no history is easily told...It can make for brutal reading.
Though Floating Coast is billed as an environmental history, it could also be described as a meditation on a biosphere. Demuth includes lavish descriptions of the landscape she has been admiring since she first visited as a teenager, but relatively little in the way of straightforward political or economic history.
... we taste the perspective of someone who’s personally experienced the Arctic as an enfolding abundance, a dynamic system occupied by humans and fluctuating populations of animals.
Braiding human, animal, and environmental history, the author explores the ways in which the implications of economic ideologies have altered the balance of the natural world in this remote land.
In this selective look at the natural world found in the two regions, Demuth largely focuses on the history of hunting, starting with commercial whalers who decimated the bowhead whale population, nearly making the species extinct, and illuminating the more mindful Native subsistence hunting for animals including whales, walrus, fox, and caribou.
... lyrical, deeply learned.
... detailed, sometimes poetic.