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Across Russia's easternmost shores and through the territories of
the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how, over
150 years, people turned ecological wealth in a remote region into
economic growth and state power. Beginning in the 1840s, capitalism
and then communism, with their ideas of progress, transformed the
area around the Bering Strait into a historical experiment in
remaking ecosystems. Rendered even more urgent in a warming
climate, Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the impact
that human needs and ambitions have brought (and will continue to
bring) to a finite planet. * Shortlisted for the The Pushkin House
Book Prize 2020.
Along the Bering Strait, through the territories of the Inupiat and
Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia, Bathsheba
Demuth explores an ecosystem that has long sustained human beings.
Yet when Americans and Europeans arrived, the area became the site
of an experiment and the modern ideologies of production and
consumption, capitalism and communism were subject to the pressures
of arctic scarcity. Demuth draws a vivid portrait of the sweeping
effects of turning ecological wealth into economic growth and state
power over the past century and a half. More urgent in a warming
climate and as we seek new economic ideas for a post-industrial
age, Floating Coast delivers warnings and poses provocative
questions about human desires and needs in relation to
environmental sustainability.
More than any other locale, the Pacific Ocean has been the meeting
place between humans and whales. From Indigenous Pacific peoples
who built lives and cosmologies around whales, to Euro-American
whalers who descended upon the Pacific during the nineteenth
century, and to the new forms of human-cetacean partnerships that
have emerged from the late twentieth century, the relationship
between these two species has been central to the ocean’s
history. Across Species and Cultures: Whales, Humans, and Pacific
Worlds offers for the first time a critical, wide-ranging
geographical and temporal look at the varieties of whale histories
in the Pacific. The essay contributors, hailing from around the
Pacific, present a wealth of fascinating stories while breaking new
methodological ground in environmental history, women’s history,
animal studies, and Indigenous ontologies. In the process they
reveal previously hidden aspects of the story of Pacific whaling,
including the contributions of Indigenous people to capitalist
whaling, the industry’s exceptionally far-reaching spread, and
its overlooked second life as a global, industrial slaughter in the
twentieth century. While pointing to striking continuities in
whaling histories around the Pacific, Across Species and Cultures
also reveals deep tensions: between environmentalists and
Indigenous peoples, between ideas and realities, and between the
North and South Pacific. The book delves in unprecedented ways into
the lives and histories of whales themselves. Despite the worst
ravages of commercial and industrial whaling, whales survived two
centuries of mass killing in the Pacific. Their perseverance
continues to nourish many human communities around and in the
Pacific Ocean where they are hunted as commodities, regarded as
signs of wealth and power, act as providers and protectors, but are
also ancestors, providing a bridge between human and nonhuman
worlds.
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