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Evading Arctic Heat Death

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2020.0081

1080-6628

Miles A. Powell,

Arctic and Russian Policy Studies

Evading Arctic Heat Death Miles Powell (bio) Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. xiv + 416 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $27.95. Bathsheba Demuth's remarkable Floating Coast explores the environmental, economic, social, and cultural history of the Bering Strait from the midnineteenth century through to the present. The book weaves together the experiences of a multiplicity of peoples. Present since time immemorial, local Indigenous populations consisted of numerous nations divided into three broad linguistic groups—the Iñupiat, the Yupik, and the Chukchi. Demuth refers to them collectively as "Beringians." All others were foreigners. Arriving first as commercial fur traders and then—after the Bolshevik Revolution—as Soviet planners, Russians began the region's transformation. Initially aboard whaleships and later—after the 1867 acquisition of Alaska—as colonizers, Americans oversaw Beringia's further geopolitical division. Demuth frames this history as a struggle of organisms (human and nonhuman), cultures, and societies to maximize energy returns in an environment that featured periodic abundance and protracted scarcity. But this common struggle produced crucially diverging ecological and social outcomes. While Indigenous residents worked within the limits of Arctic nature, Soviets and Americans tried to impose stability by reducing the region's ecological complexity to legibly quantifiable units. Demuth's emplotment yields the unsurprising conclusion that outsiders failed themselves and Beringians alike. Soviets and Americans perceived nature as a passive backdrop for the advancement of socialism or capitalism. But it was a dynamic historical force in the Arctic, and human groups who did not recognize this soon ran up against the limits for survival in an unforgiving land of ice and snow. Demuth makes excellent use of energy as an organizing theme to link peoples, nonhuman organisms, environments, and economies. This is an especially effective approach when addressing the Arctic, where vast sheets of white reflected already limited solar energy back into space. Demuth traces a series of energy flows to highlight how they structured ecosystems, economies, and societies. Food chains linked phytoplankton to zooplankton, [End Page 553] bowhead whales, orcas, and whalers; they bound lichens to caribous, wolves, hunters, and farmers. Radically different economies exploited these energy paths, but the scarcity of solar radiation forced all to be extremely efficient energy consumers. The key distinction turned out to be ecological and cultural geography. Among Indigenous groups, whaling provided Iñupiaq nations like the Tikiġaġmiut with enough energy to establish sedentary villages, while the Nuataaġmiut and other inland nations had to move constantly in pursuit of sparse energy. Yet all Beringians shared a regard for nature as a source of food, technologies, and limited trade. We often perceive capitalist and socialist systems as opposed ideologies, but the Arctic bares Russians' and Americans' common habit of regarding nature as a series of commodities, and of abstracting energy flows as atomized, quantifiable units that massively oversimplified the complexity of ecological space. Many environmental historians have foregrounded energy as a guiding theme to draw connections between people, nature, and ideas. This was a matter-of-course development in a field that sometimes critiques but also draws heavily on ecological science. Ecologists have long traced the movement of energy through ecosystems, grouping organisms into trophic levels according to their relationship to the food web's primary energy producers. Environmental historians have complicated the picture by considering how humans influenced energy flows through consumption and landscape change. Richard White pioneered this energy-centric approach in The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995). Dubbing energy a "protean and useful concept," he presented the river as an "energy system" that combined natural and anthropogenic inputs. Alfred Crosby later reframed human history as a struggle to acquire and harness energy in Children of the Sun: A History of Humankind's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (2007). Many other environmental historians have adopted these approaches. This includes Demuth, who owes an intellectual debt to these earlier works but also complicates and expands on them by considering how three distinct economies—indigenous, capitalist, and socialist—harnessed energy flows.1 Demuth's contemplation of the temporal scales of Arctic ecosystems and economies also enhances her analysis. In...