Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait . By Bathsheba Demuth

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/whq/whab107

ISSN

1939-8603

Autores

Marsha Weisiger,

Tópico(s)

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Resumo

At the age of eighteen, Bathsheba Demuth migrated from the Great Plains to the Arctic, where she apprenticed for several years with a Gwich’in dog musher. Her work in that landscape attuned her to the sounds, sights, smells, and stories of a place transformed not only by humans, but also by the more-than-human world of sea ice and marine and terrestrial mammals. Demuth thus brings to this dazzling environmental history a singular sensibility and experiential knowledge of Beringia, a region north of the Bering Strait that encompasses most of Alaska, the Russian/Soviet region of Chukotka, and the seas—among the most highly productive waters on earth—that surround and structure it. Floating Coast narrates an ecological history of Beringia’s extractive economies and their transformations of ecosystems and Indigenous peoples between 1848 and the 1990s. An abiding theme of this historical field has been the role of capitalism in exploiting, transforming, and degrading...

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