So I um as I was researching this this book I didn't start off thinking about it as an energy history or dealing with energy in any way in particular um and actually started because I was really interested in what the the sort of comparative history of what happened to the Russian side of the Bering Strait and the American side? Like, what happens if you make your reindeer kind of conform to communist ideals or capitalist ones? Like, does it look different? Does it not look different?
But what I realized as I was researching it is that the kind of assumptions that both the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union on the Russian side of the strait and the the American kind of government and American citizens who arrived in Alaska after 1867, their kind of assumptions about what a landscape is for were really shaped by the idea that you're supposed to get energy from it. Like, you're supposed to kill whales so that you can refine their oil and burn it in lamps.
Like, you're supposed to raise animals like reindeer in large numbers so that you can consume their meat and their hides at large scale. And that kind of assumption about the kind of base of a good society and a society that is growing and caring for its citizens, starting from the position of sort of maximal extraction, is very different than how Inupiaq or Yupik or Chukchi, people who had been living in the Bering Strait for a long time, kind of understood a good life to be, right?
It meant eating whales, but it didn't mean killing hundreds of them to refine their oil. And in some ways, that is a difference in people's relationship with how they use energy. That was author and historian Bathsheba Demuth. She grew up in Iowa, a place she describes as having an extremely cultivated landscape, shaped and managed by people at nearly every turn. Her first exposure to the North came through the writings of Jack London, books her parents read to her aloud.
As a kid, London's tales of adventure resonated with her. But as she got older, she began thinking about his reflections on how economic and political systems can crush people. At 18, she made the decision to head to the Arctic. There, she spent time mushing dogs in the Yukon. She says that experience was utterly transformative. It shifted her idea of what it means to be a human being. Not as a lone agent of individual destiny, but as a life that is part of a broader ecology.
In her book, Floating Coast, An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, she compares how Soviet Russia and the United States approached the Arctic, specifically around the Bering Strait. What she discovered was that despite their ideological differences, both nations treated animals and sea life in similar ways, primarily as resources to be managed or harvested. For those living outside the Arctic, the region has undergone a series of shifting narratives.
It's gone from a place of extraction to a geopolitical flashpoint during the Cold War, and now to the forefront of global climate change. Both of those perspectives stand in stark contrast to how many indigenous Arctic communities have historically related to the land and the sea, their focus being on reciprocity rather than domination. So here she is, Bathsheba Demuth.
Welcome to Chattermarks, a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska and the Circumpolar North through the creative and critical thinking of ideas, past, present, and future. My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host. Music. Did you grow up in a religious household? Oh, that's such an interesting question, and I don't think anyone has asked me that before. I didn't, in one sense. I mean, I didn't grow up in a household where we went to church regularly.
But I did grow up with about 50% of my parents being very spiritual people, I would say. And my mother has, sort of as I was in my late teens and heading off out of the home, she converted to Buddhism. And is actually now an ordained Buddhist nun. So, it was an element, but not in a really formal way when I was a kid. I ask that question because of your name. It's biblical. Oh, yes. In the Bible, Bathsheba is the wife of King David. and the mother of King Solomon.
You know, I guess I was wondering, did your parents choose it for a specific reason? And has it influenced how you see yourself or your work in any way? Also a great question. So my mother was reading a novel by Thomas Hardy when she was pregnant with me, where the main character's name is Bathsheba. The novel's name is Far From the madding crowd. So it's actually from this kind of piece of classic British literature that she got my name.
But it is the only other Bathshebas that I've ever met are Orthodox Jews, because it's a very uncommon name, I think, in Christian households, where the perhaps, I think it's often not seen as a particularly glorious marriage to King David, or at least how it came about. In the kind of, particularly the English translations of the Bible, not looked very well upon. Whereas in Jewish tradition, being the mother of King Solomon is a piece that's really emphasized.
So actually, often I can tell what religious backgrounds other people are from when I'm introduced to them, and they're either sort of warm about my name or really shocked that My parents would have called me this because Bathsheba was bathing naked on a, on a rooftop, right? If I'm on the roof, on the roof. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. In your book, Floating Coast, you say that you were raised on Jack London. Do you think that his writing affected the direction of your career at all?
Did it get you more interested in politics and how they relate to the natural world? So I kind of sometimes jokingly tell people that the reason that I moved up north when I was 18 is because I grew up on too much Jack London. Okay. And it's, I mean, it's a little bit a joke and kind of a glib way of answering that question fast. But I also think that, I mean, I actually remember both of my parents reading Jack London aloud to me.
And I grew up really interested in the outdoors and spending time in what you might call nature. And I think that Jack London's, you know, probably particularly the Call of the Wild just stuck with me as like, oh, this is a place I would like to go someday. So I had some really unreconstructed romantic ideas about the Far North, really.
But I think that, you know, when I was read Call of the Wild or some of London's other works, I was young enough that I don't think I'm going to actually know that I wasn't really sensitive to the ways in which he was actually critiquing a lot of things about capitalism, right? He was a pretty radical person, and I didn't get any of that at all, right?
I was in it for the dogs and the adventure of it as a kid, but have come to sort of appreciate that his experience of the gold rush and then his return to California after the rush, the Klondike gold rush, and sort of his thinking about the ways in which economic and political systems can really crush people is actually an element that runs through. a lot of his work. Yeah. And so that's something that you recognized as you got older. Yeah. Yeah. Much older.
So you spent time mushing dogs in the Yukon. How did that experience shape your perspective on northern environments? So I think, I mean, it was utterly transformative is the shorthand. But I think the specifics of it are, you know, I grew up in Iowa. I grew up in a landscape that was extremely and intensely cultivated for, you know, more than a century by the time I was born.
A place where kind of human ability to transform the landscape was very visible all over the place and came with, you know, the extinction of many local species and just sort of the transformation of it. And that, of course, gives you this illusion that human beings get to make most of the choices about how the world works. And you can kind of maintain that fiction, I think, in a place like Iowa, a little longer than you can in the North. Mm-hmm.
And like, you can't sustain it at all in the North. And in fact, imagining that you have some sort of supremacy or control is extraordinarily dangerous, right? It will lead you into, honestly, as Jack London kind of points out, it can lead you into some pretty grim circumstances. So I think it really completely changed how it was that I imagined what a human being is in some ways, right?
Rather than this sort of agent of our own histories and individual destinies that actually our ability to live in a place has to do with having a community there. And it has to do with that community, including things that aren't just people. Mm-hmm. That is a huge transition. It seems like it just flipped your whole worldview on its head.
Yes. Yeah, it did. And in some ways, I don't think I even noticed that my kind of intellectual worldview was getting flipped because my physical world was getting flipped a lot on the back of a dog sled. But like in a very tangible way, I was, you know, I didn't know what I was doing at the beginning. So I was kind of so consumed by the part of the learning curve that was intensely physical and required learning how to kind of just operate in the world differently.
I didn't know how to harness a dog when I moved there and I didn't know how to, you know, figure out which dogs would get along. And all of those just kind of basics of mushing were totally new to me.
Um so I think in some ways I didn't realize until I came back from the yukon and started uh college the degree to which my kind of worldview and understanding had been so dramatically shifted because I was sort of back in a classroom and around people who had sort of just kept going on after high school and we thought really differently about things, Yeah, I wonder if it felt a little like culture shock. Yeah, yeah. And I think it was culture shock in both directions.
I mean, I knew, I remember when I arrived in Old Crow, and, you know, pretty much everybody spoke English. It's an indigenous village, so there's lots of folks who also prefer to speak Gwich'in rather than English. But, you know, I could, at a sort of basic linguistic level, talk with basically everybody. And I also had nothing to say. Okay, okay. Because what I knew about was just not germane to anyone's life.
I didn't have any knowledge that made any sense, right? I was like a kid from Iowa. Yeah. And I remember very vividly, it was probably, I had been there for like two months, and I had been out with the dog team. And I came back and I had observed something that was actually useful to people and I had something to say for the first time. And that intermediate eight weeks was really tough, right? It felt like I was very topsy-turvy and honestly stayed mostly because I couldn't
imagine turning tail and going home, so it was sort of stubbornness. cleverness. And then by the time I had been there for 10 weeks, I was head over heels and it was very hard to leave years later. What was it that you came back to the community with, that piece of knowledge that you felt like you could share? It was wolf tracks on the trail.
Being like, oh, yeah, you know, somebody had been, there had been a wolf around the village and people were kind of keeping track of where it had been seen. And, you know, I had seen its tracks on the trail when I was out. And I was like, oh, that's actually useful to people. They're interested in this. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any stories from that time that motivated you to write Floating Coast? Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think there's a couple of things.
I think in a general sense, you know, people, and this is true, it's kind of true all over Alaska. I feel like there's a way in which when I'm living where I do write where I am right now in Providence, Rhode Island, where, you know, a lot of us have moved here recently. Certainly most of my colleagues and close friends were kind of transplants. We don't have really deep relationships with the place. And we certainly don't have kind of inherited histories of the place, right?
I mean, I can tell some history of Providence now because I'm a historian and I'm curious, but it's very different than if you are, you know, hanging around with friends in rural Alaska or in the Yukon. And part of what comes up when you're grilling your fish or having a cup of tea is history, right? There was a kind of presence of the past that was really new to me at 18 and made me interested in history in a way that at the time I couldn't put a name on it.
But I really do identify that as the moment when thinking historically, because I saw people doing it in their daily lives all the time. And what that brings to understanding the landscape is so different than if you show up and all you can see are, you know, oh, there's some spruce trees here and there's a river there. You know, if the river has many names and many stories of people living along it, it's a totally different thing.
And I think the other part of the histories that I was hearing had to do with how folks living in Old Crow, which is... Quite far inland. It's about 100 miles from the Beaufort Sea. And then, you know, it's very far from the Bering Sea coast. And it's obviously very far from the Atlantic coast. But how, you know, the colonial experience there was of goods from the Russian and British empires kind of making their way into this country long before any actual European person showed up.
And I was just fascinated by that. I didn't know there had been Russians in North America at the time. I was 18.
And just sort of the way that this part of the world that I think often for people who live outside the north is understood as being like very far away and separate was actually really deeply connected and had been for a long time and then you know meant that you know Gwich'in people and other indigenous groups had been kind of part of these geopolitics for hundreds of years or 150 50 years. So that was kind of what really made me interested in thinking about that kind
of colonial moment and its repercussions, like what it has meant up into the present. Mm-hmm. A big theme in the book is this cyclical nature of change. And you mentioned it a few minutes ago, but, you know, the cyclical nature of change as it relates to humans, how human ideas are so powerful that they have the ability to change the world. And in changing the world, we shape our relationship with it.
How often have you found that humans live in a reality of our own creation rather than one reality? Of the natural world? That's such a good question. And I teach classes that take 14 weeks to unpack that question, so I'll go to do it somewhat more speedily.
I think one of the things that, partly from my experience living in the North and then partly in teaching environmental history, as I do now, that I've come to think about is, you know, every society is in some ways a kind of constant and ongoing mediation between human societies and the ecologies that they emerge out of. There is no, you know, that pretense that I kind of imagined when I was a kid in Iowa is actually a fiction.
And it's a fiction if you don't even look very hard, right? If you're in an agricultural economy. Weather matters and weeds matter and, you know, all kinds of things that are not human beings kind of press in on your daily life. And I actually think that it's a real anomaly in the human past that we even imagine we could be separate, right?
It took an enormous amount of intellectual work, most of which has been accomplished in the last couple hundred years, among a fairly limited number of societies to sort of bring that idea to be the one that is accepted and how we make decisions. And I think it's also very clear that the fiction is coming to a crashing end, right?
Because, I mean, among other things, climate change makes it very clear that even if you imagine your actions to not have consequences in the ecologies that you depend on, they still do, and eventually the bill will come due. Yeah, yeah. So climate change is reshaping Arctic communities, you know, loss of sea ice, changing marine ecosystems, coastal erosion, displacement, thawing permafrost are just a few examples.
Based on your historical research, are there past environmental shifts that might offer us insight into how Arctic communities might adapt today? Yeah, I think one thing that emerges out of, this is present in a lot of oral histories from northwestern Alaska, but actually all the way through, you know, way into the interior, is that, you know, these are places that have actually dealt with some fairly dramatic moments of climate change before.
I think one event that comes up in people's oral histories is the eruption of a volcano in the early 19th century that causes all across the Northern Hemisphere this moment called the year without summer. And it shows up in Alaska, but it also shows up, it's actually the year that Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein because she's stuck in a house because it just, it never gets warm. Okay. And it's because there's so much particulate matter in the atmosphere
that summer just doesn't happen. And, of course, there's great turmoil, particularly in agricultural societies, because it's a very bad year to grow anything. Yeah, okay. And it was also a really rough year in the north, right? Fish didn't migrate. People talk about there kind of being this absent year of salmon because there was too much ice on the rivers. Mm-hmm. And, you know, many of the stories that come out of that period emphasize that this was a really hard time, right?
They're not romanticizing it, and they're not pretending that it wasn't incredibly difficult, but also tend to emphasize that people's ability to work together and their ability to move were kind of critical to survival. And I think that that is one of the challenges of contemporary climate change is that the way that we create communities in the 21st century is they're supposed to be permanent-hmm. And we imagine, you know, you're not supposed to move your house around.
Schools are big buildings, lots of infrastructure goes into kind of creating a community in the present. And it makes it really hard to respond to events like this in the way that people would have in the past at the level of...
Of moving but I think the the lesson that nobody gets through it alone um is portable to the present um and that it it does it implies a kind of uh solidarity and and willingness to think together that you know the kinds of big decisions that retreating from a coastline that is you know being battered by storms or thinking about how to relate to sea ice that no longer does what it used to do, those are things that are going to be very important. Yeah, yeah.
There's increasing global interest in Arctic resources from oil to rare minerals. How do you see current extractive industries following or maybe diverging from past patterns? That's also a really good question. And I think some of it depends at how closely focused you are on the specifics. Because I think if you kind of zoom out and take the view from 10,000 feet, the kind of impulse to come in and extract resources, you know, in some ways that is the story of Alaska since the U.S. purchase.
And you can argue that it's the story of Alaska since Russian colonization. That, you know, people have come to the place and wanted to get stuff out of it and then generally speaking left. And sometimes, you know, the pipeline, obviously, there's lots of infrastructure left. There's still sort of jobs that remain, but it doesn't look like it did in the 70s when the pipeline was going in.
So there's that kind of boom bust extractive thing that obviously is a big piece of Alaskan history, but also kind of northern history more generally. And a lot of the kind of contemporary mineral boom feels like it follows right in those footsteps because there's, it's often large companies. You know, if you think about some of the really big mines in Alaska right now, the companies are actually Canadian. So they're not, they're not even companies within the United States.
So that, that feels like it falls into the same sort of trajectory. Yeah. I think there are some important differences, though, that do change how those projects are related to on the ground and the complexities of the politics around them. Because if you think about, say, the Klondike gold rush where we kind of started. None of the indigenous people living in the Yukon at the time could claim gold-bearing land, right?
They were not considered able to do that by the Canadian government. So, that was a form of extraction where the participation of the Tronday Quechen and any other indigenous people was, you know, limited and kind of made peripheral because they were disallowed from owning the land that gold came out of. So, you could work a mine, but you had to work it for wages. You couldn't own it.
And obviously, that's very different if you think about Alaska Native corporations that are not just owners of the land, but are the decision makers about a great deal of what happens on it. So that the kind of set of political decisions and who gets to make them has really changed. And I think sometimes in ways that create really complicated politics, because people disagree about resource use.
It's a complicated set of decisions. And, you know, disagree about short term, you know, needs and potential gains versus longer and medium term ones. But who is at the table for making some of those decisions has changed in the past 150 years. If we look at the mid 20th century, we see the rise of the fossil fuel industry start extracting gas and oil from the Arctic. Is this or was this different from what we saw with the overhunting of whales and caribou or was it just more of the same?
This might sound repetitive, but I think it also depends on kind of the scale at which you address it. Okay, okay. I've heard people, and I think there's real kind of weight to the idea that the oil boom in the 70s was the second oil boom, right? It came after the oil boom in the 1840s and 50s with the hunting of whales, right? Like, same idea, different century. Okay, okay. But I think that one of the kind of key differences is that whales, bowhead whales, were overhunted.
They were driven very close to extinction by the early parts of the 20th century. But because they are animals and kind of operate on a time span that is similar, if not the same as human beings, they've also recovered, right? The population of bowhead whales has grown over the course of the 20th century. They're back up close to the numbers that they had before commercial hunting.
They're able to regenerate. And that doesn't undo what transformed the ecosystem because of commercial whaling entirely.
But there is a kind of resilience there that I think is different than if you do kind of large-scale mineral or oil and gas exploration, where you're, I mean, you're changing things at a kind of geological level, both through the extraction itself, but then because you're changing the atmosphere, you're creating a different kind of earth as a result of burning fossil fuels in particular.
And so I think the kind of duration of the change and of the potential kind of ecosystem harms can be quite different in those kind of two situations. One of your central points in the book is that Arctic history is a history of energy, whether it's from whale oil, caribou, gold, fossil fuels. How did energy use shape the way different societies engaged with the North?
So I, as I was researching this book, I didn't start off thinking about it as an energy history or dealing with energy in any way in particular. And actually started because I was really interested in what the sort of comparative history of what happened to the Russian side of the Bering Strait and the American side. Like, what happens if you make your reindeer kind of conform to communist ideals or capitalist ones? Like, does it look different? Does it not look different?
But what I realized as I was researching it is that the kind of assumptions that both the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union on the Russian side of the strait and the American kind of government and American citizens who arrived in Alaska after 1867, their kind of assumptions about what a landscape is for were really shaped by the idea that you're supposed to get energy from it. You're supposed to kill whales so that you can refine their oil and burn it in lamps.
You're supposed to raise animals like reindeer in large numbers so that you can consume their meat and their hides at large scale. Mm-hmm. And that kind of assumption about the kind of base of a good society and a society that is growing and caring for its citizens, starting from the position of sort of maximal extraction, is very different than how Inupiaq or Yupik or Chukchi, people who had been living in the Bering Strait for a long time, kind of understood a good life to be, right?
It meant eating whales, but it didn't mean killing hundreds of them to refine their oil. And in some ways, that is a difference in people's relationship with how they use energy. Everybody has to use energy. We don't photosynthesize. So, you know, we got to get it from somewhere. That's just like a baseline part of being a human being. But how much you imagine a society or an individual needs in order to be somebody living a good and full life can vary enormously.
And I think that that's sort of part of the set of contrasts that I found really interesting in this region as it kind of transitions from the middle of the 19th century up into the 20th. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi peoples sustained themselves for generations on whaling, caribou hunting, and fishing. The same animals and sea life that were hunted and processed en masse by Americans and Russians for industry.
What do you think it means for those sustainable resources to be taken away from the Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi? Well, in the short term, I mean, it was just devastating, right? The kind of immediate impacts of commercial whaling, which are very evident both in oral histories and in the logbooks of whalers themselves, is that it causes just a nutritional crisis in the Bering Strait.
If there's not enough whales and there's not enough walrus, it's really difficult for communities that depend on those animals to find alternatives. So I think one of the things that emerges for me in this history is that usually when you're doing this kind of large-scale extraction, and you're doing the extraction so that people who live very far away from the site of extraction can benefit, somebody is going to be bearing the cost.
And in this case, it sort of starts with people living right around the Bering Strait. And there are, you know, kind of complicating factors. It's a moment when there's big crashes in caribou herds simultaneous with the pressures of commercial whaling. So there's this period in the 1880s where it feels like absolutely everything is at its lowest possible ebb in the far north. And this is really, you know, destructive and many communities kind of rearrange
and combine. But that extractive moment of whaling and walrus hunting is really kind of critical to that crisis. And I think that the longer term kind of consequences of that, I mean, it changes ecosystems in ways that we probably don't even know what they are because we, you know, the kind of scientific research that people do now on the seafloor wasn't happening in the 1810s. So we don't know what that looked like in that sort of particular set of terms prior to this kind of whaling.
We only know through the kind of technologies of contemporary science what an ocean that has been whaled extensively looks like. So our sense of normal is probably quite abnormal. Yeah, yeah. Music. You know, you did so much research for this book on the Arctic, on the Bering Strait. Did anything surprise you?
When I started this book, and I just mentioned that I was interested at the very outset with kind of comparing what the Russian kind of Soviet desires for their economy kind of projected onto this part of the world versus what the American ones were. So I had this kind of comparative idea in mind. I assumed that I was going to be writing a book that was primarily one of contrast.
And that it was going to emphasize the ways in which, you know, the Soviet Union looked so completely different from what was happening in the United States.
And then I started doing the research and it became clear that there were differences and some of them were really meaningful and consequential but the United States wanted to create massive reindeer farms and so did the Soviet Union and the United States went through a period of extensive whaling and so did the Soviet Union and both countries kind of imagined that walruses were a major commercial kind of source of revenue and then didn't,
and actually kind of put in conservation programs because they realized they were going to exterminate walrus if they just kept going. Like, there's very similar kind of patterns on both sides of the Bering Strait, regardless of the economic system or the ideology. And I think in part it's because of the environment in the Bering Strait was one that has different rules than the environment that socialism and capitalism grew up with, right?
It's not a temperate place. It's not an agricultural zone. And so a lot of the things that people came to the North expecting to work actually were reshaped by the kind of conditions. And I didn't expect that. I was, it took a lot of evidence for me to be like, okay, my expectations are in fact, don't appear to be correct. This is a different kind of story.
Did that at all remind you of your perspective coming from Iowa and going to the Arctic and your expectations were much different because in Iowa, it's completely man-made? Yeah, and I actually think some of the accounts, both written by, you know, missionaries who went to Alaska or by, you know, these very enthusiastic young Bolsheviks who go up to the Chukchi Peninsula on the Russian side, many of their kind of initial senses of shock and observation felt familiar for that reason, right?
They're people who were kind of expecting a groomed agricultural landscape or one that was kind of romantic but welcoming at the same time. And, you know, what they get are blizzards of mosquitoes and, you know, really unpredictable weather for them, right? Other people know what's going on, but they don't. And it gets really dark in the winter. You know, there's all the things that are totally standard if you have spent a lot of time in or grew up in the north.
But our, you know, if your set of expectations come from temperate zones seem hostile or foreign or surprising or impossible to deal with, there's a scholar at the University of Washington who is Alaska Native. Her name is Jen Rose Smith.
And she has this great term, which she calls temperate normativity, just to try to get at this set of expectations that people like me showed up in Alaska with and how it really kind of can color the political goals and the economic goals and the sort of social imagination of people who are making decisions from Washington, D.C. Or from Moscow, for places that they don't actually kind of understand on the ground. Yeah.
Yeah, I like what you said earlier to basically describe expectations, and it was something along the lines of, you know, if it wasn't manicured, then at least it might be welcoming. And they found that it was neither. Yeah. And I mean, I'm sort of fascinated by there's an assumption there that a landscape that you don't know anything about would be welcoming, which is kind of, if you think about it, kind of odd.
Like, I don't actually imagine that the tropics are hostile, but they would be to me because I don't know anything about the tropics. I don't know what to eat and not eat. And I don't know what time of day it rains. Like, of course, that environment when I first enter it is going to be really disorienting. So it's kind of fascinating to read these accounts of people who have an expectation that, well, it should work here, like it works the place that I grew up or spent a lot of my life.
I wonder if that comes from the ability to travel or maybe the inability to travel in, say, the 1800s, and those people were not as worldly. Yeah, I think there's, our information environment is very different. And I think I was actually talking about this with a friend the other day that there are a number of indigenous Hawaiian whalers who sign on with the 19th century whaling fleet that goes up to the Arctic.
So people who grew up in Hawaii and take what is supposed to be maybe a four or five month job on a whaling ship going north. And then the 1870s, a bunch of these ships get frozen into the sea ice. Including crews who came from Hawaii. So you are somebody whose entire world has been what Hawaii looks like and feels like and what you can eat there. And you don't just end up on a whaling ship in the Bering Strait in the summer,
which is cold and stormy by comparison. You end up, you know, iced into the Beaufort Sea through a winter where the sun doesn't come up. And that, like, you know, now if that happens to somebody, you probably have heard that this is a possibility that exists on Earth. Yeah.
But in the 18th century, people were moving around in all kinds of ways where they stumbled into experiences where it might have never been a sort of discussed possibility that you could be in a part of the world where it was below freezing and the sun didn't come up for six weeks. And, I mean, that's just a wild thing to contemplate. Yeah. How do you process that? How do you think about what this is doing to your body?
Yeah. Do you think our perspective of the Arctic, the Bering Strait, has changed over time? I think it depends who the we or the our is, for sure. I think for people who don't live along the Bering Strait and who kind of view it from afar, that it goes through some really distinct changes from the 19th into the 20th century and into the present.
And it moves from the kind of 19th century moment where it's at the kind of edge of the, edge of the world, as people say, living on the East Coast of the United States would know it, right? Of course, it's the center of the world to people who live there. But on the kind of map of an American living where I do now in Providence, it would have been known, but very peripheral, if that.
And then in the course of the 20th century, it really emerges as a place of kind of geopolitical anxiety, because the United States and the Soviet Union are very close to each other at the strait. They're only 50 miles apart. There are people who have family members on both sides, which led both countries to be concerned about, you know, are they actually loyal citizens?
And you can find lots of FBI files that are very concerned about whether or not people who live like right along the edge are going to be loyal to the United States if the Soviet Union invades and vice versa. And also because there's huge military buildup, right?
Like all of the Air Force bases in Alaska, you know many of them are built initially during the second world war as part of the land lease program when we were allies with the soviet union but then they really expand during the cold war, so it shows up on maps suddenly in a very different way to kind of americans living in the lower 48 um as a place where like this is this is where the the end of the world is going to begin right it's going to begin at the bering strait
with some sort of nuclear armageddon um. Which is, of course, not really how people think of it now. If you live in Alaska, people talk about the geopolitics and the Russian airplanes that are flirting with American airspace. And that is very present there. But I very rarely meet somebody living here in Providence who is even aware that that's happening. Yeah. Yeah, it's in the newspapers multiple times a year. Right, yeah. It's like, oh, that again. Yeah, exactly. It's like a game. Yeah, right.
That kind of brinkmanship. I think now people who live in the lower 48, when they hear the Arctic, they tend to think about climate change. That's the narrative that I've, or at least the questions that I get are often focused on that now. Getting back to the Inupia, Yupik, and Chukchi just for a minute. You know, those people had also integrated whales into their spirituality. So not only was their food source being depleted, a part of their belief system was also being attacked.
Yeah, I think one of the things when I was looking at different ways that people have related to whales and to bowhead whales in particular that was really striking is that any human being who needs to hunt whales as part of their life is very intimate with them, right? You'd have to know how they behave. You observe them very closely. So... The kind of commercial whalers end up building up a great deal of knowledge about bowheads and leave it in their logbooks and their journals.
But when you kind of compare that sort of knowledge, which is very grounded and very specific often, to the kind of knowledge that the people who really have the longest relationship with whales, right? You know, Yupik and Inupiaq hunters, it's thousands and thousands of years. It's a much different depth of experience. Their way of understanding whales and thinking about the ways that whales and people kind of intersect is one in which, you know, whales have a kind of moral capacity.
They are observant, sentient beings that pay attention to what people are doing and respond to it. And sort of, they're a piece of society in a way that for a commercial whaler, a whale only becomes part of society when it's turned into a commodity that you can sell. It doesn't have that role prior to being sort of economic good.
And that's very, very different in the kind of worldview and the understanding of what a person is and what a society is for Yupik and Inupiaq communities, where whales are part of building that. And relating to whales is a kind of act of asking permission and supplication rather than dominance or extraction. Mm-hmm. You know, I love this part of the book where you talk about how a certain whale is older than parts of the United States.
I think that that gives the reader a manageable understanding of time and how humans can completely alter wild areas in such a short period of time. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the really remarkable things about bowheads is how long they live. You know, that you can, there are certainly whales that outlived the Soviet Union by a fair bit. And there are whales that, you know, were born when Thomas Jefferson was president and died when Bill Clinton was president.
So that's a, you know, that's most of the American experience.
And that thinking about what it is that whales that were born in the early part of the 19th century so we're born before commercial whaling we're born before noise pollution we're born before plastic which is a major part of what is happening to oceans yeah we're born before you know PFAS and that the other kinds of contamination that actually ends up building up in the Bering Sea to a really worrying degree, that's all happened within their lifetime.
And so, you know, if there is a being out there that actually knows what the Bering Sea looks like, you know, prior to all of these things, it's whales, it's not people. So I hope this next question doesn't kind of come out of nowhere, but, you know, it's something that I just kept thinking as I was reading the book, but it blends historical research with what I would say, literary prose. How did you develop this approach to writing history? So I think it comes from a couple of places.
Part of why I became a historian is because I really like writing and I like thinking about what words can do. And history is a field where there's actually a kind of wide spectrum of accepted ways to write. So you can write very technically and then you can write very poetically and it counts, which there are other academic fields where it's much more, it's much stricter.
And I think, you know, part of what I realized when I was writing this book is that if I'm writing even just for professional historians, let alone other kind of members of the public, and assuming that most of those people are not from the Bering Strait and don't have experience with it firsthand, that a huge part of my job as the person writing this history is to communicate how much this part of the world matters.
That it's not actually peripheral. Which, of course, if you live there is obvious, right? And it's not saying anything new to anybody who's from this part of Alaska and Russia. But I was sort of assuming that most of my audience were going to be people who do not wake up in the morning thinking about the Bering Strait or thinking about Wales or thinking about any of the other things that come up in this book.
And so I needed to kind of convince people that there is something kind of worth staying with in this place. And that is actually, it's kind of a writerly task. It's one of world building and kind of welcoming people into this history through the prose, rather than just sort of assuming that they're interested and then telling them the history as if it is kind of, Something that they're already engaging with on a daily basis.
So I think some of it was that hope to be able to reach an audience of people that aren't picking this up only because they're interested in this part of the world or they're interested in Wales. But, you know, there's kind of enough pull there that they would stay with the story. In your experience, what do you think the written word has the ability to accomplish? So this is a question that I get asked a lot by undergraduates here at Brown, because I teach a class on environmental writing.
And I think for a lot of students come to the class because they're looking for tools of persuasion. They feel like they know a lot about the environment, but they don't know how to tell people about it in a way that inspires compassion or action or contemplation or any of the other things that they might feel are missing in our approach to our relationship with nature. And I, on the one hand, deeply share their impulse.
I believe that the way that human beings make meaning out of the world is through words, whether they're written or spoken. On the other hand, I also think that sometimes we imagine that there's just one book waiting to be written out there that's going to kind of transform the political landscape of how it is that we make decisions around the environment. And at the level of politics, it's a lot more complicated than that one book.
I think you need lots of books from lots of different kinds of authors and perspectives and about different kinds of environments to reach lots of different kinds of audiences. And hopefully that's what shifts the needle rather than it being, rather than putting all the pressure on sort of one work of literature or nonfiction or poetry to be the final change agent. Mm-hmm. Do you feel like, with your writing, you're trying to make meaning of something out of words?
So I think I think writing works for me at a couple different levels I think the first time that I sit down and draft something it's actually because I need to figure it out which I think is a kind of meaning making but I often think of the the first draft as a kind of selfish one it's it it's me trying to find the signal in the noise and come to understand something that i'm preoccupied with better. And it takes that draft, which is really for my eyes and for my brain, right?
It's the place that I work out what it is that I think about something. And then the second draft is the one where I try to think about what in that process of figuring something out would be useful to other people and how can I best communicate that. And who might it be meaningful for? Because not every piece of writing is meaningful for the same groups of people. I'm currently working on a piece that's pretty technical and will be mostly published for scientists.
And that's written very differently than if I write a sort of creative nonfiction essay for a literary journal where it's a completely different audience and sort of a different kind of meaning. Mm-hmm. And how long do you take between drafts? So I think it varies a little bit about on the length of the project. My first book, I wrote it as a draft of my doctoral dissertation. And so that first draft took me about two years.
And then I sat down to revise it into a book and to revise it into a book that hopefully more than just other historians would want to read. And I was immediately like, oh, no, if every draft takes me two years, it's going to be a really long time before there's a book in the world. And it turns out that each draft takes about half as much time as the draft before, in my experience.
So if the first one was two years, the second one was a year, and they really, really start speeding up after that, because that first one is where you're figuring out what do you know and what do you not know and where do you need to figure things out and where is there no answer to the things you want figured out. But the second draft is more that work of putting it in context for other readers.
And then you're down to the fine polishing and the kind of buffing around the edges, which is a lot of fun and makes you feel like you're a really speedy, you know, on top of it writer until you have to start all over again with a new project. Yeah. Yeah, just a minute ago, you said that you use writing to make meaning out of the noise. How often do you do that?
It's a good question. And I think... I think there's always pieces where if I had infinite time, I could keep pushing and investigating and thinking and reconsidering how I go about the thinking. So in some ways, I think any intellectual project, the end point is a little bit arbitrary. It's because at some point you have to cut yourself off, write a book, talk to other people about the drafts, see that it's actually doing some work in the world for somebody besides yourself.
And let it go. Because otherwise, you could sort of perpetually be in this stage of refinement and bringing in more research and talking to more people about it. So I feel like the, you know, since the book has been out for about five years, that now it feels like it kind of stands on its own. And so it has made some meaning in the world for myself and for other people, hopefully.
And now it can kind of go off and do its work on its own. And my job is to try to make another book to find some more patterns in the kind of complexities of the past that feel like they make sense and explain why it is that things have happened in the way that they have. And perhaps out of that, give us some sense of how things might be different in the future. Yeah.
How often do these historical issues that make their way into the present just gnaw at you and you are, you know, sitting awake at night and you're like, I need to do something about this. You know, this thought is not going away. I think most writers and most historians are basically come to that particular profession because there's some set of questions that nod them.
And that's the I mean, some ways I feel like I'm a historian because the questions I have are about the ways that the past has come to influence the present. And I'm a writer because that's how I can think about those things. And the two of them are pretty conjoined. They really are the same set of questions, and they do preoccupy me. Because otherwise, you know, there's lots of other things you can do with your life besides go to archives and try to make sentences that people want to read.
So I think there is a sense that it's something that you feel a little bit called to do, or you would miss it, you would feel its absence if you weren't able to do it. Do you think capitalist and socialist countries are capable of coexisting with nature? So I started this project very much hopeful that one of these ideologies or the other would have a particularly strong set of kind of principles within them that felt like they allowed for a level of coexistence.
And what I found is that the kind of fundamental core, and this kind of the abstract core of both capitalism and socialism, really is the idea that for human societies to be good places for human beings to live, we as human beings have to maximize what it is that we take from the environments around us. They're not ideologies that have a lot of place for imagining that other parts of the world need to exist in a kind of whole and flourishing form.
And I think that that kind of human supremacy often puts them at odds with what it is that ecologies need. And there are cases where both ideologies can bend, right? And there's one of those cases in the book. But I think, Generally speaking, the need for both socialism and capitalism to keep growing and to imagine that growth is the sort of health check of the society—. Puts enormous pressure on ecosystems because ecosystems don't grow infinitely.
That's kind of fundamentally not how they operate. And so if you're trying to extract ever more from something that is finite, at some point you're going to ruin it. And that impulse for extraction kind of sits inside both socialism and capitalism. So you need other values to discipline those ideologies if there's going to be coexistence. I don't think it comes internally. Yeah, I keep thinking, here's this area, the Arctic, the Bering Strait, and it has these natural resources.
But there are these other parts of the world with, you know, an insatiable hunger, and it just keeps taking bites, and bites, and bites, and another bite here. And, you know, eventually, it's all just going to be gone. Yeah, I mean, if you asked what keeps me up at night, in some ways that is exactly what keeps me up at night. I don't want it all to be gone, right?
I think like many, if not most people, I value things that exist outside that kind of economic appetite and want there to be space for it and want forms of life that aren't just human life to be able to flourish and abound. And for that to happen, there need to be kind of some set of checks that we decide as a collective, a kind of political collective, the places that are out of bounds.
And, you know, the United States has done this historically through things like national parks, which have a very complicated history because of who they include and exclude. So they're not a perfect model by any chance, by any sense. But I think there are kind of other ways to imagine and ways beyond just kind of putting a fence around a piece of land and saying, okay, this is off limits.
That is more about our kind of daily lives and the choices we make around consumption and how much fossil fuel we burn and those sorts of things that also need to be included in that kind of decision making. Yeah. What do you think we can learn from the environmental transformations of the Bering Strait when we think about the future of Arctic economies and environments?
There's a book whose title is a quote from a Yupik man who lives on St. Lawrence Island, whose name is unfortunately escaping me because it's Friday afternoon. And the title of the book is The World Moves Faster Now. And I think that in some ways that title and that line really encapsulates the sensation that comes from a quickly changing environment. That it speeds up not just the pace of sort of environmental change,
but it speeds up what people are doing in the environment. So it makes it easier for shipping traffic to come to the Bering Strait. And it makes it more likely that there's kind of more kinds of mineral exploration as sea ice and ice caps recede. And that kind of speeding up feels like it is of a piece with kind of other sensations that the world is giving us right now.
But that in the Bering Strait are very closely aligned with environmental change, not just, you know, political or social change or the ways that our phones feel like they're constantly turning into new kinds of technology in our hands. And it's making a direct link between sets of change that are usually seen as purely social and ones that are deeply environmental and showing how they're closely linked and don't really show any signs of slowing down.
And is the author of that book, The Earth is Faster Now, is it Igor? Krupnik. Yes. Yeah. Krupnik. Okay, there we go. So how about Alaskan Native and other Arctic Indigenous perspectives? You know, how might their perspectives play in shaping sustainable futures for Arctic regions? So I answer this question as not an Arctic Indigenous person and somebody who doesn't currently live in the Arctic.
And I think that from my perspective, the question really is, when will Arctic Indigenous folks get the chance to make those decisions, right? It's a part of the world where many forms of kind of sovereign decision making have been moved from Indigenous hands into those of various federal governments, right? Those of the United States and Canada and Russia and the other kind of circumpolar nation states.
So we actually don't know what it would look like if decisions were being made by Arctic indigenous people at that kind of big nation state level, right? There's all sorts of decisions that they are making on the ground and in local communities.
But in terms of shaping things like how the United States goes about fossil fuel development in the Arctic, that's not a decision that is solely made by Arctic residents, let alone how fossil fuel consumption decisions are made in the United States as a whole, which is incredibly consequential for the Arctic, but obviously doesn't happen there.
So, I think it's a question that we should answer by offering more robust and durable forms of political representation and policy shaping to exactly those communities that over the course of the 20th century were often kind of sidelined by nation-state and often geopolitical concerns in the circumpolar world. Mm-hmm.
We talked about this earlier, but the Arctic is often viewed as a warning for the rest of the world, whether that's through melting ice, shifting economies, or disappearing species. What do you think the Arctic can teach us about global environmental change?
So I think the person who has the wisest things to say about this is a scholar that I mentioned earlier named Jen Rose Smith, who teaches at the University of Washington, and thinks a lot about the ways in which the Arctic is kind of mobilized by people who live outside it in changing ways over time that often have nothing to do with the experience of actually living there.
Okay, okay. And that, you know, historically, the Arctic has been seen as a kind of scary, empty place where people from the outside go to kind of prove their manhood and sometimes die there. Or the Arctic is this place of pristine beauty where we can go for contemplation. Or it's this sort of 21st century version that the Arctic is this place that's sending us a signal about how our behavior is wrong. And one of the things that Jen says that I think is...
Is a kind of helpful reminder is that the Arctic might actually be, you know, a place that we should pay attention to in this era of climate change because the change that is happening so rapidly. But we should also remember that on top of and with that change, it's also an inhabited place. It's not just a place for us to project our thoughts onto, right? It's a place that people live in and have lots of knowledge of.
And so if it's going to teach us anything, some of that teaching needs to come from the folks who are living there rather than sort of in this abstracted sense of like, well, you know, the ice caps are going to teach us that our behavior has to change. I think it's a good reminder just because of that long history of imagining the Arctic as this kind of empty space that it's not. Yeah.
And I think that to me, part of what's powerful about remembering that the Arctic is inhabited and is a homeland for so many people is that it's a reminder that the terms of climate change are not abstract. They're not just about kind of figuring out how to recycle because we care about polar bears. They're really, this is about preserving people's rights to live in the homes that they want to live in under the terms they want to live in them.
And I feel like that's a little more granular than sometimes environmental messages are sent to us, that it's supposed to be this kind of abstract altruism about animals that we may or may not ever meet, landscapes that we may or may not ever see. And that actually it's more about, like, do you want your children to be able to experience the world that you experienced as a child? And if the answer to that is yes, you know, then we should figure out how to do that. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Bathsheba, those are all the questions I have for you. I want to thank you for your time, for your beautiful and informative writing, and for the amount of research you've done on the Arctic and the Bering Strait. Thank you so much. Those were wonderful questions. I really appreciated them. Music. For more information about the Anchorage Museum, visit anchoragemuseum.org. This podcast was produced by me, Cody Liska, for the Anchorage Museum. With additional help from Julie Decker.
Chattermark's music is produced by Keys Open Doors. Music.