November 7, 2019 17
compliance carried greater benefits.
In 1979 the USSR ceased whaling en-
tirely. Walruses had fared better. The
USSR banned industrial walrus hunt-
ing at sea in 1956, and walrus herds
returned to a population level close to
that of a century earlier.
In Beringia, Demuth has found an al-
most perfect case study through which
to compare capitalist and Soviet ap-
proaches to the exploitation of natu-
ral resources. She finds that from the
Arctic vantage point, the results were
remarkably similar: ecological devasta-
tion and the immiseration of indigenous
communities. Intent on maximizing
“production,” neither system conceived
of a moment at which economic growth
was no longer possible or desirable.
This left them equally ill equipped to
situate human economies and societ-
ies within the limits of ecosystems that
operate primarily on a cyclical rather
than a linear model. The limits that
Americans and Soviets discovered in
Beringia—the slow reproductive cycles
of whales and walruses, the delicate
balance of wolves and caribou—are
vivid examples of the natural boundar-
ies that confine all human endeavors.
The twentieth century imagined prog-
ress as liberation from material con-
straints, but to ignore these constraints
is to court disaster. The harms caused
by the heedless consumption of whales
were a preview of the much larger dan-
gers of the consumption of fossil fuels.
America and Russia no longer hunt
for whales, but they continue to pursue
fuel and profits with terrifying reck-
lessness. In September, the Trump
administration announced its plan to
allow oil leasing on most of Alaska’s
19-million-acre Arctic National Wild-
life Refuge, which has already been
severely harmed by climate change.
Russia, meanwhile, is keenly aware of
the boons that a thawing Arctic may
offer its own oil industry, but it showed
minimal concern for the fires that
burned swaths of forest in the Arctic
and in Siberia this summer. The ques-
tions of enclosure raised in Floating
Coast have new urgency in the current
climate crisis, when it has become clear
that crucial ecosystems—the Arctic,
rainforests, the oceans—are better un-
derstood as global public goods than as
sources of profit.
Demuth organizes her book the-
matically—“Sea,” “Shore,” “Land,”
“Under ground,” “Ocean”—which leads
to chronological jumps that can be
confusing, especially given the leaps
between the American and Russian/
Soviet cases and among different in-
dustries. Her prose is often portentous,
and her frequent use of wordplay and
inversion quickly becomes irritating:
for example, a single page includes the
phrases “What took precedence: ani-
mals rights or human rites?” and “Dead
whales had once been valuable as light;
left alive, they had become a sign of en-
lightenment.” Her rhetoric comes at the
expense of clarity, and I often longed
for a plainer and more detailed discus-
sion of historical developments.
But Demuth’s passion for her sub-
ject shines through on every page, and
her account is enriched by her exten-
sive personal experience in Beringia.
Rather than treating the Arctic as a
plein-air museum, she shows how death
and destruction are essential aspects of
life. She was not too squeamish to eat
gray whale during one of the many
summers she spent in the Arctic, stay-
ing with an indigenous family, and
she takes the long geological view of
climate change: “The planet without
Beringia’s cold has existed before, and
great and plentiful life existed along
with it, but never in the experience of
Homo sapiens.” Above all, Demuth
writes, her time in Beringia has taught
her to be acutely conscious of her good
fortune in being and remaining alive.
“If we pay attention,” she writes,the world is not what we make of
it; rather, it is part of what makes
us: our flesh and bones, and also
our inclinations and hopes. In the
Arctic, such attention is not an op-
tion but is necessary, and it yields
appreciation for the precarity, the
contingency, of simply being.AFTERNOONS AND
EARLY EVENINGSThe beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dying
but could still enter into random conversations with strangers,
random but also deliberate, so impressions of the world
were still forming and changing you,
and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer
though by then everything was happening more slowly—
boutiques, restaurants, a little wine shop with a striped awning,
once a cat was sleeping in the doorway;
it was cool there, in the shadows, and I thought
I would like to sleep like that again, to have in my mind
not one thought. And later we would eat polpo and saganaki,
the waiter cutting leaves of oregano into a saucer of oil—
What was it, six o’clock? So when we left it was still light
and everything could be seen for what it was,
and then you got in the car—
where did you go next, after those days,
where although you could not speak you were not lost?—Louise Glück MEL BOCHNER: Exasperations
5 November - 21 December 2019 Peter Freeman, Inc. New York