SCIENCE sciencemag.org 5 JUNE 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6495 1071T
he area known as Beringia sits atop
the world, straddling Asia and North
America. A mere 50 miles of water
separate the Chukchi Peninsula in
Russia and the Seward Peninsula in
the United States. Terrestrial plant
life is relatively impoverished here, but the
Bering Strait compensates for the land’s
parsimony and more.
In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demuth tells
the story of this singular place beginning in
the mid-1800s. Empire-making was under
way then, both by the United States and by
Russia, and the lifeways of native Iñupiat,
Yupik, and Chuckchi peoples were about to
be severely curtailed. So too were the natural
histories of the species that contributed to
making the region.
America was earnestly building its sov-
ereign might, and thus its economy, during
this period. Having exhausted species off
both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, whal-
ers looking for new quarry came to Beringia
to hunt bowheads. Whales were integral to
just about every machine and product made
at the time. Whale blubber was used for lu-
bricating sewing machines and cotton gins.
Whalebone (baleen) lent structure to um-
brellas, fishing rods, and mattresses. Whale
tallow was refined into soap and became a
base for perfume. Most of all, whale oil was
used to fuel indoor lighting.ECOLOGYBy Mary Ellen HannibalColonialism and its consequences
The ever-ratcheting appetite for whales
drove them to near extinction in a few
short decades. The indigenous peoples
whose lives depended on whales lost both
their source of sustenance and the culture
around which their identities had been con-
structed for millennia.
With whale populations depleted, indus-
trial appetites turned to walruses, although
it took 250 of the blubbery beasts to measure
up to a single bowhead. “Far from Beringia,”
Demuth writes, “walruses were a minuscule
part of imagining a prosperous,
mechanized future: as fan belts on
power looms or grease in factory
cogs....” Wholesale depletion of
walruses continued well into the
early 1900s, as their blubber was
transformed into nitroglycerin in
service of World War I.
While Americans denuded
Arctic waters, Russians bristled
at what they considered theft of
their natural resources. The den-
izens of the waters between the
two sovereign nations did not
adhere to any putative human boundary.
“The problem of whaling, for the United
States and Imperial Russia, was not so much
that it killed too many whales, but that it
brought commerce while failing at civili-
zation,” writes Demuth. The United States
bemoaned profits that were being spent on
guns and alcohol, contributing not to lawful-
ness but its opposite. The Russians saw those
profits as going to the wrong people (Ameri-
cans). The solution that was negotiated was to
establish boundaries, to “enclose” the cyclicalperegrinations of whales, and subsequently
those of walruses, reindeer, and fox, in an at-
tempt to systematize harvests and make their
yields more reliable. Bringing little ecological
knowledge to bear on this effort led to both
market and population crashes: “...while dol-
lar value might make fur seem the same as
blubber or ivory, the rhythms that governed
their creation were not equivalent; the mar-
ket’s habit of supplanting one desire for an-
other did not apprehend how a fox would
never live on the same time as a walrus.”
As the Russian Revolution transformed
into bolshevism, and from thence to com-
munism, the question of how exactly to gov-
ern territory according to a Marxist ideal
brought new pressures to Beringian land,
sea, and native peoples. The cycles of nature
notwithstanding, Stalinism in particular
sought to mechanize production accord-
ing to its own time frame, not only at the
expense of the animals involved
but by way of cruelty to the Rus-
sian people it employed.
Once nonliving resources in
the form of gold and eventually
tin and oil became the focus of
colonial harvest, the question of
how to enclose Beringia became
expressly about sovereignty. “In
Alaska and Russia at the turn of
the twentieth century, the politics
of mining had to do with who
should rightfully benefit from
gold: the individual proprietor,
the corporation, the tsar, or the collective.”
In Demuth’s masterful narrative, the
very long time frame of energy production
crashes disastrously into the ever more ex-
pedient ways humanity purposes that en-
ergy. Global warming, the result of quickly
burning organic material that took eons to
accumulate, is the apotheosis of colonial
strategy. Floating Coast is eloquent testi-
mony to how this strategy is not working. j10.1126/science.abc2285Floating Coast: An
Environmental History
of the Bering Strait
Bathsheba Demuth
Norton, 2019. 416 pp.The reviewer is the author of Citizen Scientist: Searching
for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction (The Experiment,
2016). Email: [email protected]A ship traverses the
Bering Sea near Russia’s
Chukchi Peninsula.BOOKS et al.
A ravaged Arctic ecosystem serves as a warning
of the perils of human advancement
PHOTO: 1441147448/SHUTTERSTOCK
Published by AAAS