Awards

• Long-listed for Cundill History Prize 2020
• Winner of Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics 2020
• Winner of George Perkins Marsh Prize 2020
• Winner of Julia Ward Howe Prize 2019
• Winner of Western History Association Hal K. Rothman Book Prize 2020
• Winner of William Mills Prize 2020

Overview

Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

Full Product Details

9780393358322

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Reviews

Bathsheba Demuth's history flows as richly and fluidly as Arctic waters. Floating Coast narrates the transmutation of nearly every object and idea into something else. As she tracks the dynamics of the modernist, ecological makeover of the Bering Strait, Demuth is inventing a new form of historical narrative. -- Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival This first-ever popular history of the Bering Strait poses questions that will only grow more important in a warming climate: it explores how animals, plants, natural landscapes, and human beings responded as capitalism and communism demanded that they serve ideas of human progress. Demuth's research in Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi communities shows care and rigor, but it is the poetry of her writing that tends to come up first in recommendations and reviews. -- Hilah Kohen - Meduza Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed... Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all. -- Jack E. Davis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea In a time when human desire bends so very much of what it encounters to its own image, Demuth's debut encourages us to think about the very physical limits of such a proposition. Easily one of the most innovative and poetic natural histories I have read in years. -- Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore Though Floating Coast is billed as an environmental history, it could also be described as a meditation on a biosphere. Demuth includes lavish descriptions of the landscape she has been admiring since she first visited as a teenager.... Demuth's passion for her subject shines through on every page, and her account is enriched by her extensive 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. -- Sophie Pinkham - New York Review of Books A brilliant hybrid.... Often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision. -- Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland This book has much to offer. No matter its subject in any given paragraph... Floating Coast is rich, well researched and illuminating. It keeps under readers' feet the vastness of Demuth's expertise, as solid as a land bridge. She has made it her life's work to learn about Beringia. In relaying her knowledge, she provides a vision not only of where we on this continent came from but where we are headed. We study the Bering Strait to learn what the future holds. -- Julia Phillips - New York Times Book Review Floating Coast is a historian's Moby-Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time into a marvelously readable narrative. -- Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement [Floating Coast] is a deeply studied, deeply felt book that lays out a devastating but complex history of change, notes what faces us now, and dares us to imagine better. -- Genevieve Valentine - NPR Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing. -- Sverker Soelin - Nature

Floating Coast is rich, well researched and illuminating. It keeps under readers' feet the vastness of Demuth's expertise, as solid as a land bridge. -- The International New York Times Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, has reaped rich and fascinating material from the oral history of the indigenous Beringians recorded by ethnographers. -- Literary Review Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements. It is astonishingly rich in ethnographic detail, ecological precision, economic circumstance and historical texture. -- Nature ... Demuth has now herself written the history she calls for. Floating Coast is a historian's Moby Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time, into a marvelously readable nar -- Amitav Ghosh In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demouth has written a brilliant hybrid book about one of the most fragile and forgotten of Anthropocene front-line territories, the Bering Strait. Uniting ecology, anthropology, reportage and more, this is a superb work of environmental history, often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision. -- Robert Macfarlane

Author Information

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the United States and Russia, and in the history of energy and past climates. She has lived in and studied Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America.

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