Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and Arctic ecology

For most of human history, bowhead whales interacted with human beings only as an occasional and relatively minor threat along the edges of their migration routes. When industrial whaling ships arrived at the turn of the 20th century, bowheads at first demonstrated little fear, approaching the vessels with curiosity and at times bumping into them, Demuth’s research revealed. As their kin were slaughtered, the whales’ behavior soon changed and they began to use sea ice in new, strategic ways to avoid hunting boats. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.

Were you to pass under a streetlamp at night in New England in 19th century, chances are good that you would find your path illuminated by a substance that originated in the Arctic Ocean. Whale oil, the waxy matter found in the skulls and blubber of these aquatic giants, lit the West during the industrial revolution. Producing a bright, odorless flame, it lit houses, roads, and factories, guided ships toward land, and lubricated the waterwheels and looms that helped drive the industrial revolution. It was the hunger for this substance, writes our guest, historian Bathsheba Demuth, that nearly wiped these leviathans off the planet and brought two warring world powers into contact with another way of relating to nature.

“The lack of ability to separate industrial killing from indigenous subsistence hunting emerges out of the sense that, well, we’re kind of above consuming at all as human beings, we’re special in some fundamental way; we don’t actually need to depend on animals or ecology in a direct sense; we can kind of coast above it all,” says Demuth. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.

“Commercial whaling ships,” writes Demuth, “sailed into a place where whales were not for sale, but were understood as souls by the Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi [peoples], who hunted them with expectations of a world constantly reincarnating and never easy to survive in. And there were the whales themselves, animals who, in the first years of this revolution, learned the danger of American ships and chose, with their behavior, to frustrate the desires of commerce.”

In her acclaimed book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, Demuth explores how capitalism, communism, and ecology have clashed for over 150 years in the remote region of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters stretching between Russia and Canada. Long before Americans and Europeans arrived to recruit its creatures into their economic programs, indigenous peoples living in these territories have practiced drastically different modes of association with the elements colonists regarded as natural resources. In reconstructing the confrontation between these practices and the rituals of early industrialization, Demuth remakes the possibilities of her genre. “What is the nature of history,” she asks, “when nature is part of what makes history?”

Abandoned mining equipment outside Nome, Alaska. “That impulse to universalize a set of rules, regardless of the ecosystem or the animals that people would be in relationship with, comes from a very similar place as the Soviet desire to make everyone a communist or the American colonial desire to make everybody a nice American capitalist,” says Demuth. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.
Bowhead whale jawbones in Gambell, Alaska. Bowhead whales can live for over 200 years, so some bowheads born in the second-half of the 18th century – individuals that experienced Soviet and American whaling firsthand – are still alive today. “If whales could scream out in pain like people,” one whaler later said, “we would all have gone mad.” “Such knowledge of whale feelings and actions, like the whalers’ own sentiments and observations, had no value to the market,” Demuth writes. “No oil buyer on the New Bedford docks paid for emotion. They sold light to people who could burn it with no knowledge of pain. Whalers were part of a society that gave their labour value only after whales became commodities.” Photo by Bathsheba Demuth.

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian at Brown University, specializing in the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began at the age of 18 when she moved to the Yukon, where she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. Her explorations of how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect have appeared in The New Yorker, Aeon, The Atlantic, and in her acclaimed first book, Floating Coast, which was hailed as a best book of 2019 by Nature. 

Demuth moved from Iowa to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon at age 18, where she spent two years mushing huskies, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon, and tracking bears. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.
“My continued and ongoing frustration really is one with the English language, which is that there’s not a great set of words or word for talking about things that are not people in ways that endow them with sentience and moral capacity and a kind of beinghood,” says Demuth. “We end up using these awkward portmanteaus like ‘nonhuman’ and ‘other than human’ or ‘nonhuman beings’ or ‘nonhuman persons,’ but all of those are about a lack; if you put non in front of human, you’re already implying that there’s something missing, which is not actually the way that I understand a whale to be. It’s not a not person, it’s a different kind of person.” Photo by Bathsheba Demuth.

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