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.
“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?”
Continue reading Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and Arctic ecology