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, according to a review published on goodreads.com.
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?
