To explore themes and ideas of the book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, we held a pop-up live podcast interview at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center SEED Lab with author and professor Bathsheba Demuth about her upbringing, connection to the Arctic, and goals for writing the about the environmental history of the Bering Strait region.
"Imagine the Arctic as a place where you can see the relationship between human beings and their broader environments, one that is interconnected and interdependent rather than being just one of humans making a series of decisions through time that are completely independent." - Bathsheba Demuth
I am an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. My interest in northern environments and cultures began when I was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For over two years, I mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, I have visited Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, I am interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect. My writing on these subjects has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker.
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.
A complete review of Floating Coast by Lisa Alexia for Denali Sunrise Publications is located here. Denali Sunrise Publications publishes media which promote the integrity and survival of subsistence-based and indigenous cultures.