A book review – featuring an interview with author Bathsheba Demuth.

What if the ‘greatest men of history’ wore a layer of blubber? In Floating Coast, bowhead whales emerge as key figures in the environmental history of the Bering Strait.A Russian communist, an American maritime capitalist, and a whale calf meet in the Bering Strait. These unlikely partners converge through time as Floating Coast follows the trajectory of human life, economic capital, and the animals that make it all possible. 

Like most scholars in the West, author Bathsheba Demuth was taught human history separately from the life sciences. Her 2019 book departs from this tradition by re-centering nonhuman life in the history of a place. In Beringia, bowhead whales emerge as figures of survival. Whale bodies supplied food to villagers in Russia and transformed into fuel and light for 19th century American cities. Together, these markets expose routines of slaughter and profit. 

Demuth, who moved to the remote Arctic following high school, eloquently captures these interactions between people and whales at several vital moments in history. Her book considers for the first time how bowhead whales may have experienced these trials personally.

I joke sometimes that I learned how to write history from working with a dog team. It’s only partly a joke.

Demuth adopts nonhuman perspectives in her book. During her time in Beringia, she learned that sled dogs have information that people do not. For one, they can hear and smell far better than humans can. That made her pay attention to the ways people pretend they are the sole decision-makers, when in reality, “they’re being mediated and negotiated with animals and the rest of the world around [them].” In the cold, harsh environment of the far North, you either work together or face extinction.

Life in Beringia isn’t easy. Straddling the northern U.S. and Russia, the harsh landscape is blanketed in snow through long, dark winters. Meanwhile, life at sea was miserable for the foreign laborers desperate enough to brave its Arctic waters. It’s in this landscape that Floating Coast traces the impacts of a devastating whaling industry through many diverse points of view.

A Russian, an American, and a whale calf meet here in the 20th century. The characters of this story seem at the surface to be polar opposites. Yet they each negotiate precarious terrains to stay alive, each life bound to the other. Demuth develops their stories by first confronting the profound limitations of human timescales. The life cycles of bowhead whales puts human history into some much-needed perspective.

Bowheads can live for more than two centuries. As Demuth explains, a whale calf was born “when the United States had not yet purchased Louisiana and the Russian empire owned Alaska. [The calf] would survive humans dreaming of utopia and nuclear apocalypse.” In scaling human conflict into the span of a single whale’s lifetime, “history” begins to recenter its key figures. 

Of course, history isn’t just about people. The characters in this dynamic story each operate within the intricate networks of life in Beringia, and within their own political contexts. The networks in which they operate are not just ecological but economic and familial. In this way, Demuth patiently reveals how ecology has never been extricable from anthropology. 

For the first time in a historical account, whales are seen for what they are: bound to people’s everyday lives. The word “resource” suddenly becomes dull and ineffective. In a world that is vibrantly alive and interconnected, exploitation becomes harder to justify. 

Yet, after colonial trade exposed indigenous communities to resource plunder, whale byproducts became central to the market. And while foreign men labored to make a wage by exporting these commodities, countless bowhead whales died.

Amazingly, this profound shift in whaling practices — from ceremonial indigenous hunting to mass industrial slaughter — impacted the behavior of bowheads in real time. After several years of relentless exploitation from foreign vessels, the whales learned to recognize American ships and altered their behavior to resist them. By centering the whales’ agency in her analysis, Demuth challenges traditional ideas of animal industries as static and fully exploitable.

The diverse spiritualities of indigenous Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi peoples help explain this change in animal behavior. As long-time members of the more-than-human community, indigenous hunters observed whale trends over the centuries. As Demuth writes, “Shamans became whales and then people again; caribou could have human faces.” For these indigenous communities, there is no strict definition of personhood. The land and sea are understood as sentient and dynamic. Bowheads are among the landscape’s chief decision-makers.

For some native peoples, survival depended on whales’ moral judgements upon distinct groups of humans. Ritual accounts describe bowhead whales who gave themselves over to die based on moral worth and ceremonial care: a respect that was not afforded to American whaling vessels. However, Demuth explains,

The thing that I saw the Soviet Union no better able to articulate in an actionable way was actually thinking very seriously about human beings as part of an ecology. [Socialism] is as much an ideology that separates the human and the rest of the world as capitalism is. 

The Beringian indigenous worldview, on the other hand, employs an intrinsically moral system. Bowheads aren’t considered mere resources. Their cosmology describes a universe constantly reincarnating, with blurring the boundaries between human and whale.

Demuth spends much of the book re-weaving lost connections, taking care to name indigenous languages and cultures while making their worlds explicit. Still, the author writes as a foreigner. According to her, “I don’t see myself either as speaking for or needing to speak for indigenous peoples around the Bering Strait. My responsibility as a historian is to [write] in a form that a wide public can understand — the consequences of, in this case, American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism eroding indigenous sovereignty.” For Demuth, that means taking local indigenous historians very seriously.

She cracked a warm smile. “I mean, these are not communities that require somebody from outside to represent them.” That’s something that indigenous activists, artists, and writers are doing for themselves and for their communities.

Floating Coast reimagines the Arctic as a dynamic world with no single history. The logic of capital becomes explicit as the politics of westward expansion divide people from nature. Critically, the book challenges the idea that humans are the only beings that can make political decisions. In reality, human systems of commerce are interconnected within larger, complex cycles of nature. 

The architecture of the book reinforces this theme of interconnection. Structured by strata and overlapping in time and space, the reader traverses “Sea, Shore, Land” and other chapters as histories progress and interact. “Land” and “Sea” emerge as false binaries in a place where nations converge, rift, and break apart. 

Bathsheba Demuth undermines the idea of any two ‘distinct countries.’ “In the much longer human experience of living in Beringia, people have gone back and forth across the Strait for a long time.” Despite recent political salience, life and energy continue to move constantly back and forth across the coast, across nations, and across ideologies. 

The book is not just a eulogy or an archive, but an urgent reminder that the past is ecological and interactive. History is diverse, multi-faced, and always in the making.