coe199_demuth.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back, folks, you're with us here at the Cultures of Energy podcast, maybe in the Cultures of Energy podcast with the Cultures of Energy podcast,

Speaker2: [00:00:33] You are on top of the cultures

Speaker1: [00:00:35] You pop out on top in a metaphorical sense,

Speaker2: [00:00:38] Not a literal sense. Let's use all the possible dyke decks you are under the table of the podcast. Now you're in your sleeping bag.

Speaker1: [00:00:45] Oh, I know, I know. Here's this is a good contemporary social theory. You're entangled with the cultures of energy podcasts so welcome

Speaker2: [00:00:54] Belong to an assemblage

Speaker1: [00:00:55] Together. We're glad to be entangled with you and assembled with you here on this fine day or evening, as the case might be wherever you're at. Here it's what time is. It's like afternoon. We're still in Berlin.

Speaker2: [00:01:08] I'd like to share protein and nutrient streams with people.

Speaker1: [00:01:13] Oh, really? Is that what you want to do?

Speaker2: [00:01:15] I'm just trying to think of other entangled ways like I would like to access the same aquifer with our shared root system.

Speaker1: [00:01:22] Yeah, that'd be cool. Be cool if you were. What's that tree that so it's not a willow, but there's a tree that grows. It's like, it's like a I'm not using the right words. I should be better with my words, but it's all. It's it's all one unit. It's all one living being. It's interconnected, even though it all. It appears to be separate individual trees, but it's not.

Speaker2: [00:01:43] Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker1: [00:01:44] And it's not the rhizome. The rhizome isn't exactly the right word for it, but there's a name for that particular kind of

Speaker2: [00:01:53] Like a stand of trees that

Speaker1: [00:01:54] Share it. But it's all one. It's all genetically. It's it's all one organism. Yeah. Well, anyway, I will look that up after we get off the mic here, and then maybe you can put it into the notes. So I don't sound like quite such the idiot, but you know what I'm talking about there

Speaker2: [00:02:09] Was they found something in Louisiana, but didn't they? I'm going to look it up while we're talking.

Speaker1: [00:02:14] I don't know about Louisiana. All you know is that we do have an entangled system of climate and atmosphere that we kind of collectively share ultimately.

Speaker2: [00:02:23] All right. Scientists discovered a two thousand six hundred and twenty four year old tree in a North Carolina swamp. Excuse me, I remember it. It was in the south at the wrong part. And then the headline is climate change could kill it. This is not a news story. This is a story from May, actually. But I think this is the type of tree you're looking at.

Speaker1: [00:02:40] Oh, really?

Speaker2: [00:02:42] But wait, it's a clonal tree. Oh no. Wait, it's a non clonal tree.

Speaker1: [00:02:47] Ok, so it's just one individual tree because it's very small. Well, that is sad now. Ok, go ahead. You.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] I interrupted you before you were talking about air.

Speaker1: [00:02:56] Oh, I was just saying if. Is it possible? Like, say, someone were listening in North Carolina? Yeah, for example. And you know, we're sitting over here in Berlin. Yeah, could we ever? It's possible that we could breathe the same air. Oh yeah. Or we could breathe there. Exhale, I guess. Or they could breathe in our exhale.

Speaker2: [00:03:15] Yeah. I think that if you if you get down to the at least the like the atomic or the cellular level, like, we're exchanging things all over the world constantly. So we are literally interconnected.

Speaker1: [00:03:25] But it's a long distance, though. And yeah, it would take a while for each of those molecules to get swapped out and around. Well, I'll update everyone because we're going to read our next assignment in science or one of the assignments in our science book is Do we drink the same water that the dinosaurs drink?

Speaker2: [00:03:41] Wait, when you talk about your science class, you talk about your home schooling.

Speaker1: [00:03:44] I'm talking about science for ten year olds, and I'm I'm learning a lot in science class. Some of it I already knew some of it. I knew and have forgotten. So what? And some of it, I don't think I ever knew.

Speaker2: [00:03:56] I saw what they're reading today, and it's about, you know, getting to know the human body. So what parts of the body

Speaker1: [00:04:02] Are you learning about that? You know, that's a different assignment. But that is part of the science rubric. Ok, that's that's we're calling it the growing up book. Oh, it's about,

Speaker2: [00:04:13] Oh, is it that conversation? Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:04:15] Yes. Oh my god. We already read

Speaker2: [00:04:18] Flies.

Speaker1: [00:04:19] Listen, we yesterday we read about sex. The first chapter of that book is Sex. Oh boy, and it talks about intercourse, and you can tell she's in the other room. I mean, she and I read it together, and we talked about it and I was like, What did you learn? And she was like, Oh, well, you know, she was totally fine with everything, but she she she's like, The only part that's weird is this part, and she pointed to it. What was she pointing to the section that talked about like using your mouth on genitals? Oh, and and using your anus. As for sexual putting the penis in the class

Speaker2: [00:04:51] That they have that

Speaker1: [00:04:52] I'm not fucking kidding. It's in that book.

Speaker2: [00:04:54] The book is called It was a lot. That's sexuality beyond reproduction right there.

Speaker1: [00:04:59] Yeah, it was. But I mean, the thing it's not the greatest book. It's called It's perfectly normal. It's like one of these big bestsellers. I think a lot of people use it. I think it's pretty good. It's not as good as the one we read. We read a couple of others by Corey Silverstein. I think it's a surname, which is super good, unlike trans stuff and differently abled. Bodies. Zoe Wall's partner, yes, right. So we had a couple of those books, but it doesn't go into as much detail and it doesn't have anything about sex or sexuality. It has to do with gender, it has to do with bodies. And it's very good and it's super good. It's like really, really progressive.

Speaker2: [00:05:36] Do you remember when the conversation and put that in scare quotes the conversation was had with you when you were a youngster?

Speaker1: [00:05:44] Well, I mean, I mean, I remember we had health class and I think that was in elementary school. I feel like it was about fifth grade, so I think I was about 10. That's great. Maybe it was fourth grade, I'm not sure. And I kind of feel like they separated the boys and the girls like, you know, the boys, like you did team up these classes, like the two fourth grade classes or whatever, all the boys from one would would go. Both of them would go one class and the girls would be in the other class. But we still learned about the other sex. We learned about the vast difference, for example, and thought about that in a while. So we learn about all the the kind of parts and sex and reproduction and eggs and sperm and all that stuff. But I feel like we were. I think they put all the girls together and all the boys together to make it a little less embarrassing for everyone all around.

Speaker2: [00:06:34] Yeah, yeah. I remember fifth grade too. I think although actually my mom had pulled me aside to have this conversation, I'm sure my dad didn't have it with me. I'm sure it was my mom and I think she, like, kind of drew, you know, the parts of the reproductive system and just explain generally how everything worked.

Speaker1: [00:06:49] Now, in this day, she didn't talk about sex, too.

Speaker2: [00:06:53] Yeah, no, she did. She's pretty frank. Ok. Yeah, no. I definitely knew about that. So I feel like I knew about that pretty early on. It might have been like as early as, like second grade even. I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:07:03] Well, yeah, I listen.

Speaker2: [00:07:04] I still have questions like, there's no there's no shame folks in going back and reviewing the basics.

Speaker1: [00:07:09] Ok, well, when I was looking at the little diagram in the book today, I named something that's part of your physical, physical body, but it's part of your corpus. And you said it was a made-up word. It's not a made up word. It's part of your parts. Totally. Yes, it is. I'm going to go find it. I don't remember it either, but I remember the vast difference because all the kids are like, Oh, well, Stavros, do you remember

Speaker2: [00:07:32] The best different parts of my body are only puns and obscenities? That's all. That's all I got going on.

Speaker1: [00:07:39] Well, yeah, no. My mom definitely talked to me about all that stuff very early on. I think it was about five or six, even like I knew about menstruation for as long as far back as I can remember. Yeah. Like, I don't remember having consciousness without sort of knowing about that. So I'm going to say it was about five or six.

Speaker2: [00:07:55] That seems like a good thing to prepare yourself for, right? It's a pretty big change.

Speaker1: [00:07:59] And she must have. She must have talked to me about intercourse too and pregnancy early on also. But she also worked for Planned Parenthood. So she was like, you know, very, yes, very frank and open. And, you know, talk talked about that stuff early, you know, from the get.

Speaker2: [00:08:17] So what are your tips for having the conversation now that you've had it? If you could go back and change anything?

Speaker1: [00:08:22] It's kind of it's I don't know if it's not conversation, like we're reading the book we've read already two or three books. Now we're reading this one. Yeah, but OK, I was going to say about the part where they talked about oral and anal sex. Like, that's the part that, you know, she found a little weird or strange. And the way I explained it is because there is there's a chapter or there's a section in there about gender and sexuality, sexuality in general. And they talk about homosexuality. They talk about gay men and lesbians. They talk about ancient Greece, you know, so they kind of do a historical thing. They talk about homophobia. So we had already read that section on, quote unquote, homosexuality. And so that seemed to be the way to kind of talk about those acts, too. I was like, Well, I was like, If you think about it, you know, if you have two women together, like, there's no penis, so you can't really do the vagina penis thing. And I was like, and if you have two men, you've only got two penises, you don't have a vagina, so you've got to figure out another thing to do.

Speaker2: [00:09:21] All right. No, that's a

Speaker1: [00:09:22] Great way to go. She thought that was very reasonable because she's very, very, very queer, positive. And so it's like, you know, this is one of the ways that queer people can have sex. Now I admit to demeaning about the heterosexual side of that. I didn't really get it.

Speaker2: [00:09:37] No need. No need for us. It's all dysfunction.

Speaker1: [00:09:41] For us, it's dysfunction. Right? Yeah. Anyway, OK. People didn't know that they were tuning in to the Dr. Ruth Hour here.

Speaker2: [00:09:49] I don't think, yeah, if you want to, we've got an open line here, folks. If you have any questions at home, dial in right now. We're happy to handle those for you. We also give relationship advice and yeah, and break up advice too, because you know, you get what you want to, you want to be fully informed and ready for anything that can happen in life. So that's what we're here for more or less. Hey, you know what else are here for? Oh, we have an interview, but go ahead.

Speaker1: [00:10:12] But we do have an interview. Well, I was going to say my best breakup advice is like, make a really good mix tape that's going to get you through it.

Speaker2: [00:10:19] I think she said. Like, just like. Run for the door and don't look back.

Speaker1: [00:10:23] Yeah, we leave a Post-it.

Speaker2: [00:10:25] Keep a bag packed at all times.

Speaker1: [00:10:27] Yeah, you know, just go, kid. Is that what you call it? A go kid.

Speaker2: [00:10:30] You go kid. Yeah. Keep your go kit under your bed.

Speaker1: [00:10:33] No, I think having a good playlist, you know, I, you know, mix tape, whatever a playlist is, really, it's really important. So I guess that's the first thing you should do like if you're going through a breakup, whether you're the breaker up or the breaky, you should definitely go out and make like a really, really good list of sad, sad songs, breakup songs that you can cry to and bond with and understand in more profound ways than you possibly could when you're all happy in that relationship. Way back in the olden

Speaker2: [00:11:05] Days, I think I think you and I, if this is all just about our relationship, I have the feeling I think we're going to make it like, I think you can you can delete those playlists.

Speaker1: [00:11:14] I don't. I didn't. I haven't. I see you keep making me. I haven't made I haven't made one, but I would just say, I think it's a good thing to do because it's a creative thing to do. It gives you something to focus on. And it's also going to be really therapeutic. It's true. Think about it. I mean, I don't know, like when you're in love, like when you're falling in love, you get music, you connect to it, you sort of absorb it into your being. I think in a far more profound way than you do and you're just, you know, kind of going about your daily life and not focused on the in-love ness, right? Yeah. Because. And the breakup too. Like, I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:11:49] Yeah. Time slows down, like every moment is filled with meaning and sensation. And yeah, we're getting some pretty deep territory here. But I'm just saying like, I think like you and I think we're going to make it, I just want. That's my feeling. I don't know. I know you have. I know you're not sure, but I'm saying like, it's been a while. You get along pretty well.

Speaker1: [00:12:09] Well, now I'm kind of worthy eating. This whole conversation has been a meta commentary about our

Speaker2: [00:12:13] Relationship, and I feel like it's been going in that way. I mean, that's just my own insecurity. I don't know. Well, if you if you if you stopped making the mixtapes and leaving them on Spotify, which is called Breakup Mix 2019, if you would stop doing that, I would probably be less nervous. But you know, listen, I'm not going to sing for you.

Speaker1: [00:12:32] Did you just start projecting this when I started talking about the various kinds of sexual gratification

Speaker2: [00:12:38] I will try? I'll try new things. I promise. I promise. I know I've been.

Speaker1: [00:12:43] Thank you. I really kind. So generous, generous,

Speaker2: [00:12:49] Willing to try some new things. Ok. All right. With apologies to our interview today, we have a great conversation coming with somebody who's got an amazing name. By the way, Bathsheba Demuth, who is an environmental historian from Brown University. She has a book out with a real press, folks. The Real Trade Press W.W. Norton. The book is called Floating Coast and it's an environmental history of the Bering Strait and the region that I now know is called Beringia, which spans the fake political boundaries between two, quote unquote sovereign states Russia and Alaska and the United States, but in reality is an indigenous, complexly occupied indigenous territory for four millennia, and it's a really interesting study of that, you know, ecosystem, I guess you could call it

Speaker1: [00:13:44] As it's very much as it's inflected by human practices and politics.

Speaker2: [00:13:48] And from what we would say is

Speaker1: [00:13:51] The engagement and engagement with the natural environment and the creatures that live within it. There's lots of wonderful sort of stories and lines of analysis and thinking through different creature forms, as well as the important politics of understanding and statecraft that we see unfolding over that time. So, yeah, it's a really nice portrait, and I think we both learned quite a bit about the region and it's beautifully written really well and a question I meant to ask this, but I think we ran out of time. I was really taken. For those of you who get a chance to read the book focus on the on the titles of the chapters, because I think that Bathsheba had some kind of paradoxical irony in mind as she was writing those the titles for each of the chapters. I don't know if you don't have it right in front of me, but even floating coast is it's it's a paradox, right? Yeah, coasts don't float there, you know, by by necessity, they're fixed to the land, right?

Speaker2: [00:14:57] They do if they try hard enough and

Speaker1: [00:14:59] Not lose their coasts and where there is some. What are the other ones there? There is. I think they were all sort of paradoxical or intentionally so.

Speaker2: [00:15:10] Yes, beautiful, beautifully written book. Well worth reading, but also a wonderful conversation. She is super on top of this and we get into some interesting. Material, everything from what whales are the energetic transformations of the ocean and land, the importance of including indigenous voices within these regional histories. There's a lot in there, so I think you'll enjoy it. And I think we've also solved most of people's questions about sexuality and relationships. On today's introduction to So I mean, this is, you know, you're welcome.

Speaker1: [00:15:46] I'm going to do another another shout out, though. That's got nothing to do with that. All right. And that's to Lacy Johnson. Oh, yeah, our friend and colleague, right? Who's an amazing writer? Yeah. Is going to have a piece coming out in The New Yorker on Saturday online, and there's a cool multimedia companion that goes with it done by Josh Okun. And we're really looking forward to seeing it is very centrally, although not entirely focused on our awkward memorial event because Laci and Josh were with us at that and she had already had a contract or a deal or whatever with The New Yorker to write the piece. And so we're super excited to finally see it coming out. Thanks, New Yorker. I mean, I appreciate that they're publishing it, but it took them a long time because we weren't from New York. No, because they let that fucker with the orange face get in the way. Yeah. So that's the problem. But anyway, we're super looking forward to Lacey Johnson and Josh O'Connor's work is coming out in The New Yorker. That'll be Saturday. Great.

Speaker2: [00:16:54] Woo-hoo. Well, with that, we should say, go Bathsheba. Well, everyone, welcome back to the cultures of energy podcasts we have on the line with us from Providence, Rhode Island, a wonderful town, a town where I went to college. As a matter of fact, Bathsheba Dartmouth, who has just published a wonderful book called Floating Coast in Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Bathsheba, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

Speaker3: [00:17:36] Thank you for having me. This is one of my favorite podcasts, so it's a real pleasure.

Speaker1: [00:17:40] Yeah, good. That's a good way to start the conversation. I like it. All right. So Bathsheba, you have, as Dominique said, this wonderful book out recently with with Norton, I believe. Yeah, and W.W. Norton. And it's really marvelously written. It's I mean, it's so compelling and poetic in many ways, and it's just it's a really, really nice read. And in the context of all of that, that wonderful experience of reading, we also learn a lot about a region of the world that we all have an inkling about, but maybe don't have diverse spent as much time meditating on or understanding the complex socio environmental histories that have taken place there. And so the region that we're talking about and that you talk about through the book is called Beringia the Bering Straits Region. I'm going to say in general, if that's fair and what you examine in the book is how capitalism, but also socialism come to sort of function and play out in different ways through the bodies of animals, through the lives of human beings and through the kind of commodity chains or the lives of minerals and other facets of land and earth. And it's a marvelous journey. But I wanted to ask you how, if there's something unique about this particular place, maybe particularly how it brings together the kind of geo historical story of capitalism as it's been incarnated in the United States and the geo social history of socialism or communism, as it was articulated in the USSR in this particular place called burn.

Speaker3: [00:19:17] Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a great question. Part of what drew me to doing research in this region was was the fact that I kind of stumbled across it in graduate school. I knew when I started graduate school that I wanted to work on the Arctic, and I in fact became a Russian historian. I was trained as a machinist first and foremost because Russia has a lot of Arctic space, and I was I have been fascinated by the Arctic for a long time because I have lived there on and off for the last 20 years. And I realized as I was kind of thinking about places in Russia to explore essentially Soviet ways of trying to develop the Arctic, that Beringia is this kind of unexplored natural experiment in that ecologically, the two sides of the Bering Strait, the one that's in North America and the one that's in Eurasia are ecologically more or less identical. Culturally, they have long ties between the indigenous populations that live on both sides of the Strait. And so that people that are linguistically and culturally, sometimes very similar and sometimes in fact identical across the two sides. And yet in the 20th century, they're divided between these kind of two major ideological systems between American style capitalism and Soviet style socialism. And yet no one had ever really looked at that space in terms of how these two ways of trying to make modernity essentially play out. And I was I was actually sort of surprised that no one had done this from a sort of historian's angle. I quickly learned when I started doing the research that some of it might be because not everybody likes the cold as much as I do after a lot of time and some some fairly remote and pretty chilly archives in order to put the story together. But to me, that was actually kind of a boon.

Speaker2: [00:20:59] So I wanted to ask you a little bit about what I think is a really fascinating red thread in this book, and it shouldn't have come as a surprise, but I was a little surprised by how much energy was something that connected the various kind of historical phases and thematics of the the book to one another. Because of course, you start also before the kind of capitalism versus socialism era in the kind of frontier era of whaling. And and I guess we'd have to add walruses to that if that's even a word. But I mean, the kind of the harvesting of species by the settler colonial types, as well as by the indigenous people of the region. And I just wanted to ask whether energy was something that came to you out of the region or was it something that kind of came to you more out of the evolving conversation and the energy humanities today?

Speaker3: [00:21:48] So it really came to me from the region, and I spent quite a few months, probably about six months before I started archival research, just basically doing work on how Arctic ecology functions. And one of my takeaways from that was that Arctic regions, unlike temperate spaces, have this very pronounced geography of primary production, which is the capacity for photosynthetic life to make. Cells from sunlight and minerals, essentially, and that in a temperate climate, the oceans and the land are roughly the same in terms of their primary productivity, so they produce the same amount of energy. They're making the same amount of carbon that's available for other life to to eat and to consume in other ways. But in the Arctic, there's this really kind of strong gradient where the oceans are incredibly biologically productive and some of the most rich ecosystems in terms of their carbon fixation on the planet. And then as you move out onto the coastlines, they get somewhat less so. And by the time you get out to the tundra where there's no trees and agriculture is impossible because plant life is so constrained, they're far less biologically productive than than temperate landscapes and then the oceans that they're sitting right next to. So I went into the archival part of this work not thinking that I was going to study energy, not thinking that this story had anything to do with whaling, thinking that I was going to start more or less when the Soviet Union arrives in Beringia, so that it would be just a comparative history of the kind of Soviet and capitalist periods.

Speaker3: [00:23:21] But I kept realizing that, you know, the story from kind of an environmental perspective went back further that it didn't make any sense to just start it with the Soviets. And in fact, the the sources kept telling me both the kind of archival work and the oral histories that I was working with were sort of saying over and over that the real turning point moment begins with capitalist whaling in the middle of the 19th century. And then I realized that capitalist whaling basically starts where ecosystems and Beringia are the richest. It starts at sea looking to extract oil to to pull energy out of this place and then the kind of process of European or outsider or foreigner however you want to put in contact with Beringia, then moves up the coastlines where there's still quite a lot of energy, but not quite as much as on the ocean. And then it moves out into the kind of tundra itself so that the pattern of colonization through time essentially follows the distribution of energy in space. And then I realized that this is story needed to really go back into the 19th century and that it was a way for me to try to embed that story of what different economic forms are in the ecosystems that they're there harvesting from.

Speaker2: [00:24:34] Yeah, it's a brilliant it's a brilliant analytic strategy, I think, and I just want to read just a paragraph here that that's very much in the spirit of what you were just saying. And I think that also will give listeners, you know, a taste of the beautiful writing, too. And you say a whale is a combination of sunlight and minerals transformed by photosynthesis into algae, algae into teeming banks of krill born upwards and degrees of complexity through acts of consumption. That consumption is also productive in diving to feed and rising to breathe. Whales move deep water to the surface, where plants turn its nutrients into cells. Whale digestion sends elements iron and phosphorus out in great plumes. The nitrogen that whale dung makes available for other organisms is greater than what spills into the sea from rivers or is fixed from the atmosphere. Whales enable the conversion of energy from one species to the next, each transformation filling the sea with life. This is only one of many such beautiful paragraphs that you have, but it really does, I think, bring home the point of why this story or why the hunting of whales in increasingly large numbers really could disrupt an entire ecosystem that would spread onto the land at the same point. I just wanted to ask you if you could talk a little bit about that process of disruption, especially from the indigenous point of view, since obviously whaling had been practiced by indigenous peoples for likely hundreds, if not thousands of years in the area. But without this, without the same kind of disruptive impact, right?

Speaker3: [00:26:03] And that the whaling story, I think, like many stories of capitalism, is really one about scale and increasing scale. So people have been using both sides to survive and to make sort of incredible cultural richness and meaning for at least two thousand years in the Bering Strait and perhaps more. And bowhead whales in particular are such there such rich animals, both in terms of kind of what they do in the ecosystems they inhabit and just in a literal sense because they're almost 50 percent fat by volume. So if you have the capacity to kill a bowhead whale, they provide so much energy that people didn't have to move. They could have sort of settled life on coastal sort of migration routes for bowhead whales, which human beings, generally speaking, don't settle unless they have agriculture, because the capacity to get enough energy is usually require some sort of agriculture. So Bowhead had been really at this kind of critical place for many communities along the Bering Strait coastline for a long, long time. But the harvest numbers, you know, from from what people who do that kind of archaeological reconstruction estimate were probably around one hundred whales. A year out of the bowhead population of over twenty thousand animals prior to commercial hunting in the 19th century, so it was a level of whaling that was quite sustainable and didn't seem to put adverse pressure on the on the whale population. And the same is true for gray whales, which were probably harvested in somewhat larger numbers their smaller whales that were mostly hunted in on the Russian side of the Bering Strait. And what happens after the introduction of commercial whaling in 1848 is that the number of boat heads killed every year climbs into the many hundreds and eventually into the low thousands.

Speaker3: [00:27:51] And kind of as a result of this, after a couple of decades of really intensive whale harvesting, the capacity for indigenous folks to successfully hunt whales goes down because the just population of bow heads out there is no longer sufficient. And this coincides with commercial whalers who are also under great pressure to get enough oil are starting to kill walruses at a really high level, so they branch out and are killing tens of thousands of walruses, which are also really critical foodstuffs for four Yup'ik and Inupiaq hunters and also Chukchi hunters. And so the kind of combined essentially siphoning of these animal species in large numbers out of the Bering Strait produces widespread and in some places really devastating famine, particularly by the 1880s, when whaling has been present for more than three decades. Wheel racing has kind of hit its peak, so the walrus kill has really reduced that species also. And this kind of coincides with a moment of kind of slight temperature variation in the Arctic that seems like it had real impacts for other species. Also, so it seems like there weren't enough Arctic hares and the caribou populations were in trouble. So there's a sort of terrible, perfect storm in the 1880s in the Arctic or in this part of the Arctic that leads to widespread famine and kind of the reconfiguration of indigenous nations as people, essentially as refugees are moving from places where they can no longer successfully kind of carry out their their ways of making their lives that have worked for a long time and are trying to find regions where there still resources and where they're still healthy communities that they can kind of integrate into and try to survive this.

Speaker1: [00:29:36] Yeah, I think the chapters on the whales are super, super compelling and really riveting to read and about the boneheads in particular, which I had heard of but didn't know a whole lot about as a species. And so you let us know that they can live for more than two centuries, two hundred years, and you're looking at a block of time that's been a very dense two centuries, right? And so we kind of get a bit of a biography of this unnamed but sort of known whale. Right? We begin the chapter and then we end it, and I won't give away the punch line at the end. But you point out that you know this this calf was born when the U.S. still hadn't purchased Louisiana and Russia. The Russian Empire swallowed Alaska, and Adam Smith's wealth of nations was only a couple of decades old, and we hadn't even heard from Karl Marx in capital yet. So and yet he goes on. This whale goes on to live through these verges of nuclear apocalypse and all these ideological changes that we saw and, you know, sort of battles pitched battles between the United States and the Soviet Union in particular. So there's a timescale that's operating here in your narrative of this whale and whales as a species, particularly this very long lift ones and the kind of human timescale. And so I wanted to ask you to kind of think out loud a bit about how that operates in terms of our own environmental precarity and the present, because I think we get a really nice sense of it. A different creature, Lee temporality with this bowhead whale and all the human activity that's happening on land around it as it survives, as it continues to survive in the Arctic.

Speaker3: [00:31:23] Yeah, that's a really good that's a good way of framing the kind of issue of time which I also never really expected to be writing about when I started this project and then realized at some point that within this story of energy, it's also a story of the ways in which different kind of temporality of animal populations and climactic flux and change which are always happening in the Arctic, although now are obviously happening in very different ways. And to me, the bowhead whales are really a particularly fascinating way of thinking about this because from what all different communities of people who know and interact with whales, so indigenous hunters, but also marine biologists and other interested folks, it's pretty clear that these are very intelligent animals that possess culture and communicate with each other and pretty sophisticated ways. So if you're imagining them living for two hundred years and the kinds of things that they can observe and. Perhaps, you know, value and communicate to each other. To me, it was it was an entry point to trying to imagine a set of temporal cities that are are not constrained by human lifetimes, which I think is often how historians kind of break down a manageable size of history to talk about and instead think about the different kinds of lifetimes and how they intersect with human lives and enrich them and sometimes trouble them.

Speaker3: [00:32:41] And then thinking about these whales that if one is born today and you know, the bowhead population right now is actually pretty healthy, you know, these are animals that are going to live into an Arctic that looks so much different than the one that they exist in right now. And so imagining a future for them. Also, I think, pushes our horizon of what the future when the future is out further, right? Because this isn't it's multiple human generations, but it's a single whale generation. So I don't I mean, I'm hoping that people find that useful to think with essentially that there are in any ecosystem, there are all sorts of beings that are making decisions about how to live their lives, and they're doing so on these radically different time scales from a couple of years that an Arctic fox lives to the several centuries that are bowhead whale lives, and that if humans are going to be in good relation with all of those things, that kind of understanding of time that we have, I think, needs to be more capacious than the one that's kind of imposed or I feel is imposed by both American style capitalism and to some degree, by Soviet socialism, which are very linear and really only think in terms of of the kinds of time that way human lives explicitly.

Speaker1: [00:33:54] Yeah. And I think what what really worked for me in this kind of narration, this historical narration is that you provide the context for this particular whale, but you don't pretend to know what the whale might be thinking or feeling. You know, you give us context, but you don't anthropomorphize. You don't try and create some kind of personification, exactly. But you give us the sort of portrait the picture of the whale life as we can read it from the outside as human beings. And I think the other thing that was really compelling was the way that the lives of whales, particularly in this period and in this region, articulates with the the growth of, you know, mechanization, industrialization, quote unquote modernity in both the United States and, you know, and in Russia at the time and then in a more global picture. So, you know, we get we get the picture coming back to this question of energy. We get the picture of, you know, New England homes and factories and homes in particular being lit up with whale fat, right? This whale oil that was being used and the higher and higher demands, even though it had been there since the 16 thirties explodes as populations explode, as people demand more light. But we also get the picture of the cetacean fats that are lubricating, you know, clocks and machines and the cotton gin. Very important, you know, innovation, a devastating innovation in many ways in and among enslaved people in the United States. So, you know, whale oil and whale fat as an energetic and lubricant form has been a big part of the story that I think, you know is sometimes gets told, but but doesn't always. I don't know what my question is exactly, except to say that, you know, how do we find these articulations between the energetic form that we see in, for example, whale oil and the kind of energies that then feed into mechanization and industrialization? The transformation of technologies that are also lubricated by the same energetic form, which is in the first instance as you point out, sunlight and plankton and then whale and then these other things.

Speaker3: [00:36:06] Yeah, that's a good question. And it was one of the things I found most intriguing in the research, actually was the degree to which, you know, these animals that, you know, grow to massive size so very far away from the industrialized in the United States and for a brief moment, being really critical in a lot of these industrial processes. And I think part of what surprised me about it. And it's actually not surprising in retrospect, and it's in some ways not surprising in the context of the wider energy humanities is how intimately people can relate to an organism or a form of energy in their homes and in their kind of very daily experience without having any idea where it comes from or where it was taken from and who might be impacted by that action. And I think this is something we see very much with histories and and work that traces the mineral energy regime and the extraction of of petroleum and other kinds of fossil fuels. But it surprised me to the degree that was true of whales also that in some ways this is a kind of precursor to what happens more intensively or.

Speaker3: [00:37:14] Or more at greater scale with fossil fuels that the process of commodification can so render a thing completely ubiquitous and also so utterly divorced from its point of origin and from the labor by which it's produced, which I think is also, you know, if you think about the whale oil and the sort of the labor of the whalers, that brings it to New Bedford. And then it ends up in a cotton gin where of course, obviously the labor by which American cotton is being produced prior to the Civil War is also something that people are as consumers trying not to engage with, right? It's a reality that is not particularly appealing, and I wouldn't want to go too far and kind of connecting those two histories and in a direct sense. But I do think that there's something about the capacity to consume without being aware of production. That is that is a real sort of theme within the just the ways that people use energy at an intensifying scale over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries if you live in an industrialized space. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:38:13] And I really I had those same thoughts. And again, I don't want to push it too far because I know, you know, most historians have an aversion to kind of reading contemporary morals into historical stories. But it's hard not to with the case of of whales, and they're harvesting for fuel and other materials. And there's a way in which the whole kind of whaling to walrus story reminds me a little bit of the shift, you know, from conventional to unconventional fossil fuels to this idea of like, Oh, our supplies are drying up, let's, you know, look in this new place and, you know, kind of no matter the cost right and just start, you know?

Speaker3: [00:38:48] Right. Like, it's not as good, but we can, right?

Speaker2: [00:38:52] And you have to you have to kill so many more lives to get the same amount of fuel, even from walruses as opposed to to whales. But the other part of it, I thought that was interesting. I think this is I would wager this is a part of your story that probably most people don't know is that in some ways, the the the whaling industry persisted beyond the point at which whale blubber was being used for fuel because of baleen and because of all the other things that baleen was connected to. And that kind of reminds me of where we are with petrochemicals today. I mean, even if we were to stop using petroleum for fuel, there's so many other products that we depend on that have petroleum feedstocks in them, in plastics, everything else. It would still there would still be a demand for oil for some decades afterwards, just as people tried to to move off of that. So I don't know if that was something that struck you too. But that was, I thought, a really interesting twist in the story.

Speaker3: [00:39:45] And it struck me, particularly because the line was essentially used as a plastic. It's used because it's an extremely pliable, you know, you can use it to make your umbrellas and your whip handles and your corsets. And it was replaced kind of most directly by spring steel. But I think also the rise of really early forms of plastics that kind of make lights and and other kind of polymers that are emerging in the early 20th century are also part of the demise of the whaling industry. Finally. And so I think there is a real echo there that it's and kind of like a bizarrely one to one echo. It goes from sort of fuel in a direct sense with a byproduct that is useful as a kind of plastic in the case of baleen to in the case of fossil fuels, fuel and then also the plastics that we all use, right?

Speaker2: [00:40:32] And you know, you have to credit fossil fuels in this one instance with sparing whale lives, too. So again, the kind of moral and ethical complexity gains another layer there to us. But I wanted to ask you to kind of get back to us, something Simone had mentioned earlier about the Soviet versus the American models of the Arctic. If you would talk us a little bit through how these two visions of progress, these two ideologies of progress differed as they impacted the Burundian area and especially what people expected, you know, indigenous peoples to do, what role was expected for them to play in the in the path of progress and modernization?

Speaker3: [00:41:10] Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that one of the things I found the most striking about the comparison between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 20th century is how often they ended up looking very, very similar to each other. You know, obviously, particularly after the Second World War, they're setting each other up as complete ideological foes, and there's this desire to create sort of separate worlds and visions of the future. But on the ground in the Arctic, they actually end up very often resembling each other, and in part because both of them arrive in Beringia and take the indigenous peoples of the region as kind of hopelessly behind the project of modernity. Right. So in the U.S., this is a very familiar story that had by that point played out all the way across the Great Plains that the United States and the federal government kind of in particular saw itself as needing to aggressively assimilate without choice, well, expropriating the land of the indigenous inhabitants. Of the contiguous states, and that process to some degree, carries out in Alaska, although it's different in the sense that there's not agriculture, at least up in the in the Bering Strait. So the kind of primary driver of settler colonialism and the sort of primary focus of assimilation, which is, you know, make people into farmers rather than participants in the ways of creating life that they had had prior to colonization, work a little differently in Alaska. And so there's these sort of efforts to make people into reindeer farmers and kind of classic colonial schools and those sorts of things. And the Soviet Union, you know, really has sort of a similar set of goals in the sense that they want to liberate the people of the Russian side of the Bering Strait from what they see as really kind of benighted backward and kind of not just not modern, but ways of living that that are kind of painful and without the kind of bounties that would come if you're sort of a proper socialist.

Speaker3: [00:43:16] So they put a lot of emphasis on on education, on hygiene, on things that would actually be really familiar if you were an American missionary on the U.S. side of the Bering Strait. And sometimes, honestly, the things that people were writing if they were a missionary in Alaska and if they were a Bolshevik in in Chicago were so similar to each other other than the language that they were written in, you could almost swap them one to one. So there was this real kind of desire for modernization that looked similar. Of course, the end goal is quite different, right? The Americans want to create much more individual kind of participants in the modern market. And the Soviets want to reject the idea of the market altogether and have people who are part of collective production and that this is going to be sort of the way that the future is formed. So the Soviet Union is really reacting in some ways to what the United States had already done and saying, No, we can do this better and we can do it more ethically. And I think that there's a sense of moral purpose that's present in the Soviet project that's always a little bit more wavering in the American version.

Speaker1: [00:44:19] Yeah. So yeah, I think there's also a really nice distinction that you make, too, because you brought up the kind of mission as an impulse of various kinds, right? The mission izing of Christian spirituality and capitalism as a as a sort of socioeconomic form and then the Bolshevik mission design for a socialist new man. And I think you make a really important distinction here that I found fascinating. And that is the difference between the kind of visions of the Soviet versus the American vision in the early 20th century of the separation between the spiritual and the material qualities of conversion. So you say that in the U.S. case in general, there's this idea that the soul is this kind of future object. You know, it's something to be dealt with after death and materiality has to do, maybe with the some kind of Protestant work ethic where you have your earnings and your wages and therefore maybe your rights to heaven. But that reindeer create this really interesting kind of conundrum within that picture of American spiritual and material conversion and that of the Soviets, where you say the Soviets are are different in a sense, because capitalism is asking individuals to work their way out of material injustice. But socialism will overcome this kind of isolation that the person might feel through a remaking of them. And this is the kind of new modern socialist future that required transformation from the sole outward. And when we look at when you look at the material form of reindeer, they create, as you said, you know, there's a way in which the Soviets want to make these reindeer farmers. They want to make peasants out of herders, if you will, that kind of agricultural imaginary and agricultural logic. But this this distinction between the spiritual and the material operates pretty differently in both of these worldviews. So I wanted to hear a little bit more about that and how you see the reindeer operating within that, that material spiritual difference between these two evolving Nation-State pictures.

Speaker3: [00:46:21] Yeah, I'm so glad you brought out that point, because that was something that really fascinated me when I started kind of really thinking about the ways in which these these two projects basically to take what is on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait, generally collectivist Inupiaq caribou hunters who did not own caribou as private property and turn them into private property owning reindeer farmers. So that's the American project. And then on the Soviet side, you essentially have the exact inverse where the Chukchi, who are the indigenous people on that side of the Bering Strait, had for quite a long time owned Rangers private property and had sort of different levels of ownership within their society that the Soviets immediately see as being a class system that needs to be eradicated, and they want to take private property, owning reindeer farmers and turn them into collectivist. So there's this sort of brilliant and kind of bizarrely ironic inversion. Of what these two states want to do and what they actually find in the in the countries that they are trying to inhabit and what I thought was interesting is that in the American case, there's sort of a sort of a division of colonial labor in some sense that the United States wants to take a Inupiaq hunters and turn them into kind of human reindeer farmers because that's a sort of more advanced in the American ideal way of making a living right? It participates in the market. It's more modern. It's going to make people self-sufficient, which is a major kind of rhetorical point in the kind of imaginary of bureaucrats at the time, right? They don't want to make indigenous people dependent on the federal government. They want to make them independent and kind of individual smallholders.

Speaker3: [00:47:58] But and that work is connected with conversion to some denomination of Christianity. But they're also not exactly the same thing. So there's the work that missionaries do. And then there's the work that kind of schools and the federal government does in terms of changing people's economic practices. And they're not really the same thing. Like you can be a participant in the market without being sort of a converted capitalist, I would say, whereas in the Soviet case, the the kind of desire to remake the world from the ground up and really have a revolution kind of unites those two things, right? That your material form and your spiritual self are really both supposed to be collective projects, and they're both supposed to transform in the course of kind of bringing around real existing communism. And I think that in in the case of the peoples that are involved on the two sides of the Bering Strait, it makes the terms of Soviet style socialism much more transformative. The Soviets are asking the Chukchi to literally transform everything that they do in order to be part of the Soviet state, and many people just reject it. Many Chukchi are not interested in that. That level of participation, whereas the much more kind of it's almost wishy washy on the U.S. side, right? Well, you can be part of the market and you should probably also convert to Christianity. But you know, those two things don't necessarily go hand in hand with each other in the same way actually really change the way that colonization works and change the way that people relate to reindeer in a lot of ways because it's not quite the either or that the Soviet system ends up being so.

Speaker2: [00:49:36] Another thing I wanted to talk about. You know that we've touched on but haven't gone into deeply is the place of indigenous knowledge in the book. I imagine it would have been possible, and maybe if you had been writing this book 50 years ago even expected that you mostly could have told this story with Russian and maybe American. And I don't know British archival sources, but there's actually quite a lot of indigenous voices in the book. And that raises questions, you know, methodologically about how how you got access and it may connect to to some of what you share in the framing of the book around your own time with kitchen people. So I just wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about that and both where you saw the importance of bringing in indigenous perspectives and memories into the narrative and also how you went about gaining the materials and access to some of these memories.

Speaker3: [00:50:29] Yeah, I think that's a really important question, and I I think I went into this project very much not wanting to just tell a story that was the U.S. and Soviet or the U.S. and Russian imperial kind of states facing off against each other because both of those states are such newcomers to the Arctic, right? They're not they're not indigenous to that part of the world and that they are layered on top of these much, much older traditions that are also very much part of the present as our indigenous peoples all over the Americas and Eurasia. And I think part of that was because I had spent a lot of time in the Arctic prior to starting this before I was even an academic in any way when I was a teenager. And so the Arctic that I knew actually really came through being taught how to navigate it by indigenous folks. And so the idea that you could tell a history without their experience being at least a third of the story didn't seem to be. It just didn't make any sense to me, right? And then the question is, of course, how are you going to go about doing it? And what I realized pretty early on is that this is a book that spans a pretty large geographical space. So it's multiple village communities on each side of the Bering Strait, in the tundra along the coastline. And, you know, in the ideal version of this, where I had 45 years to write the book, I would go and spend six or eight or 10 months in each of those communities and be able to kind of feel like I was collecting or producing stories with those communities from each place.

Speaker3: [00:52:02] And of course, that's not actually how bookmaking works. I wasn't going to have 45 years to write this. So what I did, and I talked with folks from communities both in Russia and the United. To sort of think about how do you tell a story that makes sure that indigenous voices are a piece of it when you don't have the kind of temporal capacity to go and be an ethnographer in each and every one of those communities? And what I ended up doing was using oral history collections that have been put together by the communities themselves. So these are versions of the community's history that the communities have decided are public facing their work that they want to put out in the world and have kind of endorsed as being kind of acceptable for public consumption, right? Because the thing I didn't want to do is sort of show up in a scattershot way and talk to a couple of people and not know if their understanding was representative, not knowing if they were telling me something that the community in general thought was appropriate to be published. It seemed like I could run into all sorts of issues really quickly, so I mostly use these collections, which thankfully are quite rich and available, and everyone should go read them because they're remarkable documents that have so many more layers to them than I can get into in in one book myself. And those were really kind of critical sources for this project.

Speaker1: [00:53:26] I mean, one of the strategies, I don't know if it's a rhetorical strategy, exactly. It's a kind of an analytic approach that you do throughout the book is you pose these kind of ontological questions about the subject objects that are at the heart of the process that you're talking about writing about in any one chapter. So for the chapters where we're focused on whales and human interactions with whales and labor and commodities, and all of those things that are tied up into the body of the whale. We get posed the question of what is a whale and and and when we're talking about the reindeer farming or reindeer herding or, you know, husbandry with reindeers, what is it to be a reindeer? You know, a person who who works with and lives from reindeer? Like, what is the kind of ontological capacity at work there? And it really reminded me quite a bit of Anne-Marie Mols work in the body multiple where she approaches one particular disease from multiple points of views and these different practitioners. And it kind of sits way, but really an ontological reading where she's, you know, trying to understand the disease from the point of view of all these different interlocutors with it right, the patient and the different experts. And I think we get that in your book and that was a a surprising turn for me. I didn't expect to make that connection, but I do see it operating because you pose these big questions.

Speaker1: [00:54:52] And what is a whale, you know, from the whale's point of view, perhaps, but also from all these humans that are interacting with it over time in a very, very different ways, as we've been talking about. So I'm thinking about that. I was thinking about the different subject objects that that we visit with and spend time with in the book. Whales appear, you know, in the beginning and the end and the walruses. We have the Arctic foxes, we have the reindeer, we have the caribou and then we come to gold and tin. And so I wanted to ask you how you think about the differences or the similarities between whales as they're constituted differently or walruses, caribou, reindeer, foxes. And then this pretty different object subject, maybe even of gold and or tin, because we get that we get the same posing of that question with gold. You know where you say, look, there's there's different ways of understanding what gold mining is or how to, you know, how to sort of capture a gold like we even get that ontological question when it comes to gold. So could you talk to us about the difference or the similar similarities between the living forms and the non-living entities that you treat in the book?

Speaker3: [00:56:04] It's such a great question, and I hadn't. I never quite put it in those terms, but I think that's a helpful way of thinking about some of the the similarities and the differences that I'm trying to draw between. I mean, the term that environmental historians use is agency, right, which is actually not a term I use in the book very much because I think it's kind of clunky, but trying to draw out the fact that there are all sorts of different capacities for action and for shaping life that these different organisms or geological forms bring to the story. I think the similarity that I find between whales and mining for gold is that both of them are places in which sort of human desires are pushing against different kinds of temporal processes. So in the case of whales, it's how fast a bowhead can reproduce and make more boneheads and grow into a, you know, a large whale. And in the case of gold mining, it's how quickly do these geological forces bring gold from the depths of the Earth to some surface level where people can find it and actually access it? And they're very radically different temporal scales like the whales live? Long time, but the geological processes take hundreds of thousands or millions of years and just thinking about the ways in which human capacities and desires push against those different kind of temporal realities. I think those are the similarities.

Speaker3: [00:57:32] The thing that I found really different between whales and gold or really any of the chapters that deal with a living organism that moves around in some sense and the mining chapters is that the temporal scale by which geological space changes in the 19th and 20th centuries is so slow that if kind of human technological capacity actually can figure out how to move enough Earth, and basically if humans can move in and start to speed up geological processes, what humans want to get out of a particular landscape is a lot easier to control than any of the places where they're trying to kind of manage a biological organism because the biological, you know, the reindeer at the end of the the kind of reindeer section, there's all of this effort put into making kind of perfect reindeer environment in Beringia. And it turns out that reindeer are very sensitive to small changes in the climate, and people couldn't do anything about that. Whereas both the Soviet Union and the United States at the end of it are actually quite good at moving massive quantities of Earth around by burning fossil fuels in order to find a tin and gold that they want. So that I think the scale by which kind of these processes move actually really does change the capacity for human desires to to inveigh on the on the change itself.

Speaker2: [00:58:52] So it's been a fabulous conversation. We would be a couple of hosts if we didn't ask you to talk about what you're working on now and maybe shout out anything in particular beyond the book that that's out there that you like people to read.

Speaker3: [00:59:10] That's a great question. I am. I am approximately 30 seconds into working on my second book project.

Speaker2: [00:59:16] Ok? How's it coming?

Speaker1: [00:59:19] She's already got three chapters.

Speaker3: [00:59:22] Yeah, exactly. And what I'm focusing on for the second book is the Yukon River Watershed, which basically lies just around the the territory that I talk about in this book on the North American side of Beringia. So it's just to the South, but then also kind of stretches around it to the east and up to the north. And partly this is because when I first moved to the Arctic, I lived on a tributary of the Yukon, and I really would like to be able to go back there and spend some sustained time in the next few years. And it's also because this watershed cuts through several very distinct indigenous ways of imagining the relationship between human beings and other beings in the world, and then as layered over by the Russian and British empires in the 18th and 19th centuries and then by the U.S. and Canadian nation states in the 20th century. And I'm really intrigued by the ways in which all of these different entities and they're now kind of layered on top of each other. So there's sort of this palimpsest of kind of different traditions have thought about rights and the rights that you can grant to people and the rights that you can grant to non-human things and how that's influenced the ways in which salmon and timber resources and waterways and things like that have been changed and people's relationships with those things have have altered or not altered over time. So in some ways, it's a similar set of questions in the sense that this first book went after these kind of big abstract ideas of what capitalism and communism are. And in this new book, it's much more about legal ideas of rights and personhood and who gets to be a person and who gets to have a right and then also be able to do so in a territory where there's sort of the contrasts, but but a different set of contrasts and a different set of players.

Speaker2: [01:01:07] That sounds like a solid forty five seconds worth of work now.

Speaker1: [01:01:11] That's right. It's also it's very timely. I mean, there's so much going on around those questions of when a personhood in these natural bodies. And so, so they'll be it'll be a great project for sure.

Speaker2: [01:01:21] Yeah. Well, thank thank you and thank you so much for taking the time to talk about Floating Coast, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. Everyone can find it, and I'm so glad to see that there's a lot of positive attention about the book coming out already, so congratulations.

Speaker3: [01:01:36] Thank you so much. This was such a joy. Yay.

Speaker1: [01:01:39] Thank you, Bathsheba.