Floating coast : an environmental history of the Bering Strait / Bathsheba Demuth.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: The migration north -- Whale country -- Whale fall -- The floating coast -- The waking ice -- The moving tundra -- The climate of change -- The unquiet earth -- Elements of redemption -- Caloric values -- Species of enlightenment -- Epilogue: The transformation of matter.

"A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between humans and the natural world where two great economic ideologies converge. Along the Bering Strait, through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia, Bathsheba Demuth explores an ecosystem that has long sustained human beings. Yet when Americans and Europeans arrived with self-serving ideas of human progress, the Chukchi and Seward Peninsulas and surrounding waters became the site of an historical experiment. Here, the great modern ideologies of production and consumption, capitalism and communism, were subject to the pressures of arctic scarcity. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through these resources Demuth draws a vivid portrait of the sweeping effects of turning ecological wealth into economic growth and state power over the past century and a half. More urgent in a warming climate, and as we seek new economic ideas for a postindustrial age, Floating Coast delivers necessary warnings and poses provocative questions about human desires and needs in relation to environmental sustainability"-- Provided by publisher.