Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Bathsheba Demuth

Mar 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Christa Lewis

About this audiobook

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. 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? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

About the author

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.

Christa Lewis and her pseudonym Pippa Jayne have narrated 265 audiobooks between them. The recipient of eight AudioFile Earphones Awards in a variety of genres, Christa has also garnered a SOVAS Voice Arts Award, a Sultry Listeners Award, a Listeners Choice Award, and two Audie nominations.