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Bathsheba Demuth
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“Perhaps because there was so little impediment to human desires underground, mining saw the United States and the Soviet Union at their most distinct, and most contradictory. The American gold rush brought desperate people north on the hope of liberty through personal property. Most experienced inequality that left them feeling less free. The Soviet Gulag pursued socialist freedom through imprisonment and exploitation. And, eventually, both contradictions were ignored as the underground fed a new resource, that of national myth: Chukotka as real, existing socialism, Alaska as the last frontier.”
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
“The nature of history when nature is part of what makes it is cacophony: not harmonious but revealing both a linear ugaluktuaq story and many cyclical unipkaaq, converging. We all live in more than one time, even if we are taught to refuse the idea. The evidence is all around us, in the layered world: a mossy, decaying mission store in Gambell, built near an ancient whale-butchering place, across from a row of tidy new homes. Or, as I saw in Lavrentiya, a house with Soviet concrete walls, but a roof made of walrus hide so fresh, it smelled.”
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
“In their great herds, caribou and reindeer spread like the tributaries of a river; where the gray strands pool, they are indistinguishable at a distance from the land. It is more than an illusion. In life, as the herds paw and yank at their fodder, they churn nutrients and dead vegetation into the earth, where it rots in summer, raising the soil temperature. In the presence of scarce warmth, seeds germinate. A grazing herd, where it does not eat foliage to the quick, amplifies tundra productivity.' Alive, reindeer feed swarms of mosquitoes so massive, the insects can drain half a liter of blood in a day. In death, reindeer muscle becomes bears, eagles, foxes, lynx, people, ravens, wolverines, wolves. The wolf pup grows and drags down a reindeer. Around the stripped carcass, arctic poppies bud.
Rangifer migration is the tundra respiring, an oscillation of energy rather than air.”
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
Rangifer migration is the tundra respiring, an oscillation of energy rather than air.”
― Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
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