In 2018, I heard Bathsheba Demuth deliver what is possibly the best talk I have ever listened to. It was on whales and the indigenous peoples of Beringia (the region around the Bering Sea).
Demuth
has now written a book: Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the
Bering Strait. Having read an advance copy I can confirm that it fully
lives up to the promise of that talk.
Although
the subtitle describes Floating Coast as an ‘environmental history’, the book’s
scope is much wider: it is a narrative about the ways in which beings of all
sorts – animals, human, plants, spirits – interact with each other over time.
Beringia
is a region where historically neither animals nor people have paid much
attention to natural boundaries. But it is also the region where US-style
capitalism and Soviet socialism stood face to face for the better part of a century
– and strangely, in their stance towards indigenous peoples, animals and the
environment, they were not very different from each other. Christian
missionaries on the US side, and socialist workers on the other, both came to
the conclusion that the indigenous peoples of the region were ‘backward’ and
needed to be weaned away from their beliefs and practices, forcibly if
necessary.
‘The
instinct of capitalism and communism,’ writes Demuth, ‘is to ignore loss, to
assume that change will bring improvement, to cover over death with expanded
consumption. Such modernist visions are telescopic: from the present, each
leaps into a distant world, a future place of freedom and plenty. The present
must accelerate to reach that far country. Speed is quantified in what can be
converted to material value for sale or the state.’ [134]
In
respect to whales and walruses there was a chronological difference between the
two sides. The slaughter wrought by American whalers peaked in the 19th
century whereas Soviet industrial whaling only got started in the 1930s. But by
then whaleships were more mechanized and efficient so the slaughter they
wrought was on par with, or exceeded, that of American whalers. Driven by
socialist (Stakhanovite) work incentives Soviet whalers massacred whales with a
blood-lust that defies belief.
Some
parts of Demuth’s narrative are so gruesome as to be difficult to read. She
writes of Soviet whalers that ‘they learned to use young whales as lures and to
tie carcasses to their ships as “fenders” to insulate contact between vessels.
For objects do not suffer, even when nursing calves paddled up the slipways
after their mothers’ corpses, still lactating and covering the decks in mil.’
[292]
The
slaughter ceased only forty-one years ago, in 1979, when the USSR phased out
its industrial whaling fleets. But in a sense it has not ceased at all, but
only mutated, for many of the industrial needs that led to the mass slaughter
of whales are now being met by palm-oil, which is proving to be just as destructive.
Anyone
who believes that capitalism is the sole defining feature of the Anthropocene
needs to read this book. It establishes beyond a doubt that Soviet-style
socialism was no less violently extractive that capitalism. They are in fact
two related avatars of the same phenomenon: industrial modernity. ‘In
Beringia,’ Demuth observes, ‘the Soviet experiment showed to whales and other
beings that socialism and capitalism could look similar, and transform the
world on remarkably similar terms…’. [305]
Elsewhere
Demuth writes: ‘There is not a history yet that puts in human terms the
cetacean experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this great
annihilation of generations of whale minds: minds that listened as their seas
grew quiet, watched as their clans shrank, fled as their families were consumed
year after year in the adrenal chase, the strike, the final gouting blood.’
[295].
But Demuth has now herself written the history she calls for. Floating Coast is a historian’s Moby Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time, into a marvelously readable narrative.
Amitav Ghosh