The first thing you should know about Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is that it is a beautiful book and you should stop reading this right now to go get a copy of it if you don’t already have one. I’m hardly the first person to say such a thing. Since its publication in 2019 by Norton, it won both the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association and the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, awards that recognize both the work’s beauty and its exceptional scholarly erudition. Indeed, at times, Floating Coast is achingly beautiful because it describes so vividly landscapes and communities that many readers will know are uniquely imperiled by global climate change. And, yet, the book also refuses to capsize the story of those landscapes and communities into the catastrophes of the present, making them mere victims in the history of the extractivist, imperial centers to which they might be seen as peripheral. Rather, the book is about the irrepressible largeness of life, over deep time and vast distances, radiating out from the Arctic in a majestic swirl, moving through ice and water, on land and in air, under mountains and over glaciers, on the backs of seals and polar bears, on the wings of birds, and in the hands of the landscape’s Native peoples. In Demuth’s expert hands, keen eyes, and careful ears, a landscape too many readers might otherwise assume to be barren and lifeless is shown to be abundant, teeming, dynamic, and utterly fascinating. Indeed, the drama of that landscape makes even the imperial designs of the nation-states that have battled for it for three centuries seem small. The book is world-making seldom found in academic or popular nonfiction writing. That Demuth wrote such an ambitious book and published it with a trade press rather than a university press while still an untenured, junior professor at Brown University—Brown has since wisely tenured her—makes her not only courageous, but a damned interesting person to interview. It was my pleasure to speak with Professor Demuth about her first book and her next one too, as well as about the politics of writing environmental history, her relationships with animals, and how she first came to the Arctic.

Gabriel Rosenberg (GR): How does a girl from Iowa end up writing such a deeply immersed environmental history of the Arctic? How did you navigate the pretty substantial differences, not just geographically but also culturally, socially, between the spaces that you have known and this very different place?

Bathsheba Demuth (BD): I was an 18-year-old in Iowa with a pretty serious case of wanderlust and probably too much exposure to Jack London as a child. I convinced my parents I should take a gap year between high school and college and with my babysitting money I strung together this itinerary that started in an Indigenous village in the Canadian Arctic and though I was supposed to go to various other places, I just ended up staying in this village called Old Crow for years. This is before I had any sense of what a professional historian was. I was homeschooled, so I actually didn’t even have a lot of exposure to formal education, full stop. But I was really interested in writing and so part of why I was there was because I didn’t feel like I had a lot to write about at 18. The experience ended up rewiring my brain at a pretty fundamental level, because my primary job was to train sled dogs and that is a job that really requires that you give up any pretense that as a human being you have a particularly special place in the world. You are dependent on what the dogs do. You are dependent on what the weather does. Human supremacy is actually not possible and a bad idea; if you actually buy into that, you are probably going to die. I didn’t have an academic language for that, but it really changed how I understood the world, living there for several years.

The other thing that I learned about was what colonialism looks like. Obviously I’m from Iowa, I’m from a thoroughly colonized place. I come from a family of people who stole land from Native folks pretty directly, but I didn’t grow up with that knowledge as a front and center narrative. I didn’t know Native people growing up. In the community I was living in in the Canadian Arctic, it was almost all Indigenous people. I was able to see more clearly what colonialism meant for Native people there, seeing what the arrival of first fur traders, and then gold miners, and then the Canadian nation-state had meant over the last hundred years in their history. It also changed my understanding of what power relationships are and made me interested in where that idea of human supremacy that I had grown up with came from. Because human supremacy didn’t work in this particular place, but it was constantly being imposed by the state. Eventually, I made my way to formal education and ended up getting a PhD in history, in part just to tease out those questions.

GR: In my reading of Floating Coast, there are two things that are really striking to me. The first is that we think about the Arctic as an edge, whereas you narrate it as a center. That the world expands outward on the horizons at 360 degrees from this place—not, in other words, as we think about it as being the edge of the world. That is very beautiful in its own way and it comes from a deep appreciation of the landscape, since you have actually been there. Second, your gesturing at the variety of more-than-human forces woven into the story is so rich. How do you think those two perspectives are related to your time with the Indigenous people who live there? To what extent is that something learned from being there or learned from listening to those people, how does that shape the story that you tell and how you write about it?

BD: I deliberately wanted to reposition a place that is so often seen as a periphery, and it came from the sense that anybody’s home is at the center of the universe, right? For people living in the Arctic, these are their homelands, so of course for them the region is the center of the world, in the sense that it’s the place where your imagination operates from.

In terms of how animals figure into the book, I actually had an entire draft of the dissertation, and somebody read it and was like, you do realize that every chapter starts with an animal; it doesn’t start with people? And I realized that that is because that is how that story made sense to me, because I had, through my time in the Arctic, come to understand the universe as one where whales have their own country, where you are required to recognize the agency of nonhuman beings, because if you don’t there are real consequences both morally and very practically.

GR: Is there a there a visceral difference between writing about more-than-human forces on the basis of historical sources and writing about more-than-human forces on the basis of an embodied encounter with them? In other words, is a multispecies ethnography of the Arctic different for you, and does it provide a different set of narrative coordinates and different ways of thinking about the questions that you are trying to answer than a multispecies or environmental history?

BD: You are asking a really good question, which is, are species timeless? Like, is the whale that I meet in 2020 the same as a whale that somebody met in 1920 or 1820? The answer to that is it is harder to parse than it is with people, right, because the evidence that people leave us makes it very clear that there are just vast differences over time. You read something from the 1920s and you immediately recognize that this is not how we organize our lives today, that this is not the cosmology that we participate in. But whales or caribou are not leaving cultural artifacts in the same way. And there is a real risk of turning them into timeless, placeholder critters. But if you take seriously the idea that they have culture, then you have to assume that it was also changing and that part of what you were seeing in the past is a version of whaleness that is not necessarily the same as in the present. It is in some ways the easiest to see in animals like dogs, where there is a really dense human record of those interactions, and you can sometimes see the ways in which dogs are becoming more domesticated over time. Their reproductive lives are coming more under human control and with that comes all sorts of other changes. There are still dogs, much like people are still people, but just as historians have to parse out the difference between what is a baseline human interest—in having enough to eat and seeing your family and things that I do think we can understand as being culturally inflected, but still transhistorical—these are also big questions for animal history. How much of that meaning can we access and how much of it is even present in some cases? I don’t study insects for example. I have no way of knowing, you know—

GR: The ancient insect culture.

BD: Has ant culture changed? That is an excellent question, I hope someone tackles it, but I don’t have an answer to it. But that is like a really key question in where animal history is heading.

GR: Have we had a good ant history yet? Has anyone written an ant history?

BD: I don’t think so actually.

GR: We’ve got to make sure this gets in the interview so that a graduate student who reads it can be like, that is a good idea, maybe I should write my dissertation on ant history.

What are your relationships like with animals in Providence? And do you think that they are shaped or influenced by your time in the Arctic and by your writing about the Arctic?

BD: The primary relationship I have with animals here is the two dogs that I have. I’ve always liked dogs, and after training sled dogs for years, it was very difficult to have a period in graduate school where we didn’t have a lease that allowed for a dog. I take enormous joy in having dogs around and I am constantly badgering my spouse because we have two and I think we could have three.

Part of what I find so rewarding about spending time with dogs is learning their individuality and the co-relationships that develop. The dog who is sleeping in my office right now, Pebble, she has all of these rituals that she has developed and taught us. In the morning we get back from a walk and my husband sits down to take his shoes off on the stairs and that is the moment when she goes and gets special Pebble pet time. Her sister is asleep so it is all her and that is just their ritual. They have worked this out. She comes up to my office after breakfast. She checks in with me, like hey, I did it, it was a meal, it was great, and then she takes a nap. These are not things that we trained her to do, these are ways that she has arranged her day that intersect with our day, and she gets a little grumpy if they don’t happen.

The other animals I spend a lot of time around are the assorted urban fauna, which is usually a relationship of guarded interaction. I try to plant things that the rabbits don’t eat immediately. The squirrels eat half my strawberries and that is how we have come to negotiate that particular relationship. I didn’t do any of the negotiating really there. I just gave in. We almost ran into a skunk this morning, so you don’t negotiate with them either. But the piece I see as an absence from my experience of living in the Arctic is that, with the exception of the dogs who I live with very closely, there was an interdependence that was very clear in the animal relationships in the Arctic. You need to be able to find caribou because you need to be able to eat caribou, and there are a lot of ethical rules about how to do that well, but it is also a very clear imperative. It also means that you have to have a relationship with the entire landscape that the caribou inhabit. I don’t have a similar set of relationships here. I would be terrified to go deer hunting in Rhode Island because it is so urban, the urban density is such that I would be afraid I would shoot someone’s house. In the Arctic, there was a level of closeness that is impossible to approximate here. It feels different even than the farm I grew up on at my parents’ place, which was not a huge livestock operation, it was more of a hobby farm. But we had a huge garden and that was where most of our food came from and so you had that really direct sense of the fact that what was happening in the climate was going to affect our garden. And I’m at much more of a remove here.

Ecologically speaking, Rhode Island is as rich as anywhere. What is preventing me from experiencing the same relationships I have when I go up North is the ways that white collar work is set up in the United States such that having deep ecological relationships in a particular place is not an affordance of the job I have. I can’t take off time to harvest at a scale that would be remotely self-sustainable. Harvest time is hitting right now, which is when we are full on in the semester. I can’t say, sorry, I need a few days off to can my tomatoes. And that has to do with how we have partitioned labor. The canning of the tomatoes is supposed to be someone else’s job. Somebody who is usually paid less and whose labor is invisible-ized. So it doesn’t even matter if I actually would want to have those relationships. They are not on offer in our “free society.” That barrier is part of the issue. Property is another one. Many people don’t have land, can’t afford land, and we don’t have many commons on the East Coast. People’s desires for a more ecologically deep life, in other words, are so often impeded by the necessity of getting to work on time or getting your grading done or getting your kids to school or, you know, the other kinds of ways our society is set up that run into each other, rather than it being some innate structure of the ecosystem itself.

GR: When I taught your book to a group that was mostly composed of Duke faculty and some graduate students, they wanted to read it as energy history. There is a beautiful phrase, “the chain of conversions,” which plays a major role in the book and is a brilliant way of articulating the vision of agency and force that is moving through the book in all of these different ways. Is the book an energy history, and what are the politics of naming it an energy history? Why might people want to do that instead of naming it, for example, as Native and Indigenous history?

BD: That is interesting. Many energy historians have a preoccupation with fossil fuels—usually a petro-obsession, though coal is a close second. So there is an interest in histories that think about other forms of fuel. For some readers Floating Coast offered a perspective on energy history that doesn’t talk about petroleum—in a place that many people might expect to be petroleum focused, given that Alaska has so much oil. But I also think that energy history has the ability to take a very place-based history, one that is invested in a lot of specifics, and show how a place like the Bering Strait is connected to dynamics and politics far away. The desire for whale oil, for example, changed how energy moved through the Bering Sea ecosystem.

I’ve also always been interested in the ways that energy history does or doesn’t embrace agricultural history because agriculture is obviously critical to fueling human beings. If you are thinking about energetics at that level, it should be a piece of the discussion. When I teach energy history, we talk a lot about agriculture. Floating Coast isn’t an agricultural history, but it looks at how people are always embedded in energy relationships through what we eat and burn and the work we do. I guess it’s an energy history that uses energy not just to think about fuel but to think about connections, how we’re connected to where we live.

GR: The book also operates on a different axis of political considerations than what American partisan politics and cultural politics are organized around. Which is to say that it is very abundantly clear that the major axis of difference is not a left-right difference, but rather, a colonial-decolonial difference. The competing imperial powers in play—primarily, the United States and Russia—operated according to extractionist logics that saw the landscape as something to be possessed and exploited, which is very, very different from how the Indigenous peoples who live there see it.

I’m wondering, then, is there a political takeaway that you hope readers will gain from the book? Does it tell us anything about how we frame and think about politics in 2025? Are we asking the right questions?

BD: There are a lot of scale issues in this question about politics. There are huge and potentially devastating consequences for this part of the world should Trump return to office. Some of that has to do with what US relationships with Russia would look like and some of it just has to do with what is very likely to happen to Alaska with even more rollbacks of the environmental regulatory powers of the federal government. There is going to be a real difference between having an administration where the Department of the Interior is willing to push back against the ways the Supreme Court is moving on to dismantle the ability for agencies to regulate in the Council, versus an administration that is going to move in step with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions and wants to open more public land for extractive industries.

Floating Coast, though, engages politics from a perspective that is above US partisan politics. It is more about identifying a politics that is organized around an extractivist economy, one that inherently excludes people whose forms of law and policymaking and politics would, for example, include whales. That is not a part of the Democratic Party platform at the moment, right? The choice here is not between the party of Land Back and Trump—it is between a mainline liberal party that is still deeply committed to the basic fundamentals of running a capitalist economy, and one that from what I can tell is really interested in seeing what that would look like if it just became a straight-up fascist economy. Those are real choices with real consequences and we should not do the terrible lumping thing at the level of our own political activity of conflating them, but that also means that if you do have the opportunity to have a democratic process, there is a lot of pushing that could still be done if you want to imagine a political future that is capable of imagining politics that include things beyond people.

GR: What is the next book about? It is about the Yukon River, but more broadly what is the story that you are telling? How do you think you’re approaching this task differently than maybe the first book? What do you think you learned from that process and what is, yeah, what are you going to do differently?

BD: The book is an environmental history of the Yukon River watershed. The question that I’m really interested in is one that I realized skirts around the edges of Floating Coast, which is the ways law becomes the place where people’s visions of the ideal and the necessity of the real often meet. The Yukon has all of these different Indigenous legal traditions along it, and it has British and Russian ways of thinking about law that meet in the 19th century on the river, and then the United States and Canada split it now, so there are all of these different ideas about where the laws come from and which ones have authority. Is it natural law or does it come from fish? These are really different ways of framing what law is and what it should do. And then, what happens when different ideas of law get to take precedent and be practiced? It is really a book about people figuring out how they should live in a place. How do you make rules for right relationships to the land, and whose idea of the right relationships gets to carry the day? The way I’m writing it is actually quite different than Floating Coast in part because I have way more access to resources than I did as a grad student. I was really lucky with this book in that the Carnegie Foundation gave me money to travel the river multiple times over the summer, and then in the winters, I have been going up and mushing parts of it. That has allowed it to be a book that is led by the river—in some ways the archive is coming secondary to the river itself. The questions are coming from being on the water. And then, I’m going back to traditional historians or sources and asking them what historical questions they would like to see somebody in my particular position answer. Because every community has their own historians, so it is more a question of, if somebody is talking about this whole watershed, which is around 330,000 square kilometers, what are the kinds of things that it would be helpful to know about the past that don’t get talked about? A lot of it ends up being thinking about this as a place that has a logic that is not contained by the nation-state border as it exists now, which cuts straight through so many people’s lives and cuts straight down the middle of the watershed itself and has huge consequences, even as it doesn’t change the biogeochemistry of the river. I am excited to see where the river will push the project.

This project actually came out of my interest in the Rights of Nature movement, which looks at how giving rights to a river or a lake or a species could allow for a kind of legal representation that is usually denied to ecosystems or “natural resources” in Western law. I originally started it thinking I would research historical precedents for rights of the Yukon River. I realized no one is talking about rights in my sources, they are talking about law. So I had to scrap the rights formulation and think about it more as a question of, who and what bears law and the capacity to set it? A lot of what the Rights of Nature movement is doing is a very practical intervention into an extant legal system that is not currently capable of taking ecology very seriously, and they are trying to explain what the formulations we have right now are so that we can actually protect a watershed in some legal sense. That is an important and admirable pursuit because it is not waiting to be perfect, it is saying that we have what we need to protect the river. In the last two years, for example, I have heard people talk about the river’s personhood as a way of dealing with the binational character of the river. If you are thinking in those terms, the river is a dual citizen, right? It is a member of both of these countries, and this legal concept of personhood might actually offer practical tools in the present for some of the environmental issues that the river is facing. But that is slightly different than thinking about where we put our source of legal authority to start with—of thinking about the source or base of sovereignty. Because if our thinking about rights just comes out of precedent, if it comes out of digging through case law to figure out how to give the river standing in that space—we are actually overlooking the fact that there are actually completely other ways of organizing a legal system. This book is more interested in the different ways that people have come to think about the Yukon legally, and how the Yukon itself has shaped legal thinking.