Reindeer at the End of the World – Bathsheba Demuth

Emergence Magazine Podcast

Emergence Magazine

Society & Culture, Spirituality, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 627 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this narrated essay, ecological historian Bathsheba Demuth travels across the easternmost edge of northern Russia—home to the Native Chukchi people and their herds of reindeer. As she uncovers the history of this landscape, she encounters the allure of the apocalyptic arc—the promise of a new world—and the rise and ruin of the Soviet ideology that sought to impose its utopian vision on the Chukchi, their reindeer, and the natural cycles of the Russian tundra. Through the Soviet project’s ambition to “tame” the tundra and turn the living world into an economic resource, we are confronted with uneasy parallels to capitalist society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence
0:08.1	magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day
0:14.7	Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting
0:25.0	ecology, culture, and spirituality.
0:31.9	Bashiba Damoth is an environmental historian and the author of Floating Coast,
0:40.2	an environmental history of the Bering Strait.
0:44.6	From the Chukchi Peninsula, the easternmost point in Russia,
0:48.3	Bashiba explores the arc of apocalyptic narratives and how they shape the borders of our minds and politics.
0:53.4	As she learns about the colonization of the native Chukchi people,
0:57.3	through the apocalyptic proclamations of the communists
0:59.9	and then of the Soviet Union,
1:01.9	she ponderes the ecological impact of narratives that predict an absolute.
1:14.0	The Foxx Constitution. an absolute. The fox comes out of the willows across the creek.
1:17.2	She is nearly invisible at first, standing in the lee of a sunbeam where it breaks over the ravine
1:22.2	behind her.
1:23.8	Early morning sun, late in a summer of intense heat.
1:29.9	Here, 20 miles north of the Arctic Circle,
1:32.6	"'the light is dilute, low on the horizon, "'and stained orange by forest fire smoke
1:34.9	"'blown in from the Siberian interior.
1:37.8	"'The fox steps into the radiance.
1:40.6	"'Stops.
1:41.5	"'Her blue-gray summer pelt has loosened,
	...

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