The Bering Straight: An Environmental History w/ Bathsheba Demuth
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2022
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1848, New England ships crossed the Bering Strait in pursuit of the bowhead whales that provided their income. In the years since, the activity of outsiders- from hunters, to government bureaucrats from the US and Russia / Soviet Union, to consumers of energy who never set foot in the region- has had a deep impact on the region, but the environment of Beringia has made the place itself an active participant in this process.
About a century and a half after New England whalers crossed the Bering Strait, Bathsheba Demuth graduated High School in Iowa and moved north of the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. She later earned a PhD in history, and is currently Associate Professor of History at Brown University. In this episode, Bathsheba joins Ben for a conversation about her research, how her fascination with the arctic led her to dedicate much of her life to understanding Beringia, and the ways that an environmental perspective allows us to better understand our place in the world and that of others. Bathsheba's new book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait was published by W.W. Norton & Co in 2019. It is a masterpiece.
For more on Dr. Bathsheba Demuth, visit her website- www.brdemuth.com- and follow her on instagram at @brdemuth.
This is a reair of RTN Episode #153, which originally aired on December 2, 2019. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:09.0 | Today we are sharing an episode from way back in 2019. |
| 0:13.1 | It's a conversation with Bathsheba Dumuth on her book Floating Coast and Environmental History of the Bering Strait. |
| 0:19.4 | You will hear in this episode that this book |
| 0:21.6 | blew me away. It's still one of the top books that I recommend to people who are just interested |
| 0:26.4 | in new books in history. It's epic and you'll hear me talk about it in the episode. I'll just say |
| 0:32.4 | this. I knew it was great when it came out, but it won so many awards that I'm not even going to |
| 0:37.3 | try to list them all right now. I mean, from pretty much any publisher or media outlet that you're familiar with that reviews books. You'll hear me go on and on about it in the episode, but if you want to know more, just check out the link in the episode description. It'll take you right there. It's out in paperback. Very quickly came out in paperback and in audio. |
| 0:56.2 | If you're looking for a great reading history, check out the book. I think after this episode, |
| 0:59.6 | you will want to. Now, this is the final episode that we're going to launch in 2022. And I want to say |
| 1:06.4 | thank you. I want to say thank you to everyone who's listened, to the new listeners, to the old |
| 1:10.9 | listeners, to everyone who has come and helped this podcast thrive. 2020 has been an incredible |
| 1:17.1 | year. Just to put it in summary, our total downloads increased by 60% this year. We've now made it |
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| 1:31.8 | listened to on Sirius. |
| 1:33.2 | And we had a great sponsorship run from Cricket Shirts, and those guys were incredible. |
| 1:38.4 | This has been a great year. |
| 1:40.3 | And so if you are listening right now, thank you because you are the reason that we can make this show and we love it. |
| 1:47.1 | A special thanks to our supporters on Patreon. |
| 1:50.8 | We say this all the time because we mean it. |
| 1:53.0 | You guys have kept us going for years. |
| 1:55.2 | During the pandemic, we lost a lot of the ways we had expected revenue to come in. |
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