Bathsheba Demuth, The Floating Coast *** 1/2

The Floating Coast is billed as "an environmental history of the Bering Strait," which means that the author wants to provide a history of the region that transcends the distinctions between human and natural accounts.

 My expectations were disciplined by an education that explained nature's past ––geology, biology, and ecology––separately from human history, from culture, economics, and politics.

Demuth attempts this synthesis by describing all of the actions of living beings in Beringia as transformations, as conversions of energy from one form to another.

The work of plankton is the ... cumulative transformation of light into starchy tissue [that] fills the sea with energy, the calories that sustain over three hundred species of fatty, swarming zooplankton. ... The work of the whale is to turn this diffused energy into hundred-ton bodies.

Most of what is an arctic fox begins as a lemming.

I am impressed by the idea of considering ecology and sociology as a continuum. It provides an interesting perspective on, say, whaling when you think of it as just another link in the chain of energy transfers that started with the sun striking the ocean. Booms and busts occur in the fox fur market due both to fluctuations in the fox population and to changing enthusiasms in New York and London.

An interesting perspective, but too frequently an abstract one. Most chapters start with a vivid description of an animal or human activity, but the telling details are gone by the end of the first paragraph in favor of overly intellectual language. In the end, I felt as if Demuth was using Beringia as a stock character in a Soviet-style drama, where every character stands for an idea rather than an actual person.

Throughout their migration, walruses stir nutrients into the water column, especially nitrogen, that help photosynthetic organisms bloom. ... In the icy summers of the early 1870s, walruses began transforming into something new: money.

I lost enthusiasm for the book somewhere during the section about mining.