Floating Coast

An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Bathsheba Demuth author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:25th Aug '20

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Floating Coast cover

Across Russia’s easternmost shores and through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how, over 150 years, people turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power. Beginning in the 1840s, capitalism and then communism, with their ideas of progress, transformed the area around the Bering Strait into a historical experiment in remaking ecosystems. Rendered even more urgent in a warming climate, Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the impact that human needs and ambitions have brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet. • Shortlisted for the The Pushkin House Book Prize 2020.

"In Floating Coast, Bathsheba Demouth has written a brilliant hybrid book about one of the most fragile and forgotten of Anthropocene front-line territories, the Bering Strait. Uniting ecology, anthropology, reportage and more, this is a superb work of environmental history, often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision." -- Robert Macfarlane
"... 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
"Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements. It is astonishingly rich in ethnographic detail, ecological precision, economic circumstance and historical texture." -- Nature
"Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, has reaped rich and fascinating material from the oral history of the indigenous Beringians recorded by ethnographers." -- Literary Review
"Floating Coast is rich, well researched and illuminating. It keeps under readers’ feet the vastness of Demuth’s expertise, as solid as a land bridge." -- The International New York Times

  • Winner of William Mills Prize 2020
  • Winner of Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics 2020
  • Winner of Western History Association Hal K. Rothman Book Prize 2020
  • Winner of Julia Ward Howe Prize 2019
  • Winner of American Historial Association John H. Dunning Prize 2021

ISBN: 9780393358322

Dimensions: 211mm x 137mm x 28mm

Weight: 348g

448 pages