Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

You live here by never boasting about the number of animals that died, and by giving meat to people without any. You live here by not offending the beings that make your life possible. You live here because other lives give themselves to you. To articulate the act of consumption, of taking energy this way, is not romantic. It is a political asserti

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on

But making time a commodity did not make for self-sufficiency or even, with severe depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, basic stability.

Questions of value are political, containing arguments about how the Earth should be valued and distributed in the present, and what the future can be. They are human questions.

The instinct of capitalism and communism is to ignore loss, to assume that change will bring improvement, to cover over death with expanded consumption.

From this perspective, capitalism and socialism are not laws of history that separate the human from the nonhuman; they are ideas about time and value that shape particular relationships with the basic matter of existence, matter that has its own influence over human ambition.

An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.

Organizing energy and enclosure is at the core of politics; it requires decisions about change, value, and the allocation of the useful world.

Individual moral salvation made for national economic growth.