Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Capitalism does not require that every space and every person make equal profits; it requires enough dependency on its products to ensure growth, the aggregate total of consumption.

Owning a herd necessarily came with habits of mind. Thus, the market’s way of understanding time as linear and driven by short-term material increase crept—unevenly, with deviations and adaptations—over the tundra. The Soviets were, by contrast, without artifice. Where capitalism required individuals to work their way out of material injustice alon

Lived communism was consistent, if often insufficient; lived capitalism often bounteous but capricious.

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

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

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.

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

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on

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.