Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

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.

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

Bowheads avoided extinction not because a new space opened in the accounting ledger to tally their worth alive. They survived because, in the world outside the strait, they ceased to have value at all.

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

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on

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

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

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.

Missionaries believed their message of earthly increase and heavenly salvation would inevitably replace such empty performing: after all, to its believers, Christian industriousness seemed universally true and transparently desirable. Who did not want more goods and more good life after death?