Alas, it has been since before the pandemic, so I don’t think I’ll be getting to this in a timely manner! My apologies.

An incredible book and an amazing author! This is a MUST READ, especially given how so many species of animals are dying off, and our planet is in trouble. I highly recommend. It is informative without being heavy or preachy.

Bathsheba Demuth

After reading Floating Coast it's hard to believe that this is Bathsheba Demuth's first book. I don't say that in any derogatory sense but why hasn't she unleashed herself upon the world before now? I can only assume it's due to her incredible list of academic work that has kept herself away until now.

Floating Coast is an ecological history of the Bering Strait and how the impact of humans has affected it. Environmental Historian, Bathsheba Demuth takes us on a rich and thought-provoking tour of Bering Strait, an area she knows well from her own time living in an area, over a period of over 150 years where humans have made their indelible mark not just upon the landscape but within the waters themselves.

The human history of the Bering Strait is one that is as catastrophic as much of human history. Floating Coast tells us a story that is often repeated but often ignored, in this case it is the cultural genocide of the indigenous people's already living there during the early days of mass whaling in the region from both Russia and the US who wanted to claim dominance of the area, as such imposing their own ideals and downfalls, in the form of Christian missionaries, alcohol and other traits brought from their own nations in the arrogant assumption that all people should live to their standards.

However, this is a story we've heard time and again and immediately resonates with the history of the US' dominance over Native Americans, only this time the blood being shed was not that of the indigenous Chukchi, Yupik and Inupiaq peoples but of the Whales in the waters.

Floating Coast certainly covers a number of issues which still resound with us today, with many species of Whales nearing extinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we move on to whatever next will serve our purposes, even if temporarily, whether it be Walrus, Fox or Caribou Floating Coast details perfectly how we will exploit any resource for our own convenience.

However, Floating Coast is not just a history of the Bering Strait, there is a message for all of us here that we need to look at what we call 'sustainable'. With Whales almost on the verge of extinction we look elsewhere, today we look at Palm Oil as our great new saviour, yet with each tree cut down we contribute to our own extinction, all the while patting ourselves on the back for doing a bad job. Floating Coast manages to dispel many myths about sustainability and the so-called exploitation of resources that are seemingly only undertaken by capitalist nations, all the while ignoring the history of socialist countries like the USSR whose environmental history shed much more blood than many others.

To anyone with even a slight concern over the future of the planet Bathsheba Demuth manages to take us through our ecological ineptitude with each page as poignant and important as the last

Anyone who cares about the future of the planet needs to read this book!