Transcript: BATHSHEBA DEMUTH on a More-than-Human History /264
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Hello, and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Bathsheba Demuth.
Bathsheba Demuth How recent it is that that idea, the kind of idea of infinite growth, was even thinkable: how deeply tied to fossil fuel extraction it is. And therefore over the massive scope of human history, how many alternatives to it there are - that the way that we live now, as domineering and totalizing as it can seem, is actually both recent and partial.
Ayana Young Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University. An environmental historian, she writes and thinks with the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For over two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. Her prize-winning first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton) was named a Nature Top Ten Book of 2019 and Best Book of 2019 by NPR, Barnes and Noble, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal among others. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and other-than-human species intersect. Her writing on these subjects has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker.
Well, Bathsheba, thank you so much for being on For the Wild. I'm really looking forward to chatting on this chilly, almost winter day with you.
Bathsheba Demuth Well, thank you so much. This is one of my favorite podcasts. So it's a real pleasure to join you.
Ayana Young Oh, wow. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's amazing to be in conversation with folks like you and just be able to explore a bit together.
So to begin our exploration, I would like to begin by recognizing your background as an environmental historian. How are you changing the narratives of history and stretching the disciple to better suit us? And what is the value of doing history as an active pursuit in our present moment?
Bathsheba Demuth I really love this question. Because I feel like it's the one that gets me up in the morning, so I like to answer it. And I also would want to start off by saying that being a historian, one of the real privileges of it is that it's not a solo pursuit. It's something that you do in a community with other scholars, both inside and outside of the academy. So I feel like I'm fortunate enough to be part of a movement or a group of people who are all trying to reconsider what history is and what it can do for us. And I don't have the terrible burden of trying to be the single voice doing it, for which I'm grateful and I think really strengthens the work.
But in general, I think environmental historians, and certainly this is what motivates me, are trying to reconceptualize the way in which the kind of traditional academic disciplines that structure how we know the world have separated what it is to be a human person off from what it is to be any other kind of being in the world. And it's a division that runs right down the heart of most universities, where you have natural scientists on one side of campus, thinking about ecology and biology and climatology, and all the other ologies. And then you have the social scientists and the humanitarian/humanists sorts on the other side of campus, supposedly talking about what it is to be a human being.
And I think what I see myself and other environmental historians trying to do is to knit those two stories back together. They obviously have always been together, and it takes actually an enormous amount of intellectual labor to wrench them apart. But in putting them back and being able to tell stories about our past in ways that show how different kinds of societies and different kinds of ideas about what the world should be and how we should be in it have always been deeply settled into the places that they operate the ecologies that they emerge out of. And I think that that has hopefully some bearing on the way that we imagine ourselves in the present, and what it is that we can conceptualize as being open to us in the future: that we stop telling a story in which human beings are the only kind of active character out there, striding across the stage, and instead, that the stage itself and everything on it is something we should take very seriously and think about living with.
Ayana Young I love that recentering, or maybe even decentering, the stage and the human as the main character. It's so refreshing and so needed. I think especially now, that's what I definitely feel is one of the strongest messages of how to be in right relationship and try to find some way through this mess that we're in.
In much of your writing, it's clear that you feel a connection to those that came before us - not just as products of the systems which you study, but as individuals in their own right. So how do you navigate this connection across years, even centuries? And how does a view of connection across time change some of the ways we think about the timescales of our own lives?
Bathsheba Demuth That's such a beautifully put question, about how do you connect with people across these timescales? I think, for me, some of it is really, and this often has to come through very kind of incomplete and fragmentary sources because we don't leave our complete selves for historians to dig through in the future, and nobody did that in the past, but to really sit and think hard with what it was to try to live a good life in the past, and what were the rules that people were trying to follow, and what impeded those attempts, and to take to take those attempts seriously: even when in the present they seem ghastly, or wrongheaded, or ethically dubious. Because in that sense I have to give credit to the fact that in the future, somebody might look back at us and say we were doing things that were wrongheaded or ethically dubious or ghastly but we probably weren't doing so with destruction as our number one aim.
And I think that's particularly true because I don't, generally speaking, study elite people. I study folks who are a little further down the chain of power, who are dealing with their circumstances, no matter what they are - from working on a whale ship in the 19th century to trying to run a mine for the Soviet Union in the 20th century - where their sense of the world and how to do well in it is often compromised or challenged by the power structures they live with. And that kind of sitting with how complex that is a part of my job. And another thing is when I think about my role as a historian, I think in some ways that it's a kind of fancy gussied up term for what used to be called a storyteller, and maybe should still be called the storyteller, which is somebody that that tries to take from those things that we know of the past and that we've handed down to each other. And so that generations of people have counted them as important enough to preserve and think about what those lessons are for the present. And that's another way in which sitting with those ancestral voices, some of which are incredibly inspiring and some of which are very troubling, can help us in the present learn what it is that we need to know to understand where we came from.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really appreciate thinking about folks, you know, the Soviet Union mine worker and things like this - because I was just in a conversation yesterday with a friend, and I think for the most part, regardless of what industry we work in as humans, we're trying to do good, and we're trying to be good to our community - whether that's our family or our wider community. I appreciate diving into the lives and the stories of people; not the elites, not the kings and the queens. So many stories and so much of history, as they say, is told by the winners or told by those in power, it's through them. And I think we're missing so much when what we learned in school, for instance, is mainly about those folks. So yeah, I really appreciate that.
Thinking more on this level of empathetic relations, I wonder how we come to separate people from the systems in which they are forced to participate - both today and across time. You’ve written extensively about the realities of both Soviet and capitalistic systems of extraction while also recognizing that individual laborers are not to blame for such extraction. What then is a history from the perspective of the miner, the whaler, the laborer, and how might this perspective shift change the way we view the course of history?
Bathsheba Demuth That's also such a beautifully put question. And I think it in part, it comes from a fairly long tradition now in academic history of trying to think about history from below. So not paying attention to the presidents in the queens and the kings as the only history makers, but think about the ways in which historians can really look at the kind of dignity and fullness of human life at a whole variety of levels of power. And in the case of the work that I've been doing, I started it understanding that part of the story that I would be telling, which is about the North American and Russian sides of the Bering Strait, is one where there's a lot of really quite dramatic and often really shocking and violent social and ecological change. But I didn't want to reduce either the place or the participants just to sort of a story of decline and an immiseration, because to me that is denying the people and the place of its dignity and its capacity to adapt and continue and to flourish potentially, right? If everything has declined, then how do we imagine a future in which that's not the case?
And to me, looking at the ways in which people like the individual whalers, whose diaries I was able to work with, who set sail from the East Coast of the United States, often extremely impoverished, sometimes formerly enslaved people, sometimes people who were fleeing other kinds of hardship, and were on these long and really grueling voyages that could last for 18 to 24 months, in which their primary job and the only way they could really earn their way off the ships was to kill whales. But the killing of whales, for many of them, from the traces they leave in their written accounts, was often a really morally painful job. They could see that they were inflicting pain on these animals, they observed them really closely as they were hunting them. So they saw them as sentient and full of sentiment. And at the same time, we're not kind of given the space within the society they operated in to decide another course of action. And I found that kind of bind of those whalers in the 19th century (and then there's kind of a similar story about Soviet whalers in the 20th) to be really moving because I so often feel like I'm in that bind, right? I have a sense of how it is that I would prefer to operate in the world, and then I have a sense of what I'm required to do because of the social system that I live in. And for me, that mediation and seeing that it's at these sites of labor, where it is where people are really directly in bodily in contact with the world around them - with whales, or with some other part of the ecology - that you can really get a sense of people imagining alternatives, and not necessarily being able to turn them into reality because of where they sit in the power structure. And I hope that in that realization, there's some ability to have empathy for people who professionally kill whales or do things that we now find distasteful or seem sort of stories of horror or wrongness and perhaps can reflect on it for ourselves, you know, where is it that we also get stuck?
Ayana Young It's so interesting to put myself in the shoes of a 19th-century whaler. And what a different world that must have been, although I'm sure... so many similarities. Because I think humans are humans, and we have a lot of similar problems and inquiries that we've always had about life and love and relationships, and just how to get through life in general. But the details are really fascinating.
You tease out important intricacies when thinking about the systems that encouraged environmental degradation. You point out that both communist and capitalist systems in the Arctic instituted systems of control that served to exploit labor, harm environments, and subjugate Indigenous people. How do these systems of control manifest throughout history, and what is the harm in subscribing to the idea that we can somehow control nature?
Bathsheba Demuth One of the things that when I started this project, I really imagined that I was writing a history of contrasts, that I would have this story about the Soviet Union arriving on what is now the Russian side of the Bering Strait with its sort of socialist dreams of transforming the landscape. And that then right across in what is now Alaska, you would have these kinds of American-style capitalist attempts to do the same thing, and that they would be kind of stories of divergence along the lines that I was certainly raised to imagine, right? That, you know, socialism in the Soviet sphere is kind of more brutal and more destructive and more exploitative of human life, and capitalism could at least produce some kind of freedom around the edges.
And I think what was really fascinating about pairing the two together is the ways in which the undergirding philosophy for both American-style capitalism and Soviet-style socialism was so focused on human beings alone, and making the world work for people and extracting resources in particular to serve human ends, that they actually ended up looking as systems often really like each other in this arctic environment. And in particular because they were both systems that really focused on getting the maximum quantity of energy out of any particular ecosystem for human beings to use. And in some ecologies they would do that through agriculture, in some, they would do it through oil and gas exploration. In the Bering Strait, it was through whales and walruses and reindeer, but this kind of impulse to turn all over the world to human purpose really seemed in common for both of them.
And what that does on the ground is transform the extant human societies, the Yupik, Iñupiat, And the Chukchi, the Indigenous peoples of the Bering Strait, who had a much more capacious understanding of what a society is and who is included, going far beyond just human beings, and kind of trying to squeeze that out and reduce it to “how many pounds of reindeer meat can we get out of an acre of land?” Or “how many barrels of whale oil can we extract?” And to me that both has very concrete and dramatic impacts on the ecologies and the societies that the United States and the Soviet Union were operating in but also there's a narrowness to that impulse that I don't think I went into this research expecting to find, right? It's a blinkered kind of understanding of the world that we live in. It makes its most kind of devoted adherents ignore a lot of the world around them, often to their detriment, and often to the detriment of the thing that they're trying to bring about.
And I see this kind of with particular irony in the Soviet case, where the first generation of Bolshevik missionaries (and they would sometimes actually call themselves missionaries) to arrive in the Bering Strait, were so deeply committed to this Marxist vision of societal transformation, that in many ways, is hard not to have deep sympathy with. It's a vision of radical equality; it's a vision that emphasizes human dignity and not reducing people to the kind of capitalist labor that Marxists are good at critiquing, and it's a vision of creating a better world for everyone. And yet, it's a world that only has human beings in it. And that in the case of the sort of Soviet experiment that really, you know, leaves them to make decisions that in an ecological sense, just cannot hold - that don't work. And in a cultural sense led them to force upon people who didn't understand the utopianism of their vision. And really, by force, tried to convert people.
And so it's the ways in which those ideological formations can really blinker their strongest adherents, even when they have the best of possible intentions, from actually really seeing and participating in the world around them that ended up being really fascinating to me. And offers a bit of a cautionary note because I think I’m as seducible as anybody to visions of radical, egalitarian futures. But from this research, and watching how it played out in this part of the world, I have come to think that it must be much more generous in its understanding of who makes a society.
Ayana Young What does it say about humanity in general, that such destruction was brought on by two supposedly antagonal systems?
Bathsheba Demuth Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, and I actually think that, in many ways, the ideas that both the United States and the Soviet Union brought north with them, are not really ones that are held by humanity as a whole - that fortunately, we don't all have to be judged by them. Because in many ways, the whole presupposition that human beings are fundamentally separate from the places that they live in, and can extract from them at whim, and that they're in the most extreme versions in both capitalist and socialist ideas about using the world: it's capable of producing infinitely, right? They're both ideologies that are seduced by this idea of infinite growth and infinite production.
And those ideas in a historical sense, are extraordinarily new on the human horizon, and in many ways, extremely weird and unusual. And one of the things that I've really come to think of as I have worked on this book, and other research about the Arctic, and teaching environmental history in general, is how recent it is that that idea, the kind of idea of infinite growth, was even thinkable: how deeply tied to fossil fuel extraction it is. And therefore over the massive scope of human history, how many alternatives to it there are - that the way that we live now, as domineering and totalizing as it can seem, is actually both recent and partial. And that there were not only alternatives historically but there are many alternatives in the present. And I think the part in this research that really gives me hope is that so many people have lived so well, and such rich lives, without being guided by this particular vision of progress that really comes around to the 19th century. So it just hasn't been with us that long.
Ayana Young Yes, the pursuit of progress has taken us to such strange and destructive places, not just in the physical world, but I think definitely in our mental and even spiritual spaces. I think it's been something that we desperately need to unwind.
I'd like to transition to some of the environmental implications of your work. And I was particularly struck by the environmental impacts you described. In your article, The Act of Giving and the Chance of Life on a Finite Planet, you write “Yet, the marks of the bowheads’ near-extermination surround us. Their absence has transformed the way energy moves through Svalbard’s ecosystem. Bowheads once ate four million tonnes of zooplankton a year. Now the population of polar cod has likely grown substantially larger since the decimation of the bowheads by feeding on some of that krill.” So can you tell us more about what it means to read the environment to pay attention to what it tells us and treat it as a source equal to that of the human word?
Bathsheba Demuth One of the things that I really seek to do in my writing is provide people, myself included, with not just the metaphors, but kind of a material way for thinking ourselves back into the places that we live in. So to kind of do that knitting together work that I talked about at the very beginning of thinking of my human person as just deeply materially and otherwise connected to a specific place. And one of the ways that I have thought about doing this is thinking about how it is that energy moves through an ecosystem.
So most of the energy that we use on earth starts through photosynthesis. So any of us beings that don't photosynthesize are automatically dependent on plants and other photosynthetic organisms to give us that energy. And then it's often reworked along the way by the animals that consume it, if you eat meat, were kind of otherwise transformed by an ecosystem. And that kind of following what ecologists called trophic levels through time can kind of allow you to see the ways in which different kinds of human interventions either transform (or don't) the ecosystems they live in, in terms of how that energy moves.
So something like bowhead whales, who eat these massive amounts of krill to make their huge 70-ton bodies, their presence - because of the way they feed and because of their behaviors - actually makes that ecosystem more able to produce more photosynthetic life. So they take a great deal out of the ecosystems they live in, but they also help kind of make a flourishing space for the diatoms and the algae that are the basis of the ecosystem on up through all other kinds of layers. And then in their absence, once in the case of Svalbard, they were whaled aggressively in the 17th century and on, their absence means that those kinds of chains of energy conversion kind of shift. And so now, there are probably more polar cod than there were when the bowhead whales were flourishing. But ecologists speculate that there's just less energy produced in these ecosystems in general when you take out critical species like whales.
And to me, part of what those ecological connections offer us is a way of thinking about what an ecosystem that's really flourishing looks like. And how is it that we as people can participate in that ecosystem in a way that allows for it to stay flourishing, which means that you can, for example, kill and eat some bowhead whales the way that has been practiced in Greenland and in Russia and the United States for a very, very long time. But you cannot kill all of the bowhead whales, the way that very nearly happened in Svalbard; the reduction of the population to just an incredibly tiny sliver of its former bounty. And thinking about how it is that our actions kind of rearrange, not just the one species that something like a capitalist market gets fixated on, but the entire network of life that exists in confluence with that species, as a historian kind of allows me to map out the ways in which these extractive impulses that come both out of the Soviet Union and the United States really transform things that otherwise remain a little bit unseen, right? It's really hard as a historian to get under the water. I can't interview krill. I can't even interview a bowhead whale, much as I would like to. So in some ways, it's a question of how do you tell the story in a way that lets people see what's lost when certain decisions are made and what's gained when we make other kinds of decisions when we allow for that flourishing.
Ayana Young Right, like story as compass to help guide our decision making. I'm thinking about you interviewing curler bowheads and really loving that image.
I’m interested too in the ways you pay attention specifically to the individual species of bowhead whales within the environment. I’d love if you can give us some insight into the ways you became close with these whales and the stories you learned when paying specific attention to the actions of bowheads as agents themselves, not just as objects in a distinctly human story?
Bathsheba Demuth When I started doing this research whales were not remotely on my horizon. I wasn't thinking about them at all. And it was really because the historical sources, and particularly Indigenous communities and folks in communities in Russia and on the US side of the Bering Strait I talked to, just kept pointing me to whales and to bowhead whales, in particular into the history of bowhead whaling. And doing so in a way that from the very beginning really indicated that part of the story I was telling was about whaling as an industry that comes in in the 19th century, and kind of in contrast to the way in which Yupik and Iñupiat whalers, in particular, have hunted bowheads for millennia. But also that the bowheads themselves are just kind of worthy of attention. And I'm really grateful to the people who kind of pointed me in that direction because once I started paying attention to whales, they were everywhere in the sources that I was reading. And they were present, not just as you know, people saying, “Oh, I saw a whale,” or in the case of the whaling logbooks that I eventually started reading, in the kind of tallies of how many whales were killed, which I expected to find. But they were present as really active constitutive parts of whether or not human beings were able to carry out what they wanted to in a given day. They were very sort of active participants in social life.
And this, of course, is how Yupik and Iñupiat have understood bowhead whales for a very, very long time, right? It's sort of central to understanding what a bowhead is in Yupik, and Iñupiat society. And what I found interesting is that once I took that as seriously as it should be taken, right, these are the people who have known whales for the longest, it was very clear that the 19th century kind of commercial whalers also understood bowheads as being very active participants in their society. Actually so active that there's this period right after the kind of commercial fleet arrives in the Bering Strait and they have a couple of years in which they are able to kill bowhead whales really freely, the whales have no fear of the commercial ships, they will swim close to them. The whalers talk about how it is kind of a free for all and that lasts for a couple of years. And then the bowhead whales change how they interact with these commercial whaling vessels. And in particular, they learn how to withdraw into the sea ice as soon as they hear or see these vessels approaching them, and essentially start using the sea ice as protection. And these accounts are all over the logbooks, they're not hard to find.
And so I started thinking about the whales as doing exactly what it is that Yupik and Iñupiat communities talk about them doing: making decisions, assessing what it is that a person's desire for them is, and deciding whether or not they're willing to be hunted. It looks to me like the whales were doing exactly that - they were deciding they did not want to be hunted on this kind of scale, and for the reasons that these commercial ships came to kill them. And so you can read that interaction in a variety of ways. You can read it as sort of a behavioral adaptation, you can read it more as Yupik and Iñupiat whalers would read it as, kind of a moral judgment on the commercial ships. But either way, the whales' behavior changes so dramatically, that for a period of years in the 1850s, the commercial fleet just abandons the Bering Strait altogether, kind of giving up on whaling that far north because they're unable to do it safely and successfully. And so that was a place where you can really see this kind of agency that's far beyond the human, kind of conveying what it is that people want to do and curtailing their decisions.
Ayana Young I find these stories so interesting, especially this idea of consent between species. In expanding our moral imagination to the more-than-human it seems that we may gain a valuable moral rootedness. Even though we understand the whale’s actions through the human mediated terms of consent, what does angyi truly mean and what can the act of listening to the whales tell us about morality?
Bathsheba Demuth The term angyi - it's a Yupik term for a behavior that Yupik whalers have long identified. And it shows up very far back in historical sources, and in oral histories, and is very much part of present whaling practice that describes how bowhead whales will see a whaling boat on the water and will swim near it, but usually out of harpoon range, and sometimes do that for quite a while, like you know, for 20 minutes or an hour, and appears to be kind of assessing or attending to the people in the boat. And then will either dive and come up close enough to be within harpoon range or will dive and flee. And the Yupik interpretation of this behavior is that what the whales are doing is assessing kind of the worthiness of the people in the boat to hunt them and deciding whether or not the whale is willing to give its life so that the people in that boat and the members of their community will be able to live and in pretty concrete terms because historically bowhead whale meat and blubber has been just an integral to human life in many of these communities and remains so to a large degree.
And I think that that understanding, that this act of hunting, for one thing, comes from a very, very different place than the kind of Western-style trophy hunting around which a lot of hunting laws in the United States are based, which is kind of an aristocratic model from Europe where you're supposed to go out and kind of prove your masculinity by killing the largest animal. It's very disassociated from whether or not you need to eat that animal or otherwise depend on it, and it really kind of signals a sort of conquering or prowess over that animal and kind of over nature by extension. Out of this idea of whales’ consent, it flips that power relationship, so that human beings are the supplicants - they're the people who have to kind of maintain good relation in order to be able to hunt, and through hunting to continue living. And I think in that kind of reversal of what it means to hunt, there is a really kind of powerful acknowledgment of the way in which a human person is not kind of independently alone able to master the place they're in - or even a community of people - that you really do need to be so attentive to the landscape and the seascape and the animals and other beings within it that you can intuit whether or not they're willing to let you be there. And so I think it is a kind of consent. I know that you've had Kyle White on the podcast before and he writes very movingly and forcefully about this idea of consent and kind of what it means between species and how situational and complicated it is. It's not the kind of consent that would work between people and bowhead whales is not identical to one that would work between, you know, me and the wild turkeys that I see walking down the road in Rhode Island. And that the importance of the situatedness of these practices is something that I've been thinking a lot about, and how to kind of generalize to the point that it's useful to think with, but not to the point that we kind of overstep what a particular ecosystem is telling us.
Ayana Young Thinking on this different perception of consumption, in the article, The Act of Giving and the Chance of Life on a Finite Planet, you write “The logic of expanding consumption, of the commercial whaler and the factory ship, is the logic of the slaughterhouse: one that conceals death from the people who take it into their homes, or eat it, or wear it.” What is this logic of the slaughterhouse, and how might we learn ways to consume that are not alienating in nature, that instead might connect us to the labor and materials upon which we depend?
Bathsheba Demuth It's such a good question. And I wish as a historian that I had a crystal ball that made that all clear. I started thinking about this, this idea of slaughterhouse logic, when looking at these accounts of commercial whalers, and then later of factory ship whalers of the Soviet Union, who both speak about how dehumanizing the work of killing animals without those rules of consent is. If your job is simply to take every whale that you can possibly find, if there's no recognition in the act of killing the whale of what you're doing, but you're supposed to reduce in your mind this sentient creature that you see and feel and understand as such to a tally in a logbook, there's kind of a moral wound that comes out of that.
And to me, that kind of set of labor conditions around whaling in the 19th and the 20th century reminded me of how it is that I've seen agricultural meat production transform in the Midwest, where I'm from, in my lifetime - from smaller farms where people killing animals in order to eat them we're doing so at a much more intimate local scale and it wasn't closed off from the people necessarily who were doing the eating of the animals. And now, of course, in the Midwest, most of the farms are factory farms, animals are being raised and killed very much out of sight of anybody who eats them or otherwise consumes them. And that kind of fundamental break between understanding where it is that the world we consume and that we have to consume (since we don't photosynthesize, we're dependent on something else to do that energy work for us), we can't get out of that. But if you completely ignore the terms under which that energy is made accessible to people, you end up with these systems that exploit both the labor of killing and the beings that are killed. And there's no consent in either of those things, right? No consent for the whalers and no consent for the whales.
And then, of course, if you are just buying your meat off the shelf, or if you're buying your whale oil in the 19th century, you don't have to see any of that. The kind of process of production, you're not involved in it, you don't necessarily even know that it's terrible, and therefore don't know to intervene in it. And so I think that piece, that to me is really central to this idea of the slaughterhouse. It's a place where used to kind of put all of the morally wretched work of being able to consume the world freely and put all the pain of it onto a very small number of usually very minoritized people so that the rest of society is freed from dealing with it. But of course, that means we're also freed from thinking about the ecological ramifications of that and the kind of ethical burdens of it. And I think in terms of how do you exit from that, I think about this all the time.
I think one of the things that to me has become increasingly important is to pair the questions of the labor that people do, and the conditions of that labor, and the dignity or lack thereof of that labor, with the environments in which they're working. And in some ways, this is kind of an old-fashioned Marxist move. It's also an environmental justice move to say, “who is it that is doing the work? And are they doing it because there are no other choices? Have we made the work so terrible, but that's the only reason anyone would be involved in it?” And in that case, how is it that we make the act of producing what it is that others are going to consume not a moral burden because to me, none of it needs to be. Raising animals shouldn't be, whaling is obviously not, if you’re Yupik or Iñupiat, a terrible moral kind of imposition. But working in a slaughterhouse is and it's dangerous, just at a physical level. So to me, one of the places where, when I'm thinking about future-oriented action, which as a historian, maybe I don't do enough, is looking at the places where you can imagine transforming both the site of human labor and the ecologies that that labor is invested in.
Ayana Young Yeah, thinking about the conditions for both the slaughterhouse worker and the more than human kin that have to be a part of that system, it's not good for anybody. And it's not even good for those consuming that type of meat, regardless of if they see the environmental degradation or see the process of it. It's just so fascinating (in a really disturbing way) how we have gotten ourselves into these predicaments everywhere we look. It's something that really needs to be, whether revised or burned down entirely and started anew, and looking back in time to see where we started to head in these really strange directions.
I just appreciate that your research highlights the ways humans have adapted to massive changes in our environments. Though this adaptation is necessary to survival, it sometimes blinds us to the massive changes that have taken place over time. So I'm wondering how do we reckon with the vast changes of the past century and the changes still to come on planetary timescales while still finding space for survival within our human timescales?
Bathsheba Demuth Yeah, that's the thing that keeps me up at night. I think one of the things I've been thinking about is actually the temporal scale of adaptation and how much that matters. That obviously - human beings as a species - we're incredibly adaptable, right? We can live in such a wide variety of ecosystems, and parts of the world, and climates - so adaptation is really our forte. But generally speaking, we have been asked to do that adaptation at a relatively slow pace, the pace of our own migrations or the pace of large, long-term kind of climate processes that we can kind of adjust to year over year. And that both the kind of colonial disruptions that I study in the Arctic, and the kind of climate change future that is bearing down upon us (it's not even really the future anymore, but the kind of accelerating present), require a pace of adaptation that feels very different from that baseline human norm: that we can get used to the desert, and we can get used to the tundra, and we can get used to temperate rainforest, and everything in between.
And that, to me, thinking about ways in which we can actively slow down the pace at which we need to adapt - which goes very much counter to those 20th-century ideologies and their desire to speed everything up and see progress as just in the collapsing of time and space, and this kind of rapid production - that instead, thinking about our responsibilities toward the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is the less we put in, the more time we have to adapt. And the more time we have to adapt, the more organic and the less violent it seems that that process can be; it does not involve the same kind of disruption. It still involves loss: I still wish that it was not the hands that our generation and the generations after were dealt, and that we're dealing ourselves. But I don't know quite how to have a politics of slowness but that almost feels like where we are. How do we reduce the pace at which our adaptations have to happen so that we can make places home along the way rather than just rushing through them in the hope to find some other safe place to be? So I don't know quite what that looks like but it's something that I have been thinking about.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely. Your understanding of history shows us that humans are resilient and adaptable. You were speaking earlier that we can live in the desert, we can live in the Arctic. But at the same time, often, we have trouble tracing the impacts of our actions and the throughlines between our impacts in the past, and present, and the future, that they of course inevitably shape. Now, given your rootedness in the Arctic, as we enter a future determined by climate change, how do you envision a future of an Arctic that may be ice-free and filled with new shipping lines?
Bathsheba Demuth I mean, to be honest, it's really terrifying. I don't have a much more sophisticated take on it than that. And it's not because I don't think that communities that have lived in the Arctic long-term will vanish or cease to be. I think that one of the things that's very clear from talking with Yupik, Iñupiat, and Chukchi communities, is that the kind of trials that climate change is slinging at the Arctic are an accelerated and very broad-scale version of a kind of change that the last 200 years has had a-plenty. You know, starting with commercial whaling, which kind of rewrote the ocean ecosystems for a time, and culminating in the oil rush that has come in the 20th century. So it's not that societies won't have the capacity to adapt. I think there's a way in which sometimes change in the Arctic is reported with this breathless “everyone, everything is going to vanish” way that has deep colonial roots.
I think what terrifies me is that the capacity for people who live in the Arctic now to say, “this is how we want to manage the increase in shipping,” or, “this is how we envision our lives in an ice-free summer” hasn't actually improved all that much over the span of history I've been looking at. I think there is, particularly in the United States, more capacity for the Iñupiat, or the Gwich’in, or different Indigenous nations, to assert what it is that they want and how they want to live, but it's not the deciding factor still. Very often, it's the federal government or just the aggregate accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is making those choices. And it's the lack of political situatedness of these decisions in the place where they matter most that I find really concerning: that it's Moscow that's going to be making decisions about shipping through the Bering Strait, not people living in the Chukchi Peninsula. And that dynamic is the one that has sort of caused people around the Bering Strait to deal with really rapid and difficult change for the past 200 years. So, in that sense, I suppose I have a fairly pessimistic view. I think what might temper that somewhat is that I do think there is more awareness now than there was certainly in the 19th century (and to quite a degree, even in the 20th century), of the ways in which the actions of people very far away from the Arctic impact it, that we actually cannot separate ourselves. And greenhouse gas emissions are a very kind of tangible, obvious way in which we're not separate because the atmosphere is shared. And so on my perkier days I hope that that awareness of interconnection actually allows for more responsibility on the part of people who are distant, who still in many cases have perhaps more power than they should over the north.
Ayana Young Imagining shipping fleets moving through an ice-free Arctic is really haunting. And just thinking about whether it be oil spills, or some form of pollution from the ships, or just the noise alone underwater for the whales and the other creatures is very sci-fi/apocalypse feeling, and it's really easy to fall into these apocalyptic narratives when envisioning the future. I know I go there often. This doom, though, is incredibly anthropocentric. And thinking on apocalypse in your article, Reindeer at the End of the World, you write, “at the end of the world, there are no damned or saved souls, only people and other kin to share in the work of making life possible.” I just love that quote. I wonder if you could speak to the importance of tending to grief for lost future possibilities, while still remaining humble about our place within the earth?
Bathsheba Demuth I really like how you phrased that question because I think sometimes when I read coverage of the climate crisis, and particularly for people who are kind of new to thinking about it (and I don't begrudge anyone this experience), but I think there's a kind of desire to say, “it's all over, the world is ending, there's nothing to be done. Throw up your hands.” And I understand psychologically where that comes from, and in some ways, it's kind of self-protective, right? Because it means that there isn't anything to be done. We don't need to ask ourselves, “how do we carry on,” and we don't actually have to think about grieving for what's changing. And I think that the difference between doom and grief is actually really important. That the apocalyptic impulse is a way of ignoring that something might be changing and lost that we simply will never have back, right? And the kind of healthy response to that is to acknowledge it and grieve for it… and that's not emotionally particularly comfortable. I think, particularly in Western consumer society where we're taught to not grieve. We're taught to ignore death. I think it's actually a piece of the slaughterhouse in some ways, that that logic of not paying attention to things ending is really deeply conditioned into a kind of consumerist mindset. But we're not going to be able to avoid it, with the pace of climate change being what it is. There are things that we're going to have to grieve, but the grief is not giving up. And the grief is not the same as saying, “well, the world has ended, I don't have any responsibilities to the future because the future doesn't exist.”
I think one of the things that I have found really striking, particularly about spending time on the Chukchi Peninsula (which is in what is now the Russian side of the Bering Strait), is that it's a place where people in the last century have watched the arrival of this Soviet vision of how the world should be that was often quite violently thrust into their lives and rearranged how it was that people lived. And then that whole way of organizing society disappeared in the 1990s very, very suddenly, and came with an absence of everything that the Soviets brought with them - the electricity, anything that was powered by gasoline, food that was flown in from outside the peninsula - suddenly goes away. That really was living through the end of a world right, not the entire world, but the Soviet world stopped existing. And in that moment, which was extraordinarily difficult in material terms - it was cold, it was dark, it was difficult to get food, it was trying at like the most basic level - that what mattered was partly grieving for what had been lost and also for figuring out how it is that you keep things going in the present that you have as different and disorienting and trying as it can be. And in that work, and that recognition that you don't actually get to opt out into the apocalypse and that you must carry on regardless has really stayed with me because I think it counters that desire to flee into doom and just sort of imagine that it's all over. And that no, actually we were going to be here regardless. The question is, what are the terms of life that we get to live in? And that's a much more quotidian question. It's one of daily life and practices of care and how it is that we nourish each other both metaphorically and very physically but we don't get the refuge of pretending we don't grieve.
Ayana Young No. I feel like whales also really bring out the grief in me in a way that is palpable. So I can imagine that you had to move through a lot of grief in your research. Thinking back to our conversation on morality, the ethical stories you tell through history are particularly impactful. I'm wondering what may a modern day ethics of consumption look like, especially in an environment that has been fundamentally changed because of our own deliberate actions and overconsumption.
Bathsheba Demuth This is something I think about a lot for myself but also because I talk about it a lot with my students. I think one of the things that thinking about this question of consumption historically has really clarified for me is that in the United States, we're taught that consumption is an individual act and that there's a kind of strain of climate thinking that basically focuses on individual amelioration, right? That you get an electric car instead of a gasoline car, and you put solar panels on your house… and there's kind of this whole suite of practices that if you have the financial means are available. And I don't think there's anything wrong with any of those - in fact, I think most of them are things that if you can afford it are very, very worthwhile. But what they are not demanding for systems that do not, at the end of the day, rest entirely on the kind of ecosystem and labor exploitation that I think still fuels so much of the growth economy that we live in. And I could go completely off the grid tomorrow and use no electricity and never drive a car and harvest my own food, and do all of that, and it won't actually matter. And that what we need to do, and this in some ways is kind of the oldest song in the hymnal about the kind of environmental situation that we're in, is that it really does demand systemic and collective change. And I think change that's oriented around not just the kind of framing of fixing the climate crisis or consuming less but actually thinking about what it is as a society that we really value and want to nourish and succeed and be able to flourish in the world.
There's a way in which the climate crisis, and consumption in general, is so often framed around like, “well how much can we ask people to give up?” and, “will people be able to drive less?” and all that. And what we're not asking is do people want to live close to where they work so they don't need a car? Do people want to have access to ways of eating that don't implicate the slaughterhouse? My guess is that for many people, the answer is actually yes, but those options genuinely seem unthinkable. And one of the things I find as a historian almost distressing is the ways in which you can look back at the past and see how the kind of ideology of a given time made certain thoughts inaccessible to people - just like genuinely outside the realm of the politically thinkable. And then you take that lesson and you kind of imagine, in the present, how it is that we're constructing the narratives about what we can do. And I think we really constrain ourselves a lot of the time and consign things to radical when they're not at all radical, right? It's not radical to ask people how it is they want to live? What is it they actually care for? What is it they would like their children to be able to do and to see and to experience when they grow up? But the political discussion doesn't usually start from that place, and it certainly doesn't start from thinking about how to avoid the slaughterhouse.
Ayana Young Well, Bathsheba, thank you so much for guiding us through this conversation in the ways that you did. I feel really moved and kind of put into my inner world. I'm excited to reread some of your work after this to just sit with what you're saying a bit more. So thank you so much for your time on the podcast. I really appreciate it.
Bathsheba Demuth Well, thank you. This was such a wonderful conversation and your questions really deepened what I've already been thinking about.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Eliza Edens, Georgia Sackler, and Dana Anastacia. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Julia Jackson, and Priya Subberwal.