Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

In selling the self to kill the selves of whales, work became a thing divisible by units of trade and time, measured out in bags of sugar or rounds of ammunition.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individual moral salvation made for national economic growth.