Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

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

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.

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?

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.

Individual moral salvation made for national economic growth.

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.

From this perspective, capitalism and socialism are not laws of history that separate the human from the nonhuman; they are ideas about time and value that shape particular relationships with the basic matter of existence, matter that has its own influence over human ambition.

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