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.

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.

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

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?

Individual moral salvation made for national economic growth.

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.

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.

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.

covered the land in ice, pinning reindeer on