When We Talk About Animals · Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School

Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and arctic ecology

·59 min·4 clips

Yupik and Inupiaq traditions describe bowhead whales choosing whether hunters deserve their sacrifice.

1. When We Talk About Animals examines Bathsheba DeMuth’s account of capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology in Beringia.\n2. Lindsay Stern and Viveka Morris host Bathsheba DeMuth, an environmental historian at Brown University who studies the Russian and North American Arctic.\n3. The episode asks how whales, Indigenous practices, capitalist commerce, and communist production shaped one another in Beringia.\n4. DeMuth describes Beringia as a varied landscape of mountains, bogs, beaches, coastlines, and rapidly shifting Arctic rivers.\n5. She recounts moving to the Yukon at 18, where she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, and tracked bears.\n6. DeMuth says nation-state boundaries became operational in the region only after 1948 and do not explain Beringia’s older connections.\n7. Bowhead and gray whales supported settled Bering Strait villages because agriculture was difficult and bowheads were more than 40% fat by volume.\n8. Before commercial whaling, roughly 100 bowhead whales were killed annually from a population of about 20,000 to 30,000.\n9. New Bedford captain Thomas Royce reached the Bering Strait in 1848, and more than 100 ships followed the reported whaling opportunity in 1849.\n10. DeMuth says bowheads soon learned to avoid Yankee ships by moving toward pack ice, making commercial hunting dangerous and difficult.\n11. Yupik and Inupiaq traditions describe whales as sentient beings that observe human conduct and make moral judgments.\n12. DeMuth explains the ecological “whale pump,” in which diving and surfacing move nutrients toward the surface for algae and diatoms.\n13. Large, long-lived whales can moderate consumption across abundant and lean seasons, potentially stabilizing energy available to other species.\n14. Soviet whaling initially sought to account for whale biology and provide collective benefits rather than private commodity wealth.\n15. Postwar hunger and Soviet production demands pushed the whaling program toward catches beyond International Whaling Commission limits.\n16. DeMuth connects capitalist and communist systems through their shared tendency to conceal the labor, violence, and animal death behind consumption.\n17. Greenpeace helped expose Soviet industrial whaling but later treated Indigenous subsistence hunting as part of the same problem.\n18. The interview uses archival research, oral histories, ecological explanation, and discussion of teleological versus cyclical time.\n19. Readers of Floating Coast and Arctic environmental history will appreciate this comparison.\n20. Listeners seeking fast-paced personal storytelling may skip this archival interview.

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