00:02:43.700and I would like to begin by recognizing your background as an environmental historian.
00:02:50.740How are you changing the narratives of history and stretching the disciple to better suit us?
00:02:57.780And what is the value of doing history as an active pursuit in our present moment?
00:03:02.780I really love this question because I feel like it's the one that gets me up in the morning,
00:03:08.940so I like to answer it. And I think I also would want to start off by saying that
00:03:15.720being a historian, one of the real privileges of it is that it's not a solo pursuit. It's
00:03:21.680something that you do in a community with other scholars, both inside and outside of the academy.
00:03:26.020So I feel like I'm fortunate enough to be part of kind of a movement or a group of people who
00:03:31.480are all trying to reconsider what history is and what it can do for us. And I don't have the
00:03:36.100terrible burden of trying to be the single voice doing it, for which I'm grateful and I think
00:03:40.700really strengthens the work. But in general, I think environmental historians, and certainly
00:03:48.400this is what motivates me, are trying to reconceptualize the way in which the kind of
00:03:54.720traditional academic disciplines that structure how we know the world have separated what it is
00:04:01.280to be a human person off from what it is to be any other kind of being in the world. And it's a
00:04:07.040division that runs, you know, right down the heart of most universities, where you have natural
00:04:12.400scientists on one side of campus, thinking about ecology and biology and climatology and all the
00:04:18.240other ologies. And then you have the social scientists and the humanitarian humanist sorts
00:04:24.240on the other side of campus, supposedly talking about what it is to be a human being.
00:04:29.180And I think what I see myself and other environmental historians as trying to do is to knit those two stories back together.
00:04:38.840They obviously have always been together, and it takes actually an enormous amount of intellectual labor to wrench them apart.
00:04:45.240but in putting them kind of back and being able to tell stories about our past in ways that
00:04:52.480show how different kinds of societies and different kinds of ideas about what the world
00:04:58.940should be and how we should be in it have always been deeply settled into the places that they
00:05:04.900operate the ecologies that they emerge out of and I think that that has hopefully some bearing on
00:05:12.940the way that we imagine ourselves in the present and what it is that we can conceptualize as being
00:05:17.740open to us in the future, that we stop telling a story in which human beings are the only kind of
00:05:24.100active character out there striding across the stage and instead that the stage itself and
00:05:29.440everything on it is something we should take very seriously and think about living with.
00:05:34.520i love that re-centering or maybe even de-centering the stage and the the human as
00:05:47.880the main character it's so refreshing and so needed i think especially now that's
00:05:57.180what I definitely feel is one of the strongest messages of how to be in right relationship and
00:06:06.180yeah, try to find some way through this mess that we're in.
00:06:13.700In much of your writing, it's clear that you feel a connection to those that came before us,
00:06:21.160not just as products of the systems which you study, but as individuals in their own right.
00:06:29.200So how do you navigate this connection across years, even centuries? And how does a view of
00:06:36.100connection across time change some of the ways we think about the timescales of our own lives?
00:06:43.820That's such a beautifully put question, that how do you connect with people across these timescales?
00:06:48.840I think, for me, some of it is really, and this often has to come through very kind of incomplete and fragmentary sources, because, you know, we don't leave our complete selves for historians to dig through in the future.
00:07:06.520and nobody did that in the past but to really sit and think hard with what it was to try to
00:07:15.340live a good life in the past and what were the rules that people were trying to follow and what
00:07:19.820impeded those attempts and to take um to take those attempts seriously even when in the present
00:07:27.360they seem ghastly or wrong-headed or ethically dubious um because in that sense you know i have
00:07:36.000to give credit to the fact that, you know, in the future, somebody might look back at us and say we
00:07:40.680were doing things that were wrongheaded or ethically dubious or ghastly, but we probably
00:07:48.060weren't doing so with destruction as our number one aim. And I think that's particularly true
00:07:53.260because I don't, generally speaking, study elite peoples. I study folks who are a little further
00:08:00.900down the chain of power who are, you know, dealing with their circumstances, no matter
00:08:06.340what they are from, you know, working on a whale ship in the 19th century to, you know,
00:08:11.040trying to run a mine for the Soviet Union in the 20th century, where their sense of
00:08:16.900the world and how to do well in it is often compromised or challenged by the power structures
00:08:23.520And that kind of sitting with how complex that is, I think is a part of my job.
00:08:30.900And 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 a 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.
00:08:52.920And so that, you know, generations of people have counted them as important enough to preserve and think about what those lessons are for the present.
00:09:01.540And that that's another way in which kind of 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.
00:09:18.480yeah i really appreciate thinking about folks you know the soviet union mine worker and the
00:09:29.200you know things like this because i was just in a conversation yesterday with a friend and
00:09:36.480i think for the most part regardless of what industry we work in as humans i think for the
00:09:46.060most part we're trying to do good and we're trying to be good to our community whether that's our
00:09:55.520family or our wider community I and I appreciate diving into the lives and the stories of people
00:10:04.280not not the elites not the kings and the queens and you know so many stories and so much of history
00:10:11.680as they say is told by the winners or told by those in power it's through them and I think
00:10:18.940we're missing so much when what we learn in school for instance is mainly about those folks so yeah
00:10:26.620I really appreciate that thinking more on this level of empathetic relations I wonder how we
00:10:34.320can come to separate people from the systems in which they're forced to participate both today
00:10:40.260and across time. Now, you've mentioned, you know, you've written extensively about the realities of
00:10:45.580both Soviet and capitalistic systems of extraction, while also recognizing that individual laborers
00:10:53.320are not to blame for such extraction. What then is a history from the perspective of the miner,
00:11:00.720the whaler, the laborer, and how might this perspective shift change the way we view the
00:11:07.040course of history? That's also such a beautifully put question. And I think it, in part, it comes
00:11:12.920from a fairly long tradition now in academic history of trying to think about history from
00:11:18.640below. So not paying attention to the presidents and the queens and the kings as the only history
00:11:23.640makers, but think about the ways in which historians can really look at the kind of
00:11:28.200dignity and fullness of human life at a whole variety of levels of power. And in the case of
00:11:33.840the work that I've been doing, I started it understanding that part of the story that I
00:11:38.400would be telling, which is about the kind of North American and Russian sides of the Bering
00:11:44.740Strait, is one where there's a lot of really quite dramatic and often really shocking and
00:11:49.780violent social and ecological change. But I didn't want to reduce either the place or the
00:11:56.660participants just to sort of a story of decline and immiseration, because to me, that is denying
00:12:03.500the people in the place of its dignity and its capacity to adapt and to kind of continue and
00:12:09.720to flourish potentially, right? If everything has kind of declined, then how do we imagine a future
00:12:15.520in which that's not the case? And to me, looking at the ways in which people like the individual
00:12:22.180whalers whose diaries I was able to work with, you know, who set sail from the East Coast of0.97
00:12:29.600the United States, often extremely impoverished, sometimes formerly enslaved people, sometimes
00:12:37.640people who were, you know, fleeing other kinds of hardship, and were on these long and really
00:12:43.540grueling voyages that could last for 1824 months, in which their primary job and the only way they
00:12:50.960could really earn their way off the ships was to kill whales. But the killing of whales for many
00:12:56.860of them from kind of the traces they leave in their written accounts was often a really kind
00:13:02.660of morally painful job, right? They could see that they were inflicting pain on these animals.
00:13:08.460They observed them really closely as they were hunting them. So they saw them as, you know,
00:13:13.960sentient and full of sentiment. And at the same time, we're not kind of given the space within
00:13:22.240the society they operated in to decide another course of action. And I found that kind of bind
00:13:28.680of those whalers in the 19th century. And then there's kind of a similar story about Soviet1.00
00:13:33.340whalers in the 20th to be really moving because I so often feel like I'm in that bind, right? I have0.98
00:13:39.020a sense of how it is that I would prefer to operate in the world. And then I have a sense of
00:13:45.600what I'm required to do because of the social system that I live in. And I think for me that
00:13:52.340that mediation, seeing that it's at these kind of sites of labor, where it is where people are
00:13:59.820really directly and bodily in contact with the world around them, with whales or with some other
00:14:07.920part of the ecology, that you can really get a sense of people imagining alternatives and not
00:14:15.380necessarily being able to, um, turn them into reality because of where they sit in the power
00:14:20.500structure. And I hope that in that realization, there's some ability to have empathy for people
00:14:26.560who, you know, professionally kill whales or, or do things that we now find distasteful or seem
00:14:32.820just sort of, um, stories of, of horror or wrongness and perhaps can reflect on it for
00:14:39.560ourselves you know where is it that we also find our get stuck it's so interesting to put myself
00:14:47.840in the shoes of a 19th century whaler and what a different world that must have been although
00:14:57.880I'm sure so many similarities because I think humans are humans and we have a lot of similar
00:15:08.240probably problems and inquiries that we've always had about life and love and relationship and
00:15:16.760just how to get through life in general. But the details are really fascinating. And you tease out
00:15:25.640important intricacies when thinking about the systems that encouraged environmental degradation.
00:15:31.320And you point out that both communist and capitalist systems in the Arctic instituted systems of control that serve to exploit labor, harm environments, and subjugate indigenous people.
00:15:45.740How did these systems of control manifest throughout history?
00:15:49.900And what is the harm in subscribing to the idea that we can somehow control nature?
00:15:55.220So one of the things that when I started this project, I really imagined that I was writing a history of contrasts. And I would, you know, 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.
00:16:14.560And that, you know, then right across in what is now Alaska, you would have these kind of capitalist, 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?
00:16:30.020That, you know, socialism in the in the Soviet sphere is kind of more brutal and more destructive and more exploitative of human life and, you know, capitalism could at least produce some kind of freedom around the edges.
00:16:45.220And I think what was really fascinating about pairing the two together is the ways in which the kind of 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,
00:17:12.560that they actually ended up looking as systems often really like each other in this arctic
00:17:20.380environment and in particular because they were both systems that really focused on kind of
00:17:28.120getting the maximum quantity of energy out of any particular ecosystem for human beings to use and
00:17:34.720you know in some ecologies they would do that through agriculture in some they would do it
00:17:40.100through oil and gas exploration in the Bering Strait.
00:17:43.700It was through, you know, whales and walruses and reindeer.
00:17:46.820But this kind of impulse to turn all over the world to human purpose
00:17:51.680really seemed in common for both of them.
00:17:55.480And that what that kind of does on the ground is transform the kind of extant human societies,
00:18:04.620the Yupik, the Nupiak, and the Chukchi, the indigenous peoples of the Bering Strait,
00:18:08.580Who had a kind of much more capacious understanding of what a society is and who is included, you know, going far beyond just sort of human beings and kind of trying to squeeze that out and reduce it to, you know, 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?
00:18:29.720And to me that that, you know, both has very concrete and dramatic impacts on the ecologies and the societies that the United States and the Soviet Union were operating in.
00:18:45.120But it also is an incredibly, there's a narrowness to that impulse that I don't think I went into this research expecting to find, right, that it's a blinkered kind of understanding of the world that we live in.
00:18:59.080it makes its most kind of devoted adherents ignore a lot of the world around them, and
00:19:06.900often to their detriment, and often to the detriment of the thing that they're trying
00:19:12.440And I see this kind of with particular irony in the Soviet case, where the kind of first
00:19:17.460generation of Bolshevik missionaries, and they would sometimes actually call themselves
00:19:23.160missionaries to arrive in the Bering Strait. We're so deeply committed to this Marxist vision of
00:19:31.200societal transformation that in many ways is hard not to have deep sympathy with.
00:19:38.980It's a vision of radical equality. It's a vision that emphasizes human dignity and, you know,
00:19:47.920not reducing people to the kind of capitalist labor that Marx is so good at critiquing
00:19:54.540and it's a vision of you know creating a better world for everyone
00:19:59.500and yet it's a world that only has human beings in it and that in the case of the the sort of
00:20:07.600Soviet experiment that really you know leads them to make decisions that in an ecological sense
00:20:13.360just cannot hold, that don't work. And in a cultural sense led them to, you know, kind of0.62
00:20:20.620force on people who didn't understand the utopianism of their vision and really by force
00:20:28.640try to sort of convert people. And so it's that, it's the, it's the ways in which those
00:20:37.060ideological formations can really blinker their strongest adherence even when they have the best
00:20:44.100of possible intentions from actually really seeing and participating in the world around them
00:20:50.200that ended up being really fascinating to me um and and kind of a offers a bit of a cautionary
00:20:58.000note i think um because you know i'm i'm thinking as seducible as anybody to visions of radical
00:21:05.300egalitarian futures. But from this research and watching how it played out in this part of the
00:21:14.380world, I've come to think that it must be much more generous in its understanding of who makes
00:21:20.220a society. Yeah. And what does it say about humanity in general, that such destruction was
00:21:29.660brought on by two supposedly antagonal systems. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. And I
00:21:38.120actually think that in many ways, the ideas that both the United States and the Soviet Union brought
00:21:45.020north with them are not really ones that are held by humanity as a whole, that fortunately,
00:21:52.380we don't all have to be judged by them. Because in many ways, the whole presupposition that
00:21:59.120human beings are fundamentally separate from the places that they live in and can extract from them
00:22:04.300at whim. And that they're, you know, in the most extreme versions in both capitalist and socialist
00:22:10.760kind of ideas about using the world, it's capable of producing infinitely, right? They're both
00:22:18.920ideologies that kind of are seduced by this idea of infinite growth and infinite production.
00:22:24.140And those ideas in a historical sense are extraordinarily new on the human horizon, and in many ways, extremely weird and unusual.
00:22:33.640And one of the things that I've really come to think as I have worked on this book and the other kind of 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.
00:22:54.440and therefore over the you know massive scope of human history how many alternatives to it there
00:23:01.340are that the way that we live now and is kind of domineering and um totalizing as it can seem is
00:23:08.520actually both recent and partial um and that there are you know not only were alternatives
00:23:15.400historically but are many alternatives in the present um and that's i think that's the part
00:23:20.420and this research that really gives me hope is that so many people have lived so well
00:23:25.880and such rich lives without being guided by this particular vision of progress that really comes
00:23:32.600around in the 19th century. So it just hasn't been with us that long. Oh, yes, the pursuit of
00:23:39.440progress has taken us to such strange and destructive places, not just in the physical
00:23:47.460world, but I think definitely in our mental and even spiritual spaces, I think it's been
00:23:55.840something that we desperately need to unwind.
00:23:59.880The soil is soft beneath my weary feet
00:25:08.100I'd like to transition to some of the environmental implications of your work.
00:25:16.660And I was particularly struck by the environmental impacts you described.
00:25:20.860In your article, The Act of Giving and The Chance of Life on a Finite Planet, you write, quote,
00:25:27.440Yet the marks of the bowheads near extermination surround us. Their absence has transformed the
00:25:33.940way energy moves through Svalbard's ecosystem. Bowheads once ate 4 million tons of zooplankton1.00
00:25:40.660a year. Now the population of polar cod has likely grown substantially larger since the
00:25:46.740dissemination of the bowheads by feeding on some of that krill, end quote. So can you tell us more
00:25:54.000about what it means to read the environment, to pay attention to what it tells us, and treat it
00:26:00.460as a source equal to that of the human word? One of the things that I really seek to do in my
00:26:07.240writing is provide people, myself included, with not just the metaphors, but kind of a material
00:26:16.960way for thinking ourselves back into the places that we live in. So to kind of do that knitting
00:26:24.040together work that I talked about at the very beginning of thinking of my human person as
00:26:29.760just deeply materially and otherwise connected to a specific place.
00:26:35.180And 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 where any of us beings that don't photosynthesize are automatically dependent on plants and other photosynthetic organisms to give us that energy.
00:26:57.300And then it's often, you know, reworked along the way by, you know, the animals that consume
00:27:02.840it if you eat meat or, you know, kind of otherwise transformed by an ecosystem.
00:27:08.720And that kind of following what ecologists call trophic levels through time can kind
00:27:16.700of allow you to see the ways in which different kinds of human interventions either transform
00:27:22.840or don't um the ecosystems they live in in terms of how that energy moves so something like bowhead
00:27:29.440whales who eat you know these massive amounts of krill to make their their huge you know 70 ton
00:27:35.320bodies um their presence because of the way they feed and because of the their behaviors actually
00:27:43.540makes that ecosystem more able to produce more photosynthetic life so it you know they take a
00:27:49.140great deal out of the ecosystems they live in, but they also help make a flourishing space for
00:27:54.600the diatoms and the algaes that are the basis of the ecosystem on up through all other kinds of
00:27:59.940layers. And then in their absence, you know, once in the case of Svalbard, they were whaled
00:28:05.600aggressively in the 17th century and on, their absence means that those kind of chains of energy
00:28:13.620conversion kind of shift. And so now there are probably more polar cod than there were
00:28:20.280when the bowhead whales are flourishing. But ecologists speculate that there's just less
00:28:27.100energy produced in these ecosystems in general when you take out kind of critical species like
00:28:31.980whales. And to me, part of what those kind of ecological connections offer us is a way of
00:28:40.540thinking about what an ecosystem that's really flourishing looks like. How is it that we as
00:28:48.300people can participate in that ecosystem in a way that allows for it to stay flourishing,
00:28:53.900which means that you can, for example, kill and eat some bowhead whales the way that has been
00:28:59.040practiced in Greenland and in Russia and the United States for a very, very long time.
00:29:05.200but you cannot kill all of the bowhead whales the way that very nearly happened in Svalbard the
00:29:10.880reduction of the population to just an incredibly tiny sliver of its former bounty and that that
00:29:17.760you know thinking about how it is that our actions kind of rearrange not just the one species that
00:29:23.060something like a capitalist market gets fixated on but the entire kind of network of life that
00:29:30.460exists in in confluence with that species as a historian kind of allows me to
00:29:38.780map out the ways in which these extractive impulses that come both out of the Soviet
00:29:44.580Union and the United States really kind of transform things that otherwise remain a little
00:29:50.480bit unseen right it's really hard as a historian to get under the water I can't interview krill
00:29:56.400I can't even interview a bowhead whale much as I would like to.
00:30:00.960So in some ways, it's a question of how do you kind of 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.
00:30:14.760right like story as compass to help guide our decision making and
00:30:25.700yeah i'm thinking about you interviewing krill or bowheads and really loving that image and
00:30:34.560yeah i'm just really interested in the ways you pay attention specifically to the individual
00:30:40.440species of bowhead whales within the environment. And I'd love if you could give us some more
00:30:46.220insight into the ways you became close with these whales and the stories you learned when paying
00:30:52.620specific attention to the action of bowheads as agents themselves, not just as objects in a
00:30:59.240distinctly human story. When I started doing this research, whales were not remotely on my horizon.
00:31:08.300I wasn't thinking about them at all. And it was really because the historical sources and
00:31:16.140particularly indigenous communities and folks in communities in Russia and on the U.S. side of the
00:31:23.320Bering Strait I talked to just kept pointing me to whales and to bowhead whales in particular and to
00:31:30.680the history of bowhead whaling and doing so in a way that from the very beginning really indicated
00:31:35.500that, you know, part of the story I was telling was about whaling as an, as an industry that
00:31:41.080comes in, in the 19th century, um, and kind of in contrast to the way in which you pick an
00:31:48.020Anupiaq, uh, whalers in particular have hunted bowheads for millennia. Um, but also that the0.86
00:31:54.640bowheads themselves are just kind of worthy of attention. And I'm really grateful to the people0.99
00:32:00.020who kind of pointed me in that direction because once I started paying attention to whales they
00:32:07.280were everywhere in the sources that I was reading and they were present not just as you know people
00:32:15.220saying oh I saw a whale or in the case of the whaling log books that I eventually started
00:32:19.280reading you know in the kind of tallies of you know how many whales were killed which I expected
00:32:24.960to find, but were present as really active kind of constitutive parts of whether or not,
00:32:35.020you know, human beings were able to carry out what they wanted to in a given day.
00:32:38.800They were very sort of active participants in social life.
00:32:43.020And this, of course, is how Yupik and Anupiaq have understood bowhead whales for a very,
00:32:48.860It's a sort of central to understanding what a bowhead is in Yupik and Anupiaq society.1.00
00:32:54.960And 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 and actually so active that there's this period right after the kind of commercial fleet arrives in the Bering Strait.
00:33:22.780And they have a couple of years in which they are able to kill bowhead whales really freely.
00:33:28.520The whales have no fear of the commercial ships.
00:33:40.400And then the bowhead whales change how they interact with these commercial whaling vessels.
00:33:46.940and in particular they learn how to withdraw into the sea ice as soon as they hear or see
00:33:54.200these vessels approaching them and essentially start using the sea ice as protection
00:34:00.380and these accounts are are all over the log books they're not hard to find
00:34:06.740and when I started thinking about the whales as doing exactly what it is that Yupika and
00:34:15.360Anupiaq communities talk about them doing, right? Making decisions, assessing what it is that a
00:34:21.260person's kind of desire for them is, and deciding whether or not they're willing to be hunted.
00:34:27.420It looked to me like the whales were doing exactly that. They were deciding they did not want to be
00:34:31.720hunted in the kind of scale, and for the reasons that these commercial ships came to kill them.
00:34:39.920And so, you know, you can read that interaction in a variety of ways, you can read it as sort of
00:34:44.920a behavioral adaptation. You can read it more as Yupik and Inupiaq whalers would read it as kind
00:34:50.520of a moral judgment on the commercial ships. But either way, the whale's behavior changes so
00:34:56.100dramatically that for a period of years in the 1850s, the commercial fleet just abandons the
00:35:02.040Bering Strait altogether, kind of give up on whaling that far north because they're unable to
00:35:06.820do it safely and successfully. And so that was a place where you can really see, you know,
00:35:14.540this kind of agency that's far beyond the human kind of invading on what it is that people want
00:35:21.020to do and curtailing their decisions. Yeah, I find these stories so interesting, especially
00:35:36.200this idea of consent between species and in expanding our moral imagination to the more
00:35:45.460than human it seems that we may gain a valuable moral rootedness even though we understand the
00:35:53.920whale's actions through the human mediated terms of consent what does anagi truly mean
00:36:02.300And what can the act of listening to the whales tell us about morality?
00:36:06.660So the term anagi comes from, it's a Yupik term for a behavior that Yupik whalers have long identified. And it shows up, you know, very far back in historical sources and in oral histories and is very much part of present whaling practice.
00:36:24.640that describes how bowhead whales will you know see a whaling boat on the water and will swim
00:36:34.880near it but usually out of harpoon range and sometimes do that for quite a while like you
00:36:42.800know for 20 minutes or an hour and appears to be kind of assessing or or attending to the people
00:36:49.980in the boat. And then we'll either dive and come up close enough to be within harpoon range,
00:36:56.860or we'll dive and flee. And the Yupik interpretation of this behavior is that what0.88
00:37:03.920the whales are doing is assessing kind of the worthiness of the people in the boat to hunt them
00:37:10.300and deciding whether or not the whale is willing to give its life so that the people in that boat
00:37:15.720and the members of their community will be able to live and in pretty concrete terms because
00:37:21.840historically you know bowhead whale meat and blubber has been just in integral to human life
00:37:29.340in many of these communities and and remains so to a large degree and I think that that
00:37:36.600that understanding that this active hunting for one thing comes from a very very different place
00:37:43.720than the kind of Western style trophy hunting
00:51:46.900your understanding of history shows us that humans are resilient and adaptable you know
00:51:56.620you were speaking earlier to we can live in the desert we can live in the arctic
00:52:01.340but at the same time often we have trouble tracing the impacts of our actions and the
00:52:09.820through lines between our impacts in the past and present and the future that they of course
00:52:16.320inevitably shape now given your rootedness in the arctic as we enter a future determined by
00:52:23.480climate change how do you envision a future of an arctic that may be ice-free and filled with
00:52:30.360new shipping lines? I mean, to be honest, it's really terrifying. I don't, I don't have a much
00:52:38.920more sophisticated take on it than that. And it's not because I don't think that, you know,
00:52:45.620communities that have lived in the Arctic long term will, you know, vanish or, you know, cease
00:52:51.960to be. I think that, you know, one of the things that's very clear from talking with, you know,
00:52:58.140Yupikra, Nupiakra, Chukchi communities is that the, the kind of trials that climate change is
00:53:03.800slinging at the Arctic are an accelerated and very broad scale version of a kind of change
00:53:10.920that the last 200 years has had a plenty. Um, and, you know, starting with commercial whaling,
00:53:16.940which kind of rewrote the ocean ecosystems for a time, um, and kind of culminating in the oil
00:53:23.780rush that, you know, has come in the 20th century. So it's not that, it's not that societies won't
00:53:31.520have the capacity to adapt. It's not, you know, I think there's a way in which sometimes change
00:53:36.720in the Arctic is reported with this kind of breathless, you know, everyone is, everything
00:53:41.300is going to vanish way that I think has deep colonial roots. I think what terrifies me is
00:53:48.560that the capacity for people who live in the Arctic now to say, you know, this is how we
00:53:59.180want to manage the increase in shipping, or this is how we envision our lives in an ice-free summer
00:54:07.780hasn't actually improved all that much over the span of history I've been looking at.
00:54:13.460I think there is, particularly in the United States, more capacity for, you know, the Inupiaq or the Gwich'in or different indigenous nations to kind of assert what it is that they want and how they want to live.
00:54:27.420But it's not the deciding factor still very often.
00:54:31.620It's the federal government or just the kind of, you know, aggregate accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is making those choices.
00:54:41.200Um, and it's the kind of lack of political situatedness of these decisions in the place
00:54:49.000where they matter most, um, that I find really concerning that, you know, it's Moscow that's
00:54:53.980going to be making decisions about shipping through the Bering Strait, not people living