The Essay: Postcards from the Floating Coast

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Postcards from the Floating Coast: In the Country of Whales

In the Country of Whales

Postcards from the Floating Coast

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Postcards from the Floating Coast, In the Country of Whales

Bathsheba Demuth examines how different Arctic peoples have valued bowhead whales.

Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth heads to the country of bowhead whales to examine how different people in the Arctic have valued these creatures. 

A story of how animal cultures come to matter.   

In this episode Bathsheba Demuth heads to the country of bowhead whales to examine how different people in the Arctic have valued these creatures. She shows how these whales responded to commercial hunting by changing their culture and how their choices pushed into the domain of people.  

Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian and writer who spends much of her time in Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. Her work draws on archives, ecology, and experience of the landscape to ask how places and people change each other.

Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when, at 18, she moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra.

In this essay series she brings us into the intertwined pasts of people and animals of the lands and waters around the Bering Strait - the ice-studded stretch of ocean between Alaska and the Russian far east. 

She shows how dogs, whales, walruses, caribou, and salmon have helped make history—and in turn, how people have changed how they value and relate to creatures finned and furred.

From shifts in the culture of whales to how reindeer flummoxed Soviet plans and dogs’ emotions mattered to the British Empire, each essay is a journey into how paying attention to the environment and the animals within it helps us better understand history, the nature of change, and our place in the world.

Writer and reader: Bathsheba Demuth
Producer: Natalie Steed
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Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Historian Bathsheba Demuth seeks human and animal traces in the Arctic ice and tundra.

Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth travels to the Arctic ice and tundra to show how humans and animals together have shaped its landscape and history.

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