My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
This is an extraordinary study about life in and around the strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, home for IƱupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi people and many other lively things, before and after the arrival of Russian and American colonial powers.
I admire the nuanced way in which Demuth exemplifies how capitalist and communist resource management transformed not only human but also animal cultures (whales, for example, strategize against whaling ships).
Along the Bering Strait, through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia, Bathsheba Demuth explores an ecosystem that has long sustained human beings. Yet when Americans and Europeans arrived, the area became the site of an experiment and the modern ideologies of production and consumption, capitalism and communism were subject to the pressures of arctic scarcity.
Demuth draws a vivid portrait of the sweeping effects of turning ecological wealth into economic growth and state power over the past century and a half. More urgent in a warming climate and as weā¦
I love the cold and snow, so itās no surprise that I ended up studying glaciers and ice sheets. I am also a big fan of history and a professor of Environmental Science who teaches climate and climate change to 200+ college students a year. I grew up reading nonfiction, and nothing changedāthatās my genre. Reading about history and how others have experienced our planet, especially far away and unusual places, intrigues me. My passion is communicating science by writing, speaking, and teaching, and these five books Iāve recommended all do an excellent job of making the science and history of Greenland accessible to everyone.
This book had me shivering. Every chapter introduced another character and another set of often frightening but exhilarating arctic adventures spanning more than 100 years.
I found myself imagining what it must have felt like to cross Greenlandās ice on foot or to have spent the winter living in a rat warren of snow caves at the summit of the ice sheet with the Wegner expedition over the winter of 1930-1931.
An excellent read with well-referenced details and history galore. I couldnāt put it down and read the whole book in two nights.
A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change
āJon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.āāElizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prizeāwinning author of The Sixth Extinction
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post ā¢ The Christian Science Monitor ā¢ Library Journal
Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it isā¦
