A Conversation with Dr. Bathsheba Demuth: Capitalism, Communism, and Indigenous Communities in a Changing Arctic

In the seventh episode of the Climate History Podcast, Dr. Dagomar Degroot interviews a fast-rising star in the field of environmental history: Dr. Bathsheba Demuth, assistant director of HistoricalClimatology.com and the Climate History Network. Dr. Demuth is an assistant professor at Brown University, where she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She has spent years in the Arctic and published on the environmental history of everything from the gold rush to reindeer and walrus hunting across the far north. Remarkably, she has already won no fewer than twelve fellowships and four awards, despite beginning her position at Brown only last year. She is currently working on a major book, based on her dissertation, that will explore the environmental history of the Bering Strait from the 1840s to the 1980s.

In this episode, recorded at the recent conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Chicago, professors Degroot and Fleming discuss how experiences in Old Crow, Yukon kindled Demuth's interest in environmental history; changing environments and life-ways in the North American Arctic; the history of communism and capitalism across the Bering Strait; and the history of animals in the far north.  

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