The Environmental History and Future of the Bering Strait

10/22/19 • 34 min

In the tenth episode of Climate History, our podcast, Emma Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot interview Bathsheba Demuth, assistant professor of environmental history at Brown University. Professor Demuth specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She is a returning guest. In our seventh episode, she introduced the major themes of what was then her doctoral dissertation, and is now her book, "Floating Coast." In this episode, she describes how she wrote the book, and what we can learn from it. She details her experiences in the Arctic, her deep engagement with the community of Old Crow, her thinking about non-human actors in historical stories, her success in writing for the general public, and her views on what the past can reveal about the future of the rapidly-warming Arctic.

Previous Episode

The Past, Present, and Future Significance of Climate Changes Over the Past 2,000 Years

In the ninth episode of Climate History, our podcast, we relaunch with a new co-host: Emma Moesswilde, PhD Student in Environmental History at Georgetown University. For the relaunch, Moesswilde and Dagomar Degroot are joined by Kevin Anchukaitis, associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona and one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists. Anchukaitis uncovers and interprets past climate changes, and he's responsible for some of the most important studies on climatic trends past and present. In this episode, Moesswilde, Degroot, and Anchukaitis discuss how and why Earth's climate has changed over the past two thousand years; how scholars "reconstruct" those changes; how historians can link the changes to the course of human history; why this research matters today; and how to communicate scholarship on past climates to the widest possible audience.

Next Episode

Beyond Academia: Climate Change Storytelling and Activism in a Warming World

In the 11th episode of Climate History, co-hosts Dagomar Degroot and Emma Moesswilde interview Victoria Herrmann, president and managing director of the Arctic Institute and one of Apolitical's top 100 influencers on climate policy. Dr. Herrmann's scholarship has focused on media representations of the Arctic and its peoples. Yet while completing her PhD as a Gates Scholar in the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge University, Herrmann launched several projects aimed at building adaptation to climate change in coastal communities. Her focus has been to connect scholars with stakeholders on the ground, turning abstract knowledge into tangible action. In this interview, we discuss how climate change scholarship can (and perhaps should) inform concrete action, and how action can enrich scholarship. We consider how graduate students can find their public voice, weigh the importance of storytelling for encouraging climate change action, and contemplate sources of hope in a rapidly warming world.