The Essay

A story about how not even superpowers can escape ecological context.In this episode Bathsheba Demuth looks at how reindeer are deeply sensitive to the climate, and how that sensitivity thwarted plans to make them part of capitalist and socialist economies. 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,