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Podcast: The Essay
Episode: In the Country of Whales
Description: 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...