In the Land of Reindeer

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, caribou, and salmon have helped make history—and in turn, how people have changed how they value and relate to creatures finned and furred.

From shifts in the culture of whales to how reindeer flummoxed Soviet plans and dogs’s emotions mattered to the British Empire, each essay is a journey into how paying attention to the environment and the animals within it helps us better understand history, the nature of change, and our place in the world.

Writer and reader Bathsheba Demuth Producer: Natalie Steed A Rhubarb Rhubarb Production for BBC Radio 3