When We Talk About Animals - Ep. 43 - Cynthia Barnett on our world of seashells

In her magnificent new book, *The Sound of the Sea*, journalist Cynthia Barnett explores the epic and often overlooked history of humanity’s relationship with seashells and the marine mollusks who make them. “This book is about seeing what has gone unseen,” she writes. “The life inside the shell; the Maldivian queens and others left out of history books; the connections between the human condition and that of the sea. Just as we’ve loved seashells for the gorgeous exterior rather than the animals that build them, we’ve loved the oceans as a beautiful backdrop of life rather than the very source.” Photo by Aaron Daye.

As kids, we learn that if you place a shell against your ear, it becomes an auditory portal to the ocean. It’s a powerful illusion as, merged with your ear, the shell creates an echo chamber of noises that transports us to breaking waves and sea breezes, creating a moment of intimacy and wonder between us and the natural world. Much as shells have done throughout human history, as journalist Cynthia Barnett writes in her exquisite new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. Since the dawn of humanity, our history has been inextricably tied to the pearlescent, the ribbed, the spiraling, the speckled, and the iridescent calcium carbonate wonders and the unsung animal artists of the ocean that create, inhabit, and leave them behind.

Shells are the legacies of some of the world’s most inventive and prolific architects: mollusks. Biomineralization, the process by which these animals recycle ocean minerals into hard protective structures, evolved in microorganisms more than 500 million years ago, which eventually gave rise to the tens of thousands of known mollusk species today. These soft-bodied creatures have, quite literally, shaped the world as we know it. As Barnett writes, “We walk on a world of shell.” From limestone aquifers, to chalk, to marble, shells made by soft-bodied animals are the foundation for much of life on earth and are a blueprint for our ever-changing planet, their fossils even documenting Mount Everest’s more humble origins in the seas.

*“Something small reflecting something big – that is what this book is about,”* Barnett tells us. “You mentioned that I teach journalism at the University of Florida, and part of what we teach young journalists is the beauty of finding something tiny to tell a big story. And I’ve been teaching that lesson for my whole career, and now, at this more advanced time in my career, I actually did that in a really huge way.” Photo by Betsy Hansen.

Shells are just as fossilized in the course of human history. Barnett takes us on a global journey across millennia, from the Andes in Peru, where the shell trumpets of Chevin inspired awe and fear over 3,000 years ago, to the “great cities of shell” built by the Calusa people in Florida. Yet, as Barnett documents, shells have also brought out and reflected humanity’s worst impulses, from the luxury dyes produced with murex shells by the hands of enslaved peoples, to the role of cowrie shells in the Atlantic slave trade. They are harbingers of the fate of our seas in the Anthropocene, with mollusk populations around the world decimated by an onslaught of plastics, chemicals, climate change, and over-harvesting. And, from the iridescent shells of giant clams to the medicinal secretions of cone snails, they may hold secrets to our salvation.

Our Neanderthal ancestors collected cockle seashells to use as decorations and jewelry, according to archaeologists. One hundred thousand years later, we’re still picking up seashells and seashells are still teaching us about humanity. Photo of a giant cockle by Cynthia Barnett.

Lettered olives, one of the iconic shells featured in *The Sound of Sea*, are common sights on beaches in southeastern United States. Their “glossy, smooth cylinders” move “with linear purpose through the wet sand like slow motion bullets,” Barnett writes.
Photo by Cynthia Barnett.

A giant clam, *Tridacna maxima*. “With all animals, we don’t need a reason – we don’t need a biofuel plant to come out of a giant clam, or a cancer cure to come out of a cone snail, just to justify their place in nature and in the sea,” Barnett says. “All they do to keep water clean and keep ecosystems healthy and you healthy, to me, that’s enough. We just expect so much of animals. Just by being themselves and enthusing that joy, they are keeping this planet in balance. And I think that’s reason enough to love them and care for them and enjoy them.” Photo by Cynthia Barnett.

Cynthia Barnett is an award-winning author and journalist who has reported on water and climate change around the world. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Orion, and many other publications. She is an Environmental Journalist in Residence at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communication. In this episode, we speak with Barnett about what she describes as our “world of shell,” what shells can tell us about our past, how they have shaped our present, and how the future of shells and their animal makers is tied to our own.