Factually! with Adam Conover - Seashells Contain an Ocean with Cynthia Barnett

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

Seashells may seem like a small topic for a book, or a podcast. But when we look into them deeply, we find that they reveal startling truths about our oceans, our planet, and ourselves. This week Cynthia Barnett joins Adam to talk about the surprising history of seashells and her new book The Sound of The Sea. You can check out her book at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. So wonderful to have you listening to the show. Once again, we're happy to have you here as we dive into some of the weirdest and wildest reaches of human knowledge with some of the smartest and most fascinating experts on the planet. Let's talk about the show today. You know, one of the coolest things about nature is that you can look at any piece of it and from that little piece, you can begin to understand the entire world. The web of interconnections on Earth is so broad and so deep that from one little facet, you can build a model of every facet of reality.

And case in point, today, we're going to be talking to an author who wrote a book about seashells. point. Today, we're going to be talking to an author who wrote a book about seashells. And I know you're thinking, Adam, come on, you actually expect me to listen to you talk about seashells for a full hour. And guess what? Yes, you are. And you are going to fucking love it because seashells are quite literally our universe in microcosm. See, they're not only incredibly beautiful natural objects, each with a unique and interesting story of the creature behind it. They've also influenced human society for ages, touching everything from currency to oil extraction. And finally, they're a metaphor for our relationship with the natural world.

Mollusks build these structures, build these seashells to live in, to protect them, just as people build structures for us. And just like the creatures who live in those seashells, we often end up leaving our homes behind as the only record of our existence. Once you start looking at these things,

I'm serious. Okay, you know that scene in Uncut Gems where they like push into the diamond and like the stars fly by and he connects to a world miles away. That is what you will feel like seashells are like when you are done listening to this interview. It will blow your mind with the vastness of the smallest things imaginable. So get ready for seashells. My guest today is Cynthia Barnett, author most recently of The Sound of the

Sea, Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans. And as always, if you want to pick up a copy of this incredible book, you can get it at our special bookstore at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you buy a book there, you will be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore. Without further ado, please welcome the wonderful Cynthia Barnett. Cynthia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me on. I'm really excited to be on the show. So you have written a book about seashells. How did you come to this topic, which might not be a lot of people's first choice for a book? It's a little, it's a very specific topic. What made you come to it?

Oh, it's interesting that you think it's specific because to me, it's the whole, it's the whole world. It's a real, it's a real metaphor for what's happening to the world. And I'll, I'll tell you how I got started. I got started working on The Sound of the Sea after hearing a statistic that absolutely floored me. I was at a sweet little seashell museum on Sanibel Island in Florida called the Bailey Matthews National Shell Museum. And I had given a talk there about one of my previous books. And I was out to dinner with the director and I learned that they had surveyed visitors, many of them tourists visiting Florida with their children, to find out how much they already knew about seashells. And some 90% of respondents did not know that a seashell

is made by a living animal. Most people thought that they were some kind of rock or stone. And it really, I just couldn't stop thinking about that. And especially children not knowing that a seashell is made by an animal. And it just, I got to thinking about it and i actually started thinking about what a perfect metaphor it is for the ocean itself because we've loved seashells for their beautiful exterior while ignoring these fascinating animals that build the shells and in that same way, we love the oceans like this postcard, right? It's like a, we love the oceans like a picture postcard or an idyllic backdrop to life rather than the very source of life. And so I started to think of seashells as this great metaphor for helping

people understand the life inside. That is what's happening inside the ocean, sort of what we've wrought in the oceans, because the sea is just so huge and so beautiful that it's hard to understand the impact we're having beneath the waves on things like water quality and now, you know, especially ocean chemistry, which you can't see with your eyes, but is happening and is pretty devastating. Well, what an incredible answer to my first question. I'm like, so why a book about seashells? You're like, well, let's go from this very small thing to an entire metaphor for the world and our relationship with it. I'm sold. I'm sold immediately by that description. It's really the way I think about seashells and the other metaphor, which I don't write about in

the book, but which was in the back of my mind is this metaphor of home, right? If you think of seashells as a home to an animal that builds the seashell, it's also a metaphor for our home, this earth. And so the other thing that was in my mind in the years that it took me to do this is the metaphor of home. So it's kind of funny to me to hear you say, oh, it's just such a small little thing because to me, a shell is the metaphor of home. So it's kind of funny to me to hear you say, oh, it's just such a small little thing, because to me, a shell is the world. As it should be if you're going to write a book about it. As it absolutely should be. Well, I am kind of, you know, I am kind of floored by your statement about people not realizing that seashells are made by animals, because I learned this as a kid. My parents were both biologists. And so I was fortunate to be able to, you know,

swim in such waters as a young kid. But it's true that I don't think about that much anymore, that when I'm walking on a beach and, you know, many beaches are just littered with seashells. In fact, I grew up on the North Shore of long island which um is a very rocky coast and has a lot there's just you know shells and rocks it's not a lot of sand um and so you know i'll walk along a beach and walk past seashells and not really consider the fact that hold on a second like animals are making these things that is kind of a baffling truth to to remind myself of it it's one of those things that makes earth sort of start to seem alien uh that it's it's kind of a fantastical idea that that the our shores are littered with like the empty homes of sea creatures yeah that

just just tell me more about where they, where seashells come from. How are they made? What are they used for by these animals? Yeah, sure. So that word alien is interesting, isn't it? Because sometimes their eyes, sometimes there, there's so many different mollusks that make marine shells that it's hard to generalize them but some of them have eyes on the end of tentacles that kind of go in crazy directions like an alien so that's kind of a cool word to use and it's also illustrative I think of what you're saying we we don't necessarily think about these animals and we don't feel the need to save them, right?

Because they don't have big human eyes like a sea turtle or, you know, a Florida panther. There are so many animals that are really charismatic. And part of what's charismatic about them is that they have these big human eyes. And we can get into that later, like how we don't think about saving the animals that we don't connect with in that way. But to answer your question about what, you know, who makes the seashells. Yeah, what are these things? Yeah, so these are the mollusks. And specifically, so mollusks are the second largest group of animals in the sea and on the land after the arthropods, which include insects on land and crabs in the ocean. land and crabs in the ocean. So I'm writing specifically about marine mollusks, the animals that build what we sometimes call sea snails or shellfish. So they build shells, they build their

shells using minerals from the surrounding seawater. So those that build a spiral shell like a conch or a whelk are called the gastropods. And the paired shells like a clam are the bivalves. And there are other mollusks, but those are the two main ones that we know and that I write about. And again, my idea is that they're just so gorgeous. I think seashells are some of the most beloved objects in nature, and I know they're some of the most collected natural objects. So my idea was that by writing about seashells and the animals that make them, I might be able to draw new audiences to environmental stories. So I'm an environmental journalist and I teach environmental journalism.

And I think a lot about what might draw a new audience or a cynical audience to the story of what's happening to the planet. And that's how I came to write about these animals. And that's how I came to write about these animals. But anyway, they build shells. The marine mollusk build shells by drawing minerals from the surrounding seawater, primarily calcium carbonate. And they build their shells layer by layer as they grow. So the older they get, the more layers of shell they build. Cool. They're literally just sucking in minerals from the medium in which they live and turning it into like this. Turning it into beauty. They're turning it into a hard shell, but they're also

turning it into beauty. And another way I thought about this is that they're also turning carbon they're constantly turning carbon into beauty and that's another neat thing about seashells in our time they're upcycling just like we should be upcycling right they are taking they're taking uh the carbon you know carbon dioxide that's harmful when it when it when there's too much in the ocean they're taking uh the carbon you know carbon dioxide that's harmful when it when it when there's too much in the ocean they're drawing out the carbon the calcium carbonate and turning it into beauty and it also that means the carbon stays locked up in the shell instead of being out there in the atmosphere and in fact the oceans have absorbed like, I think, 90 percent of the carbon dioxide, the extra carbon dioxide we've put out into the world. So that's sort of another thing that makes these animals really important. draws us to these objects is that it is, there's a strange commonality between what they do and what we do as people that, you know, we also build structures for ourselves. We also eventually

outgrow or abandon them. And, you know, we pull things from our surrounding environment to, to build a structure. And obviously we do it for different reasons. It's, the structure structures we build are very, very different. But there's like a certain I don't know, there's a we see ourselves in them in a way that we don't with a lot of other things that live in the sea. I don't have a lot of else in common with a tuna, but I do feel like I understand a gastropod in this way. That's a cool idea. I haven't thought of it that way. And I love that statement. I didn't think of that we relate to them in building a structure, but the way I thought about it was that we, our structures themselves are often built of their bodies. And the great example of that,

often built of their bodies. And the great example of that, I mean, basically we walk on a world of shell, right? So all the carbonate remains of all the calcified life that has ever lived is underfoot at any given time. So it makes up the limestone aquifers that hold our water. It's at the top of mountains. It's deep in the ocean. But specifically what I thought about and what I wrote about is that the limestone, especially like here in the United States, the limestone that made the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial and the Empire State Building, they all owe the power of the building to these small soft fragile creatures and i think that's such a cool idea so yeah you related to to them building them being builders and i was sort of relating to them as home and then there's this other really cool reality that we literally use their use their shells and these and these super powerful buildings and they're and they're fragile creatures so that's kind of a neat dichotomy uh so wait tell me about this that i i'm missing something quarried limestone is made by, it was originally put down by sea creatures that at one time lived in the former seas that covered, for example, the United States. So when we cut limestone slabs or limestone

blocks, we are essentially cutting through those animals. So for example, I'll give you one example. If you look at the walls of Rockefeller Center, they look, when you're at a distance, they look creamy smooth. But if you get up really close, you see these incredible coils and spirals, fans and curlicues, and they're like embedded in the limestone. And that limestone was quarried in Indiana. And that limestone was quarried in Indiana. So it essentially formed from denizens of the shallow sea that covered the Midwest 300 million years ago. So again, in that neat way, they're homes in all kinds of fabulous ways. Wow. See, this is why we brought you on the show, because we had a sneaking

suspicion that you would blow my mind with, again, seems like a simple topic. We're 13 minutes into the interview or so. And like, what's so great about seashells? Well, the Empire State Building is built out of them. We literally are constructing our homes and our buildings out of these structure made out of these tiny, tiny little animals. That's incredible. That's absolutely incredible to think about. I will say, I do want to say something about cement and the building process. building process. So, and the other thing I think about a lot is the fact that marine life is reincarnated in the sculptures of ancient gods, right? So if you're in Italy and you see some of this incredible limestone and you see it carved into, you know, the David or whatever it is,

that's actually all these other millions of lives. And that's a cool thing to think about. But I want to mention something a little more serious, which is that we turn limestone now into cement, which is one of the largest manufacturing endeavors in the world. And it's also one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide. So part of living differently needs to be more of the, you know, the Moleskine upcycling rather than constantly churning up and extracting new parts of the earth to make something big, right? The idea is to, like I said, upcycle is the best way i could think of to put it but even ancient ancient people burn seashells to make uh slaked lime which is one of

the first manufactured chemicals and and now of course we we have a major, major cement industry. So yeah, it's all very wild and fascinating. Well, let's talk about some specific shells. I know that you talk about some in the book, some that are particularly fascinating. Hit me with one. Tell me about one of these creatures and how they live. Yeah. So I decided to build the book around 12 really iconic seashells. So I actually made a conscious decision at some point not to write about oysters or eating clams because these animals have had entire books written about them already. People have written entire books. Like Rowan Jacobson has written wonderful books about oysters. And Mark Kurlansky has.

A friend of mine wrote an entire book just about razor clams. So I devoted a chapter to an animal called the money cowry. And this is, so a cowrie is a little humped shell. They're gorgeous. They're the most collected seashells in human history. In fact, there was a seashell collection found in the ruins of Pompeii, and many of those shells were different kinds of cowries.

So people love cowries, but the money cowry is especially important to humanity because it was the first global money. So the first global money was not cryptocurrency. It was a little white shell called a money cowry and it's it's a funny story in some ways and it's also a terribly serious story because money cowries actually ended up purchasing a third of the enslaved africans that were forced to the americas so it's this incredible trans-global story. Money cowries traded, you know, just like coin, but more widely than coin for a thousand years around the world. And they were all harvested in the Maldives. So they're prolific in the Maldives. And I actually went to the Maldives and I've now seen beautiful little money cowries like living on the reef and what they actually do. And that to me is fascinating.

To me, it's fascinating to hold this ancient money in your hand. And on one hand, and then on the other hand, to see the living animal on the reef is just completely wild. It's got these little tentacles. It's just this gentle, cute little algae eater, and it scoots along. And these things were money for a thousand years. So when I say the book is about listening, when I set out, as I mentioned, I kind of set out to listen to seashells and listen to what they're saying about nature and the world around us. But they actually turned out to have much more to say about people. And so I ended up following the trail, the unlikely route of the money cowries from the Maldives to West Africa.

And I end the book in West Africa kind of reflecting on money and capital and what's really important and what the shells ended up telling me. And so one of the themes is that theme of justice that we won't solve. We won't really solve the environmental problems without putting people at the center and also solving a lot of these human problems that we have. So again, that was just a cool thing to be able to use a humble little animal on a reef to be able to extrapolate about something much bigger. And again, with my hope being that people will listen to seashells, that we've always listened to seashells. And it's just astonishing how often they led to truth. And in earlier times, truth and in earlier times seashells on mountaintops help help tell scientists about the rising and falling seas the fact that the sea had once covered the land um seashell seashell fossils in rock seashell fossils of animals that no longer live, like the ammonites, those told scientists about extinction

and geologic change. So, you know, I'm not just making it up. If we listen to seashells, they actually do tell us something about the world around us, and they always have. Well, they tell us something about ourselves yeah it's almost a it's almost a psychedelic science fiction idea that you've described about the money calorie like this sounds like it's out of dune or something like that where there's this little creature in a reef in one little area of the world and they're harvested and they're like leftover exoskeletons are somehow become a global currency that is ends up being used for such evil. Yeah. I mean, honestly, a science fiction writer would be proud to come up with an idea like that and to send a book around it.

Right. I guess it's no crazier than using paper as money. Right. I guess it's no crazier than using paper as money. They were almost impossible to counterfeit because they're so unusual. They're really gorgeous. I think I have one I underneath they have a slit that's a bit toothy. So it'd be impossible to forge it. But the other thing about them is that they're quite uniform in the way that the animal makes it. So that made it quite easy to count. So you could put it in a bag. You could fill a certain bag and know how much money you had. So it just because of the physical properties of it, the uniformity of it, you could you could like have different ways to catalog that.

I bet you could put them on a string or something like that. You could like put them put them in a find a way to bundle them up. And they were uncounterfeitable. And they're also beautiful and precious and have some amount of scarcity because they have to be harvested. Yes, scarcity is a great point, and I did find this book in many different ways. I'm sure economists know this better, but the fact that because they came from the Maldives, they were considered more precious in Africa because they were believed scarce. The problem was that they actually weren't scarce. And so later,

it really harmed the African economy that they had relied on these seashells as currency. But generally, the farther you get from an object, the greater value it has in trade. So, yeah, that was was interesting to learn about the economics of ancient global money. Well, I want to hear more of these stories, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Cynthia Barnett. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Cynthia Barnett. Look, I have on my list of questions here, I want to hear more seashell stories.

I have on my list of questions that my producer Sam put together, a couple more. I want you to pick the coolest one to tell me the story of he said he told me i should ask you about the chambered nautilus the lightning whelk and the queen conch these are all first of all incredible names like these the the beautiful names i i feel like each of these must have a fascinating story behind them. Which one should we talk about? I'll tell you about my favorite shell, which is the lightning whelk. And Adam, I should ask you, do you have a favorite seashell from when you were a kid? Like in Long Beach? Do you remember something? Long Island.

I'm sorry, Long Island. A favorite shell. Oh, my God. This is you're like cutting to the core of me. Favorite shell. Oh, my God. This is you're like cutting to the core of me. And, you know, I feel like the shells that I had the closest relationship with as a kid were muscle shells. There were muscle shells all over Long Island. Yes. And I just it was, you know, in terms of when you're a kid and you're doing tactile play, I feel like I spent a lot of time with them. I wouldn't, that's the, they're the first one that I think of and they feel very homey to me, even though they're like beyond common on Long Island.

Oh, but they're so beautiful. I completely understand that. And they're so, they're so sleek and they have a great feel to them and there's something satisfying about holding them so i guess out of the three you threw out i will talk a little bit about the lightning welk because that's my favorite that's my favorite shell and i it's interesting i i i the way you know i am not a total shell aficionado or collector is that I have a favorite shell. I followed around shell collectors for a couple of years as I was working on this. They call themselves conchologists and they're really rabid about shells and they know everything

about shells and the animals that make them they're actually really helpful to scientists because they know so much about the taxonomy of shells and they end up identifying a lot of new creatures but when you ask a conchologist to name their favorite shell they can't do it because their mind is just blown and it's like it's like asking a parent about their favorite kid. So they don't, they don't have a favorite shell, but they always remember their first shell. And it's kind of like asking an alcoholic about their first drink. Like it is so vivid and they'll tell you exactly how old they were and where they were and what it felt like. So that's how you know I'm not a serious collector. I'm just a journalist who I love. I love shells. I grew up in Florida and

California and I always loved the beach and loved seashells. So my favorite shell is a lightning whelk that is fairly common in the Gulf of Mexico and also partway up the Atlantic Eastern seaboard. And what is so special about it, so when you're holding a shell up, the little pointy part at the top is called the apex. That's where the mollusk started when it was a little tiny baby that's where it started to wind its shell around and so the little tiny point at the top is always the oldest part of the shell so if you hold the shell in front of you with that at the top almost all shells will open on the right hand side but a lightning whelk opens on the left it's it the the animal winds it in the opposite direction of almost every other shell and what's so cool about that is that the native american people

were crazy about lightning whelks so here in florida there was a an indigenous tribe called the calusa who actually they built these incredible cities of shell in southwest Florida. And they built these huge structures on top of shell mounds. They had ports. They just had this incredible shell world in southwest Florida. incredible shell world in Southwest Florida. And it was all raised in the late 19th and early 20th century for highways and farms and other uses. But the most commonly used shell among their tools and their building materials by far was the lightning whelk. And the fascinating thing about that, I know you know about Cahokia, where modern day St. Louis is now. Many, many shells are also found at Cahokia. And by far,

the most common shell found in the remnants of Cahokia is also the lightning well, even though they came from, they had to have come from so far away. So far inland in the Gulf of Mexico, it is so far inland. And these things are all over Cahokia. They're in,

they're in beads, they're in burials. They're in these special cups that the Cahokia people use to drink their special black tea, which was also the case here in the Southeast. So lightning whelks were extraordinarily important to an earlier people. And so I just love them because they're so beautiful. They look like a conch, but they're a little bit more slender. And they're called lightning whelks because they have these really subtle and incredibly dramatic. Well, it sounds weird that they're both subtle and dramatic, but they really are. They're a little pale, but they have dramatic angles.

And they do look like just lightning strikes coming down the side i'm looking at a picture down the side of the shell it's like a strike of lightning yes a vertical line yes oh yeah exactly exactly yeah so um there there are many many fascinating stories to tell about the lightning welks and they and they you know many of those stories involve native american people who who revered them and uh some of the archaeologists i interviewed for the lightning whelk chapter think it has it may have some spiritual connection for them that is based on the leftward spiral and so that you you know, that's just a lovely, that's a lovely thing to think about.

That's something about the fact that this species spiraled the other way was meaningful. Yeah. Why do they spiral the other? What is the biological reason that they would spiral the opposite way from every other creature? So one of the evolutionary biologists I interview for this book is a fascinating fellow who you would love to have him on for a whole hour. His name is Gary Vermeer, and he is at University of California at Davis. Davis, and he is blind. And the way he fell in love with seashells was that he was in fourth grade in New Jersey, and his teacher had been down to Sanibel Island on vacation and brought back a trove of seashells. One of them was a lightning whelk. And she brought them back,

and she set up a shell display for her students. And when he was a little boy, he wandered over to this display and he just couldn't believe it. He felt these shells and he felt beauty like he could never imagine. And I love talking to him about shells because he describes them in what seemed to me like visual terms of beauty, but it's all about his having spent a lifetime feeling shells. And so one of these shells that he had been connected with since fourth grade was the lightning whelk. And he is well known for his theory of why Mala spilled shells. It has to do with an evolutionary arms race.

So as they evolved, they began by building pretty simple, bulky shells. But over time, as fish developed bigger teeth and stronger jaws, and as crabs developed tougher pinchers, the seashells became more and more elaborate, like thicker and all these spines and spikes and things to foil enemies. So his theory is that the lightning whelk may have spiraled left to avoid a particular crab that has a left-handed pincher. Wow.

But it can't explain everything because there are other left-handed shells in other parts of the world where no left-pincher crabs live. It's all pretty complex, but it's kind of cool. And it probably has to do with an enemy. I could tell you the time that a major oil company was founded out of a teeny tiny seashell shop in the East end of London. Yeah, sure. Is that Shell Oil? Yes. Okay, good guess on my part. Yeah, so I think this is a little known story. And to me, it's a fascinating and poignant story because it will get us back around to climate change and sort of what's happening to the earth. So, Shell Oil's history indeed dates

to the early 19th century and a Jewish curio shop owner in the east end of London named Marcus Samuel. So, he imported tropical seashells. There were various times in human history where there was kind of a madness for seashells and the Victorians, the Victorians were just crazy about seashells. Oh my God. The Victorians did this with so many things. Like they would find out about something and they were like, oh my God, we must have more of it. And they just go crazy. There's so many stories like this. And I will say that Queen Victoria is pretty important because she was crazy for seashells and actually the reason that Queen

Conks are named, Queen Conks has to do with Queen Victoria and her love for those pink shells which were actually imported from the Bahamas to London to make her cameos and to for these these they were called ladies work

Victorian women would do all kinds of shell crafts but anyway Marcus Samuel catered to this shell craze like in the 1830s and so he has this tiny little curio shop. He's importing shells from the tropics. And he gets particularly involved with Japan, where a lot of really beautiful seashells come from. And he started importing more and more goods from Japan and trading with Japan. And he had really good relationships there. I should also tell you a quick story about him. He came up with the idea to make these little bejeweled shell boxes. Have you ever been to a little shell shop by the sea, and you see these little shell boxes that open up? They look like little jewelry boxes, or they might just hold children's treasures. So he thought of those and he began to sell them in shell gift shops around England. So like in Brighton and places like that. And they were hugely popular. And those little shell boxes actually made the family's fortune. He soon had 40 women in the East End working for him,

making the little shell boxes and other curios. And it was, you know, after the second generation, his son and namesake, Marcus Samuel Jr., he had three sons and they all carried on the family business. And it was his middle son, Marcus Samuel Jr., that was continuing the trade with Japan and other parts of the East. And he ended up figuring out the first oil tanker that could move kerosene through the Suez Canal. And he was in a real head-to-head battle with Rockefeller and Standard Oil. And he ended up winning that battle and founding the Shell Oil Company. He helped design the first big oil tanker through the canal. And he called it the Murex which is another seashell and all the early tankers were named for seashells in his father's honor

and shell oil continues that tradition today there's a there's a tanker now called the Murex that I think ships liquefied natural gas to Asia. But I want to quickly finish this story with something really poignant that I know even since the book was finished. A couple of months ago, I saw a study and I just had to call the researcher. His name is Paolo Albano. He's at the University of Vienna. And he was researching mollusk populations in the Mediterranean to see how they were responding to warming. Because the Mediterranean, this spot he was analyzing, is one of the warmest spots in the world. And he found a devastating die-off of mollusks in this area right along the Mediterranean coast where so much of this book takes place earlier.

And the single most devastating die-off was of a very common mollusk and that mollusk is the murex the team in fact didn't find a single living murex so i just find it so poignant and ironic that you know the same animal that was loved by the the the man who founded the company that became Shell Oil, who obviously loved seashells. This same animal now is endangered by the very fossil fuels that are made by the company. Yeah. Wow. That's an incredible full circle for that story to come and an incredibly sad one. I just looked up a

picture of the Murex. They're beautiful shells. Oh, they're beautiful. A lot of people don't like them because they, uh, they're predators of oysters. So they're also called oyster drills and they will, they will glom onto an oyster reef and they can just wipe out an oyster reef. So, glom onto an oyster reef and they can just wipe out an oyster reef. So I write about them. I write about the impact. I also write about the impact of plastics on these animals. You can find plastic in every mollusk in the sea. I mean, everywhere scientists are looking for plastics, they are finding them, finding plastics. And that includes microfiber plastics in mollusks that are buried like as deep as you can get. And at the farthest poles, the mollusks contain plastics. They also contain chemicals, including the chemicals that are put on ship hulls to keep barnacles off.

So I wrote a lot about Murex and what's happening with Murex. And one thing I noticed is that people were very late to respond to anything happening to Murex because they were kind of happy to see the oyster predator wiped out. But now... We're the oyster predator. We're eating the oysters. We're eating the oysters. We are eating the oysters. We're mad because we're competing with the Murex to kill the oysters.

But now that acidification and warming is obviously having an effect on so many sea creatures, I think people are becoming more knowledgeable about all of that. But again, I'm always thinking about my audience and how to draw broader readers. And I don't want to write for the choir. I feel that environmental writers are too often writing for each other or writing for the environmental audience or people who already care about all this stuff. And I really want to reach a different audience, an audience I think of as the caring middle, like people who will care and do care once they know something.

And so my hope is that seashells might reach them in a way that other wonkier things wouldn't reach them. Well, I very much hope you've reached some of those folks in this podcast. You've certainly reached me now that you've that you've reached us. What do we what do we do with our new understanding of of seashells? I think that one thing they speak to is the importance of nature based solutions like we were talking about earlier. So, you know, from reefs as coastal barriers, there's a lot of research about how much better living reefs perform in storms and sea rise than these, you know, again, cement barriers that we tend to make as humans. So it's kind of listening to nature and

using things like nature-based solutions for reefs. Seagrass meadows are an important part of this book. A lot of mollusks live in seagrass meadows for a lot of their lives, especially when they're little tiny larvae. And seagrass meadows are super important. They can actually capture more carbon than forests. Project Drawdown found that restoration of coastal wetlands worldwide, if you're counting seagrass and I think mangroves and some other kinds of coastal wetlands, they could store five times as much carbon as tropical forests. And what we tend to do when we build things is rip out. I live in Florida, so that's sort of what I what I've seen over time, right? We rip out the mangroves or we might rip out the seagrass to create a swimming area. I think we're doing it less and less as this awareness builds,

but these are the kinds of things that are really important. And seashells filter water, they clean up the water around them, they're filter feeders. So scientists sometimes call them the liver of our rivers. But I think the big lesson here is living with less. And the lesson lesson of abundance we haven't talked about food but i also i also write about seafood and about aquaculture a couple of these animals are are very much imperiled by by humans just harvesting too many and that includes the queen conchs and the giant clams. But in both cases, aquaculture is having a really promising impact. And so it is possible to save vast swaths of the ocean and grow shellfish and to grow food in a way that's clean.

Like you may know, fish farms often pollute the sea. Shellfish farms really clean up the water around them. So they're part of the solution to what things could look like. And I think too often when we talk about this, and I love the conversation you had with Jacqueline Gill. I thought that was a great conversation. And I think what I've been thinking about a lot with this book is how we define abundance.

Because like when I was a kid, and even when my kids were little, we would go scalloping and we would collect wild scallops and like try to get a bunch for dinner. But now when I go scalloping, I take pictures. I don't actually collect any scallops anymore because of what I know. And so I still have a great time and I have all these great underwater pictures and I still have a lot of fun with my kids. underwater pictures and I still have a lot of fun with my kids. I think we think of like doing less harvesting, putting out less carbon. We're thinking of those as hardships and they're not hardships. We can live with less and live really well. We can live well without burning fossil fuels. We can live well without exploiting fellow people, without over-harvesting seafood. It's a changing ethos. It's a different way

of thinking about things. So it's just like me. And I try to be very honest in this book about the fact that I've always eaten shellfish. I'm not a vegetarian or certainly a vegan, and I eat some shellfish in this book, and I struggle with my consciousness when I do, and I'm sort of really honest about all of that and get to this point of not being preachy or dogmatic, but let's get through this together. How can we live better? How can we define abundance by having clean water and living animals and, you know, a beautiful sea bottom to take photographs of rather than harvesting every

last scallop in the sea which is which is sort of how we've approached the world up to now and it's amazing how you can it's about developing that awareness and that that sense of how all these pieces are interconnected and it's amazing how you have been able to develop that and help me develop it just by looking at again something very small like i said it's you know seashells and I was ribbing you a little bit at the beginning to provoke you into that answer. But, you know, what I said at the beginning of, oh, this is a little bit of a small topic. Right. But to see it flower outwards and connect to everything has been has been so beautiful. Oh, thank you.

It's been beautiful to hear you talk about it. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I really that's really what my hope was. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I really, that's really what my hope was. And it took me, it took me six years like you, when I was first thinking about this, I was like, oh boy, seashells been a bang out my next book in a couple of years. And it was so much more than that, because like you said earlier, they reflected who we are. They have something to say, not just about the world around us, but how we treat other people and sort of everything else. So I'm really glad that that

came across to you. And I hope your listeners will read the book and enjoy it. I'm sure they will. Well, if they want to, folks, the book is called The Sound of the Sea. You can get it, I assume, wherever books are sold at your local bookshop. Or if you want to order it online, go to factuallypod.com slash books. And you'll support not just this show, but your local bookstore when you do so. Cynthia Barnett, thank you so much for being on the show to talk to us about this. Adam, thank you for having me on. It was lovely to talk to you.

Well, thank you again to Cynthia Barnett for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of the book, that URL one more time is factuallypod.com slash books to support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Thank you so much for listening. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, Andrew Carson, our engineer, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode on. You can find me online at AdamConover.net or at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually.