The Sound of the Sea Quotes

“Only after TBT was found to deform shells and cause reproductive failures in commercial oysters did bans begin, in fits and starts and weak regulations that exempted the largest ships. Not until 2008 did international treaties ban the compound once and for all. In another decade, researchers would find increasing evidence that organotins may threaten human health, too, notably in disrupting hormone and reproductive systems. Mollusks were again prophetic in their burden.”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

“Her most important findings involved the human toil behind the color purple, underscoring its elite status and expense. From the dangerous diving and baiting to the maggots and the terrible stains and odor that would have plagued the dye-makers—likely enslaved people—conspicuous consumption always had a flip side: human suffering and ecological calamity.”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

“Madame Fretageot, the Says, and their New Harmony School came seventy years too soon for the American nature-study movement that swept the country during the rise of the Progressive Era at the turn of the century. Its advocates stressed direct contact with nature as the best foundation for understanding science and natural history. Moreover, if children dug in the soil, studied the seasons, and closely observed the lives of animals—mollusks and their shells, frogs and tadpoles, bird parents raising chicks—they would develop good character and an ethos to care for the world around them. “To”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

“The colonists began to set up academic societies and museums to burnish national identity and their versions of history and scientific prowess. South Carolina colonists established America’s first museum in Charleston in 1773 with “many specimens of natural history,” open only to its members. The colony was by then known for the most sensational fossils yet found in the New World. Enslaved Africans had unearthed mammoth teeth while digging in a swamp near Charleston in 1725, and immediately concurred that they were the grinders of some type of elephant. It would be more than eighty years before Georges Cuvier, Lamarck’s rival at the Paris museum, confirmed that “les nègres” had correctly identified a fossil elephant species before any European naturalist connected extinct mammoths to living elephants.”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

“Seashells were money before coin, jewelry before gems, art before canvas.”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

“We are predators and destroyers but also builders and repairers.”
― Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans