TRANSCRIPT (00:03):
Cynthia Barnett
What captured me early on as a journalist was the topic of water. Every story seemed to come back to water. Part of that was being a journalist here in Florida. And so I think of my books as having being something of the series following the hydrological cycle. So my first book was about Florida Florida’s water history that was called “Mirage, Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S”..
(00:26):
Cynthia Barnett
My second book was a global look at water scarcity and quality issues and more importantly, solutions to water issues. It called for a water ethic for the United States. My third book was a biography of Rain. I’m literally Rain’s biographer. And this book is very special. I was I was casting about to figure out how I would now turn to write about the oceans.
(00:55):
Cynthia Barnett
And I was trying to figure out what that topic should be. We’ve always we’ve always wanted to listen to seashells. And they really are telling us something about what’s happening to the sea and its life. So this book is a way of listening to seashells. And to answer your other question, I think my next book is going to be a global book of aquifers and groundwater.
(01:20):
Cynthia Barnett
And the working title is “The Sea Beneath Us”, which pays homage to Rachel Carson’s “The Sea Around Us”. The way I came to want to write about seashells was a specific statistic I heard that was very disturbing. That came out of the Seashell Museum in Sanibel Island. The Bailey Mathews National Shell Museum had surveyed visitors to find out what they already knew about seashells, and these were mostly tourists visiting Florida with their children.
(01:51):
Cynthia Barnett
And the survey showed that 90% of visitors didn’t know that a seashell was made by a living animal. Most people thought there were some kind of rocks or stones. And I find that so telling of, you know, the state of our disconnection from nature. And it made me really want to tell this story of seashells and more importantly, these, you know, epic animals that make them these soft animals that are the Marine mollusks.
(02:22):
Cynthia Barnett
But I hope that I can help by telling the story of nature’s wonder. I hope that I can help draw people to the story of animals and water and the earth and what’s happening to all life. And I hope, moreover, that I can help people see the connections between our human well-being and the well-being of nature.