In tones not strident or shrill, an alum and award-winning author encourages people across the political spectrum to listen to what oceans, wetlands, rivers and rainfall are telling us about our planet.

by Barbara Drake (MFA ’04)

Native Floridian Cynthia Barnett vividly recalls the magic of collecting seashells as a child, combing the beaches with her two grandmothers.

“When I showed them even the tiniest coquina, they’d act like I’d found Blackbeard’s treasure,” she recalls. “We’d listen to the conchs and try to hear the sea.”

Now an award-winning author and, since 2016, Environmental Journalist in Residence at UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, Barnett (BSJ ’89, MA ’03) is still fascinated by seashells — and intent on listening to the urgent messages echoing in their beautiful, but increasingly fragile, forms.

She shares those messages in her latest book, “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans” (2021). Weaving cultural history and science, Barnett traces humanity’s long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the animals that make them, marine mollusks.

“Seashells were money before coin, jewelry before gems, art before canvas,” she writes, transporting readers to the pre-Columbian Americas, where indigenous peoples created shell-based monetary systems and extensive trade routes. The Calusa people of Florida built great “cities of shell,” most since flattened for roads and farms.

Even after modern coinage replaced shells as currency, the human passion for seashells as coveted objects lived on. It reignited in late-17th-century Europe as “conchylomania” (shell-collecting madness), when the Dutch East India Company began returning from Indonesia with shells that no westerner had ever seen before. Collectors spent exorbitant sums for rare specimens, a commodification of seashells and other natural resources that persists to this day.

But if we today are content merely to admire the loveliness of a queen conch or a lightning whelk — or the ocean itself — Barnett warns, we overlook the dire messages seashells are now sending. Some shells are becoming dangerously thin from the increasing acidification of our oceans. Others are vanishing due to habitat loss, pollution and other factors.

It is a complex environmental crisis that demands action, and we all must pitch in, says Barnett. She first began thinking about seashells as harbingers for the plight of the oceans after visiting the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, on Sanibel Island, in 2015. The museum’s science director and curator, José Leal, explained how climate change was making it more difficult for some mollusks to build their shells.

“When I first learned that some of the tiniest shells are beginning to dissolve in the acidifying sea — that’s what led me to write this book,” she said in a recent interview.

At the time of her visit, a survey of museum visitors revealed 90% of respondents didn’t know that a shell is made by a living animal. That statistic and the disconnect it revealed “floored” Barnett.

“Many people thought they were some sort of rock or stone,” she said. “I started thinking what a perfect metaphor that is for the ocean itself. We’ve loved seashells for their beautiful exteriors, while ignoring the fascinating animals that build the shells. Similarly, we’ve loved the oceans like a postcard — as an idyllic backdrop of life, rather than the very source of life.

“You look at this huge, beautiful sea, and you don’t understand what’s happening beneath the waves.”

New York Yankees and Florida Farmers

Barnett’s path to becoming an environmental writer began with her Florida childhood. She spent her earliest years in LaBelle, a small inland community in southwest Florida. Her paternal grandfather, Ovid Barnett, farmed watermelon and bell pepper there. Her mother’s father, Karl Drews, was a Major League Baseball pitcher from New York who moved his family to southeast Florida in 1951 after several trips down for spring training.

Photo courtesy Cynthia BarnettBorn in Staten Island, Barnett’s grandfather, Karl Drews, was a Major League pitcher who played for the New York Yankees, St. Louis Browns, Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Redlegs. When Drews brought his family to Florida for spring training in 1951, his wife, Nancy, fell in love with the climate and refused to leave.

“My grandparents had promised their families they would return to Staten Island after spring training, but my grandmother (Nancy) refused — she fell in love with the climate and the wilds of Florida,” she explained.

Barnett grew up in Florida and California, and her families’ contrasting backgrounds would enrich her as a writer and as a unifying voice for the environment, she said.

“I have this duality that helps me understand different perspectives,” she said. “If you ask me about climate skeptics, some of my insights come from my own family.”

“On my Barnett side, I’m a fifth-generation Floridian, and my children are sixth generation, and we really feel and appreciate that Florida heritage,” she explained. “The Barnetts know the water and land very well because they have been farming it for a long time. On my mom’s side, the Drews, they were more urban and Yankees — literally my grandfather pitched for the New York Yankees — and I am infused with that heritage as well.

“What the two families had in common was their love for nature.”

Revisiting the Source

Like many in her profession, Barnett’s “depths of feeling” about injustices in the world led her to major in journalism at UF, she said. After earning her bachelor’s degree in 1989, she embarked on a 25-year-long career as a journalist, becoming an editor at Florida Trend magazine and later writing for National Geographic magazine, The Atlantic and other national publications.

Barnett said returning to UF in the early 2000s to earn a master’s degree in American history was key to her becoming an author. At the time, UF had no degree program or faculty in environmental history, her desired area of study, so she reached out to then-Provost David Colburn, a presidential historian with a special interest in Florida history.

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Colburn forged a curriculum expressly for Barnett, creating independent study courses based on seminal works about the environment by trailblazers such as Rachel Carson and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. When Colburn died in 2019, Barnett went searching in her computer files to write her former mentor’s obituary and gained a newfound appreciation for his guidance.

“I found the list of books Dr. Colburn had me read the first semester, and it just makes me cry because Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ [1962] was on the list, and I had never read her as an undergrad,” remembered Barnett. “Looking back, I’m so moved because he wasn’t a blazing environmentalist, it wasn’t what he studied, but he saw my keen interest in the topic, knew what I needed to read and pointed me in the right direction.

She deepened her knowledge by spending 2004 and 2005 as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, researching freshwater history and science.

Barnett’s UF master’s thesis became her first book, “Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.” (2007), which won the gold medal for best nonfiction in the Florida Book Awards and was named by The St. Petersburg Times (now The Tampa Bay Times) as one of the top 10 books every Floridian should read.

“In the days before the internet,” the Times said, “books like Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ ‘River of Grass’ [1947] were groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice. ‘Mirage’ is such a book.”

“Mirage” was followed “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis” (2011) and “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History” (2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing.

Finding “The Caring Middle”

All those books, as well as her fourth, “The Sound of the Sea,” reflect Barnett’s reverence for nature and her commitment to inspiring readers to save and preserve it. Her author persona is less strident activist and more, as one reviewer put it, “part journalist, part mom, part historian and part optimist” (many readers would add “part poet” to that description).

Anecdotes about her own family populate her chapters, creating an intimate connection with the reader that transcends the dry or lofty tone of some science writing. Her knack for building bridges also informs her work at UF, where she has taught environmental journalism since 2015 and organizes the annual Climate Communications Summit with UF’s Carolyn Cox, her frequent collaborator at the Florida Climate Institute.

She credits Diane McFarlin (BSJ ’76), the recently retired dean of the journalism college, for her return to UF. “Her whole career — she was an editor at Florida newspapers before she became dean of the college — she was a champion of environmental reporting,” Barnett says. “Part of that is because her [newspaper] audiences cared so much about it. She understood the importance of water and climate and place to Floridians.”

Photo courtesy Cynthia BarnettBarnett’s water adventures with her daughter and son are part of her books.

“I love teaching, and the students are doing amazing work,” she added. “They are really inspired to work on climate change.”

In training the next generation of environmental journalists, Barnett goes back to her early family experience of straddling two cultures and finding common ground. She urges students to avoid targeting conservation-minded audiences exclusively and to reach instead for what she calls “the Caring Middle.” That begins with writers being mindful of their word choices.

“I usually don’t use the word ‘climate deniers,’” she said. “There is a difference between these cynical, well-funded doubt campaigns (like those with cigarettes and DDT) that have been part of our world for a century … and the skepticism of people who, unfortunately, often see things through a political lens. And that is what bothers me. I wish water and climate hadn’t been politicized to the extent they have been.”

“I see my work as helping people come together around the values we all share,” she stressed, “like clean and abundant water, healthy ecosystems, a beautiful Florida — all those things we can come together around for the future.”

It is a practical vision of unity that harkens back to Barnett’s childhood strolls on the beach with her two grandmothers: one rural, one urban, one longtime Floridian, one Yankee newcomer.

Two very different women, but both dedicated to teaching the next generation to value and care for the natural world — right down to the tiniest coquina.