Cynthia Barnett > Quotes

“Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“What’s exceptional about our blue marble is not that we had water. It’s that we held on to it, and that we still do. While the ancient oceans of Venus and Mars vaporized into space, Earth kept its life-giving water. Luckily for us, the forecast called for rain.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Today, at any moment, more water rushes through the atmosphere than flows through all the world's rivers combined.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Ovid recounts Jupiter’s disgust with the evil deeds of humans—their contempt for the gods, their violence, their lust for slaughter. He decides to wipe them out, which disappoints his fellow gods because…who will bring incense to their altars? No worries, Jupiter says, he’ll create another race of beings far superior to the first.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

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

“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

“Any flood would feel like the end of the world if your neighbors drowned and your community washed away. In Mesopotamia when torrential rains hit alongside spring snowmelt, the Tigris and Euphrates would burst their banks, growing the region under hundreds of miles of lakes. Archaeologists say an ancient Sumerian city called Shurrupak (Iraq's Tell Fara) was laid waste by flood nearly 5,000 years ago. A Babylonian version of GILGAMESH mentions Shurrupak by name. It describes a deluge that wipes out mankind, and a pious king called Ziusudra who overhears from a sympathetic god that the great flood is on its way. Ziusudra builds a huge boat and survives.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“On the land, spring rains are the primitive artists, greening hills and valleys and coaxing flowers to vivid bud and bloom. Summer rains are the long-lived masters of color—the steadier they fall on hardwood trees in June, July, and August, the richer reds and yellows ignite the autumn foliage.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“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

“The water vapor accumulated in the upper atmosphere for so long that when the surface finally cooled enough for the rains to touch down, they poured in catastrophic torrents for thousands of years.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Not infrequently in the wide skies over Yuma and other parts of the arid Southwest, residents watch sheets of rain begin to unfurl from auspicious purple storm clouds, backlit by the sun. But the rain stops halfway, hanging mid-horizon like a magician's trick. Known as rain streamers or by their scientific name VIRGA, the half-sheets evaporate into the dry air before the rain can reach the ground.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“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

“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

“Searching in an ancient rain-fed lake in northern India, paleoclimatologists using radiocarbon dating have discovered that 4,100 years ago, the summer monsoons began a rapid decline. They did not return to normal for two centuries.

For an unimaginable two hundred years, the Harappan region saw hardly any rain. Around the same time in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, the three other earliest-known civilizations also were lost to the dry sands of history.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“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

“For the first half-billion years, Earth was a molten inferno some 8,000 degrees Celsius—hotter than today's sun. Scientists call this violent era the Hadean, from the Greek word Hades, or hell. Time and again, the young Earth built up a crust, only to see it incinerated by storms of flaming meteors.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Persecutions reached their peak during the worst years of the climate extremes, in the decades before and after 1600. The crime disappeared from the penal catalogs after the end of the age—when the sun emerged along with more enlightened explanations for the weather. The western coastal fringes of Europe, which enjoyed more temperate weather and less vulnerability to famine, saw far fewer witchcraft accusations. Suspicions were rampant in densely populated Central Europe, which was also hit by the greatest climate extremes. It happened that people who lived with the weakest infrastructure and farmed some of the worst soils also faced the most extreme rains and the harshest winters of the Little Ice Age. Superstition”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History

“Today, McCook's place in aviation history is largely forgotten by Dayton residents, who may know the name only as the city's oldest strip mall, near the original field and now home to a bowling alley and a peep-show theater.”
― Cynthia Barnett, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History