Cowries, currencies and climate change

Roy Love offers a history of the world in a single object

Cowrie shells and beads. | Photo: Quinn Dombrowski / flickr CC.

On my desk is a sea shell, a tiger cowrie, no more than three inches long, from the island of Tarawa in the Central Pacific, found while beachcombing some thirty-six years ago. It has attractively dappled colouring on its back, is pristine white around the lips underneath, and has a natural sheen to its overall surface which creates in the whole a natural sculpture, having a beauty exceeding any human artefact. The original resident would have had no awareness of how the attractiveness of its protective shell, intended by nature as camouflage, would lead to a cataclysmic threat to its own survival as a species and to that of those who coveted it for themselves.

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