In telling snail stories, this book aims to cultivate an appreciation for these animals and the significance of their loss: to draw us into their remarkable miniature worlds, and then out beyond them into an expansive engagement with the many ways in which snails craft and share these worlds with others. This book is about snails’ modes of perceiving and interpreting the world, from their slime-centered navigation to their social and reproductive proclivities; the immense journeys that brought them across oceans to these islands; the histories and ongoing practices of learning and knowledgemaking about our world that they have been part of; their intimate relationships with Kānaka Maoli as expressed in chants, songs, and stories, but also in ongoing struggles for land and culture. In short, it is a book about the world of possibilities and relationships that lies coiled within each of their tiny shells.
Snails are said to be “sentinel species” — those sensitive canary-in-a-coal-mine critters that can give warnings about how the earth is changing if we would only pay attention — and despite the fact that snails worldwide are experiencing a mass extinction event, being “non-charismatic” animals makes it hard to get people to care about their fates. As a self-described “field philosopher”, author Thom van Dooren brings us along as he explores the Hawaiian Islands (once home to upwards of 1000 endemic snail species, today only 300 of those species exist, with just 11 listed as “stable”), and as he shares the science, history, and modern day conservation efforts related to Hawaiian snails, van Dooren makes the case for why we should care about their extinction. A World in a Shell ticks a lot of boxes for me — I loved the accessible science and vivid travel writing; the historical perspective; the focus on animals and indigenous peoples — and while I have little to complain about what van Dooren has included here, I do wish there had been more philosophy from this field philosopher: I ended this book with an even greater appreciation for snails and their ways of being but would still be hard-pressed to explain why they have a right to exist beyond acknowledging that every living thing on earth has a right to exist. Still, I enjoyed what is here very much and join the author in his mournful hope for the snails’ future. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The more I explored the history of shell collecting in Hawai‘i, the more difficult it became to separate it from the larger story of European and American presence in these islands, one in which Hawai‘i today remains a nation under US occupation, subject to the accompanying and ongoing social and cultural processes of settler colonialism.
I suppose it’s not surprising that, as with everywhere else they colonised, the Hawaiian Islands were decimated by contact with European (and later, American) settlers: not only was the indigenous Hawaiian population reduced by 90% by 1850 (mostly due to disease), but settlers cleared the land for grazing livestock and sugar/pineapple plantations, putting pressure on the snails’ forest homes from the very beginning. The mid-Nineteenth Century also brought about “conchological fever” which saw folks (primarily Christian Missionary families) engaging in competitive snail shell collecting as a wholesome exercise, with some collectors amassing tens and hundreds of thousands of specimens. Van Dooren also shares that the giant African snail was introduced to Hawai’i in 1936 (wikipedia tells me it was brought to the islands “as a garden ornamental and to be eaten”), but when its escaped population grew out of control and threatened agricultural interests, its natural enemy the predatory rosy wolfsnail was loosed upon the wild — where it proceeded to eliminate the smaller and easier to catch native snail species. Today, several wild snail populations are protected within “exclosures” that are designed to keep out these carnivorous wolfsnails (along with non-native rats and chameleons). Many of the threatened species have small populations kept safe in local laboratories (what van Dooren refers to as “arks”), and interesting moral questions arise about when it’s permissible to take the last of a species out of the wild. Perhaps the most unnatural threat to the snails has been the massive military presence that ramped up on the Hawaiian Islands since WWII.
The sad and entirely illogical result of this situation is that your best chance of survival as an endangered snail in Hawai‘i is to be a member of a species that is being, or has been, routinely blown up by the US military.
Nearly one-third of America’s listed endangered species are found in Hawai’i, but less than 10% of the allocated federal funding goes towards their conservation. And as van Dooren writes, “Parts of these islands are among the most heavily militarized locations on the planet: O‘ahu alone is home to seven major military bases and around 50,000 active-duty personnel.” After decades of live fire and bombing practise, with untold numbers of snail species wiped out with their exploded and burnt out forest homes, pressure from conservationists and indigenous Hawaiians has forced these military bases to not only end the destructive training exercises but to take responsibility for finding and preserving the last remaining wild snail populations on their properties, from their own operating budgets. I found everything about this fascinating.
The following pretty much sums up van Dooren’s philosophy on why snails, and their continuing existence, matter:
In diverse and unequal ways, we are all at stake in extinction. It threatens the ecosystems that sustain us, the cultures and systems of both meaning and mystery that animate our lives, and, in the indifference of so many of our responses to it, extinction also wounds and threatens our humanity. As extinction remakes lives, landscapes, and possibilities, it forces us to ask: Who are we and whom might we become when species disappear?
I became enchanted with gastropods when I read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating — author Elisabeth Tova Bailey was able to make me care about snails in general by introducing me to the quirks of one individual — but although van Dooren scales everything up (at least 450 Hawaiian snails species have gone irretrievably extinct in the past 100 years; the vast majority of invertebrates worldwide have not even been named and disappear without our notice), I found myself not much more devastated by their fate than I was by that of the Devils Hole pupfish as described by Elizabeth Kolbert in Under a White Sky (a species reduced to fifty or so minnow-sized fish living in a cavern in the Nevada desert). And I can acknowledge that my lack of devastation reflects poorly on my own humanity, and I can honestly say that I believe every species does have a right to existence, and where possible, our protection to continue that existence, but I guess it’s the fact that I haven’t been persuaded into devastation that The World in a Shell felt light on philosophy. But again, what is here makes for a very good read.
I remember years ago watching TV with my father and it was something about rare mountaintop frogs that were at the brink of extinction and Dad, not out of character, impatiently turned off the television and snapped, "Why would I give a shit about some frogs? What has that got to do with me?" And I, more out of character for speaking up, suggested, "Everything's connected though, isn't it? That frog might not have anything to do with you, but who knows how its extinction might affect you."
That POV is the very least that humanity demands - to recognise that losing a strand somewhere in the web of life might lead to a collapse that could affect people (hello pollinators! we need you!) - but van Dooren doesn't even make the case for the snails' importance on that basis. Tree snails eat fungus and other microbes off of leaves as they tool around, but where they have gone extinct, the trees still seem to be doing fine. And land snails have always been important decomposers, but earthworms (another introduced invader that has taken over) seem to be doing the job without issue. The only things that eat them are invasive species, so if Hawaiian snails don't have an essential ecological niche, does their extinction matter?
The indigenous Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) revere the snails as an integral part of their mythology, saying that when everything is pono ("good or correct"), the snails sing in the trees. (And when white scientists state that it's impossible for snails to sing, the Hawaiians point out that maybe nothing has been pono since the white people came along; no wonder they can't hear them.) I love that tradition, and as much as I am behind indigenous peoples' rights to a healthy ecosystem that reflects and supports their cultural practise, once again, I'm looking to human requirements to justify the snails' existence.
I can certainly recognise the lack of humanity in my Dad's reponse to the mountaintop frogs (which are no doubt all gone by now), and while I can see the poverty of spirit and closed-heartedness (driven by the selfish Me Generation Baby Boomer mentality that made my Dad successful in business), I can't name the fatal flaw in his statement: What does the frog have to do with him? No man is an island? As goes the frog, so goes the food chain? All creatures great and small, the good Lord made them all (and whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to Him)? None of that would reach my father.
This is probably the reason I was looking for the field philosopher's argument in favour of the snails' inalienable rights: to finally win an imaginary debate with my father.
