Death, Destruction & Carnage in a Provincetown Tourist Shop

Provincetown, Massachusetts. A tiny tourist town at the tip of Cape Cod, filled each summer with scads of city-weary Northeasterners. When I posted that I’d be in Massachusetts, no fewer than ten people told me to visit “P-town”—and so, on a semi-sunny day in September, I found myself strolling Commercial Street with approximately seven thousand fat gay tourists.

Provincetown has a lot going for it, but I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. On my first day out, I didn’t have a feel for the place yet. So I went and wandered the strip, and soon found myself in a shell shop.

And what a shop. The place was so packed with seashells, there was hardly room for the clientele. Bins of colorful starfish, mollusks, corals, and other marine doo-dads filled every corner; shellacked blowfish hung from the ceiling. Tiny shells had been arranged into adorable tableaux, often featuring googly eyes and little signs that said “Cape Cod.”

Except, of course, that most of these shells hadn’t come from the Cape. Out here you can still find mussels, clams and oysters—but for the exotic, collectible stuff you’ve got to go a bit farther.

Like, you know, Asia.

The fact is, most of the thousands of pretty dead things on display here had been harvested under questionable practices half a world away, then shipped in bulk. Odds are, the shop owners order their goods from a catalog like everybody else.

I remember shell shops from my childhood. My grandparents lived in Southern California, and would buy us shells as gifts. We loved ‘em, the more exotic the better. In fact, right now I’m looking at the jaw of a small shark, undoubtedly picked up in some tourist shop somewhere. It looks cool, and it was bought in the ’80s when we didn’t think about things like seashell harvesting. But those halcyon days of ignorant consumption are past, eh? So let’s think about seashells right now.

Horned sea stars are in serious danger from overharvesting.

I’ve checked around, and it looks like the best places to get seashells in bulk are Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, maybe Fiji. These are all places where the battles of industrialism vs. ecology are being waged in very real ways. Unsustainable fishing, lumber harvesting, pollution, hunting of endangered species: all of this is happening every day in a region known for its unmatched environmental beauty.

So you want to buy a shell? Well, just so you know, that dead animal you hold in your hand may or may not have been farmed, and very likely was “harvested” while still alive. No time to collect empty shells namby-pamby on the beach, not when fat Americans like glittery mollusks with googly eyes!

Your shell is also a part of a larger system, a business of extracting from the environment more than it naturally gives. Townspeople that traditionally collected shells to sell to tourists (like, back in the ’80s) have been driven out of their homes by large fishing businesses. Coastal dredging ruins reefs and massacres shellfish. Deep-sea trawling brings rare “treasures” from the depths. And any coastal dwellers that are unlucky enough to have pretty exoskeletons are being driven to extinction by seashell harvesting. And then, of course, they’re shipped around the world, on a big boat leaving a trail of petroleum through the ocean.

But look! It’s a baby pufferfish with a hat on!

Anyway, sorry to ruin your shell collection for you. I’m sad about mine, too. Let’s not buy any more shells, hey?

Want more guilt? Watch and weep: