Review: Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens
A powerful book exploring the idea of dust as an avatar of modernity
It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, on a spring Sunday in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1935. In the house, Ada Kearns remembered, the radio was on. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. “This is Dodge City,” the announcer said abruptly. “We’re going off the air.” A vast storm cloud was racing south across the Great Plains. The temperature dropped 30 degrees Fahrenheit, the sky turned purple. The storm carried so much static it shorted electrical equipment. “You think, ‘Well that’s the end of time,’” another eyewitness recalled. “When it come over you didn’t know whether there’s going to be Jesus ... or the Devil.”
The storm clouds came at up to 65 miles an hour. They were 2,000 feet high and thick with dirt. Looking out, you couldn’t tell the window from the wall, people said. This was Dust Bowl America. In 1935 alone, 850 million tons of topsoil across the Great Plains blew clean away. It was a tragedy for the environment, but it was a tragedy for the people too. Some three million were forced from their homes, one of the largest internal migrations in American history. Silica, the principal mineral in soil, was “as much a body poison as lead”, the board of health warned in Kansas, where infant mortality rose by a third.
The story of the Dust Bowl is often told as a natural disaster, Jay Owens writes in Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. But the crisis was “in truth merely the most dramatic failure in a global crisis of soil exhaustion”. Owens’ account of it is riveting: she unfolds with devastating clarity how the crisis was shaped by a range of ill-thought-out agricultural developments – mono-cropping, over-ploughing, heavy investment in industrial machinery financed by over-leveraged borrowing. And she makes compelling use of diaries, interviews and oral histories to show how people on the ground felt; how desperately they fought for their livelihoods. It is, in places, deeply moving.
Owens’ primary aim is to use dust, loosely defined, as a way of critiquing modernity. Dust has always been a metaphor for death, humility and renewal; not for nothing does God tell Adam “for dust you are, and unto dust you will return” in the book of Genesis, for instance. But her point is that humanity creates so much of it – fully a quarter of all the mineral dust that circulates in the world is anthropogenic – that dust can show us the damage we have done anew. It is a way, she writes, “to challenge ourselves to try to see the world at scales beyond our easy imaginings”. A related theme, which might have been explored more deeply, is the idea of dust as an uncanny doppelgänger of industrialised society, the ghostly presence of the Carboniferous world which enabled industrialisation to be birthed and sustained, but which haunts it too, with a promise of reckoning.
Owens starting point is Elizabethan London, which, following historian William Cavert, she sees as a moment of rupture, “the beginning of the fossil fuel age” when the widespread use of sea coal superseded wood, borrowing the buried heat of the past to feed the needs of the present. The rich, of course, didn’t like it; Elizabeth I “greatly grieved and annoyed” by the taste and the smoke, banned coal burning when Parliament was sitting. But the poor did: they could afford to heat their homes in winter. One of the first great essays about pollution, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium of 1661, not only identifies coal smoke as corrosive to stonework, ironwork and furnishings, and an affront to the dignity of civil society, but also connects it for the first time to widespread ill-health. Fumifugium is, you might say, the first step on the road to Ulez.
From there Owens ranges widely. She travels to Uzbekistan to visit the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, but killed by successive Soviet regimes, from Stalin to Brezhnev, who diverted the waters that fed it to feed nearby fields of cotton, another monocrop. The flaws that run through capitalism run through 20th-century socialism too, Owens notes. “I write of modernity to have a word for the hubris that made this possible,” she says. The water level began to fall in 1960; by the 1980s, it was falling 76 centimetres a year. Now, 90 per cent of the water has gone, leaving the sea floor a dusty bed of toxic salts from decades of pesticide and herbicide run-off from the fields. Local people call the dust the ‘dry tears of the Aral’. Fishing the sea once supported 60,000 jobs. When the last fish died in 1986 the fishermen left their boats where they were to rust.
She visits Greenland to explore the history of ice-core analysis and the role of dust in the process, from the residue of volcanic eruptions and atomic bomb tests – discussed at length elsewhere in the book – to, remarkably, levels of lead pollution from silver smelting during the Punic Wars. A chapter on domestic and interior dust tracks ideas of cleanliness and housework, its associations with morality accruing along the way, from the medieval period through to The ABC of Good Housekeeping, an American manual of 1949, which dictates a twelve-hour regime for the good housewife, beginning at 7am. She is particularly good on the implications of Le Corbusier’s vision of the home as “a machine for living in” and his goal of windowless air-conditioned buildings, “hermetically sealed” so things like dust cannot get in. “There is no room in this architecture for bodies,” Owen notes, “our wonderful sweaty, disintegrating, vulnerable bodies”. It might have been interesting to explore these warm, frail, human connotations of dust further.
Some aspects of the book are surprising. Owens gives the most space to one of the least interesting - and, arguably, only tangentially relevant - case studies, the century-long legal and environmental battle over the water supply for Los Angeles and one of its sources in Owens Valley, to which two of the nine chapters are largely devoted. And the book generally has a very Americocentric bias, which seems limiting for such a rich and large subject.
There are tensions, too. Dust, in the particular, pulls her towards complexity; the further away from dust the book gets – aside from the long sections that deal primarily with water, there are extensive passages of more-or-less boilerplate environmental polemic – the less original and provocative the book becomes. There is a lot of travel: a flight to LA for a 2,300-mile road trip; another road-trip, “1,500 miles on straight, unpeopled roads at 80 miles per hour”; three days of flying to Ilulissat in western Greenland followed by a spur-of-the-moment charter flight to the edge of the ice cap; a trip to a festival of western cultural hegemony – sorry, “world-class techno” – in Moynaq, western Uzbekistan, the description of which is toe-curling in its lack of political and cultural self-awareness. This is mostly fine, of course. But then “lawns and gardens… should be illegal”? Another biblical reference to dust came to mind: the one about not looking for the mote in your brother’s eye before attending to the one in your own.
As Owens herself says in the book’s coda, “dust complicates”. It “troubles even the cutting edge of climate modelling [and] suggests other approaches: incremental and iterative learning rather than big leaps”. But her discussion of the ways in which dust complicates climate modelling feels rushed, and here she rejects the incremental in favour of the big leap. “Do we need better climate models in order to decide whether to upend the status quo economy into a Green New Deal,” she asks. “No: we just need to do it now and do it fast.” It’s almost as if moving fast and breaking things wasn’t what got us into this crisis in the first place. To put it another way, it’s as if the complexity that dust embodies can be swept aside if what it complicates are Owens’ own beliefs.
Do these contradictions matter? No, but just as dust is a product of friction, so friction between ideas - or between theory and material experience - or between how we want to be and how we are – produces a kind of dust of its own, disturbing certainties and generating doubts and discomforts. And as this book amply demonstrates, it is this detritus, marking uncanny spaces between modes of thought we should be thinking about, rather than the hermetic, heroic certainties of modernity or, for that matter, environmental activism.
This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in New Humanist.