Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles (Hodder & Stoughton) by Jay Owens
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”. But her point is that humanity creates so much of it – 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”. Dust, as she has it, is an uncanny doppel-gänger of industrialised society, the ghostly presence of the Carboniferous world which enabled industrialisation, 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. 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.
From there Owens ranges widely. She visits 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 nearby fields of cotton, another monocrop. The flaws that run through capitalism ran 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; 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”.
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 to, remarkably, levels of lead pollution from silver smelting during the Punic Wars more than 2,000 years ago. 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 12-hour regime for the good housewife. Owens 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 are tensions, too. Dust, in the particular, pulls Owens towards complexity. But the further away from dust the book gets – there are long sections that deal primarily with water, as well as extensive passages of more-or-less boilerplate environmental polemic – the less original and provocative it becomes. As she 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 is the one to reject 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 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. As this book amply demonstrates, it is this detritus, marking uncanny spaces between modes of thought, that we should consider, rather than the hermetic, heroic certainties of modernity – or, for that matter, environmental activism.
This article is from New Humanist’s summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.