Dust

Description

Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth’s surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider—it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought.
Jay Owen’s Dust sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight. This is a book on humanity, the Earth, and what we’ve done to it over the last century. It moves from the sunlit orange groves of a thirsty Los Angeles at the birth of the “automotive city,” to Oklahoma and its Dust Bowl migrants. Owens takes readers to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab where spacecraft are built in “clean rooms” and to the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, and the Greenland Ice Sheet, to help us better understand our legacy and the challenges we face in the years ahead. This is a smart, beautifully written book that builds big ideas from the smallest particles. Jay Owens is a writer and researcher based in London. Owens studied social anthropology at the LSE and geography at University College London. She is research director at the audience-insight platform Pulsar, which helps major media and technology companies understand the present state of things online. Her research has received coverage in the Guardian, Vice, and advertising press, and she regularly speaks at design, media, and arts conferences and events. Her writing on media, technology, and place has also been published by Quartz, Medium, Roads & Kingdoms, and ICON magazine. She can be found online as @hautepop and at www.jayowens.me.

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