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I’ve got a complicated relationship with my Roomba, Keith, who sometimes refuses to charge but also works his wheels off ridding my home of dust. I hate dust, both because I’ve got allergies and because a good chunk of the particulates are toxic microplastics. Modern humans wage an unwinnable battle with dust, which we wipe and sweep and mop—only for it to immediately return. Dust is unseemly, unsanitary, and downright embarrassing for your guests to glimpse.
Why, though? Not that long ago, homes didn’t have glass windows, so the outside just blew inside. People burned wood and coal indoors for heating and cooking, loading the air with black carbon that darkened walls. Before that, we slept outdoors, which is famously dirty.
In the new book Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, digital researcher and strategist Jay Owens charts a scientific and cultural history of the stuff floating all around us. She travels across the world to discover how dust nourishes life but also kills, especially if that dust is irradiated and flung into the air by a nuclear bomb. Dust is a critical component of our rapidly transforming climate, for instance, by darkening and heating up ice and snow.
“Following the traces of dust—seemingly the formless, the forgotten, the out of sight—is not, as it might seem, an exercise in eco-grief and mourning,” Owens writes. “It is in the end a story about connection.”
WIRED sat down with Owens to chat about these connections, how clean rooms made the modern world, and much more. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: What is dust, both from human sources and from natural sources?
Jay Owens: The definition I'm using in the book is tiny flying particles, as a means of trying to find the definition that actually works across domains. The atmospheric sciences talk about aerosols, which can be solid particulates and can also be liquid ones. The air pollution people are talking about particulates, so PM 10 and PM 2.5 [particles 10 and 2.5 microns long].
Dust is tiny, it's flying. Mineral dust, black carbon—obviously having huge climate impacts—sometimes microplastics. And then the urban dust starts to get a lot of more human-made materials: cement, road surfaces, brake dust, tire wear. Under the sofa, it’s textiles, a little bit of skin, and whatever's going on with your pets.
Mineral dust is as old as the oldest time, nearly as old as a solid planet. You've got the dust belt around the middle of the globe. The water cycle, nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the carbon cycle—dust is feeding into all of these. How it interacts with algae and how it blocks solar radiation. Dust is doing something in the world.
Dust is a problem that unites many different regions: Los Angeles draining the Owens Valley to hydrate itself, the former Soviet Union drying up the Aral Sea for agriculture. When it comes to land use changes—like the over-extraction of water—how has that driven the very complicated and oftentimes disastrous relationship that we have with dust?
Humans, whether capitalist or communist in these scenarios, are trying to put more of what gets called “marginal land” into use. That land is fine just being itself, being arid, just sitting there having its own ecosystems. But in economic terms, it's marginal—you can't put an enormous wheat crop on there.
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The Dust Bowl comes out of this period of 1920s capitalist expansion and very, very high utilization of land in the high plains. Or Stalinist, Khrushchev-era Soviet Russia trying to increase their cotton crop. The five-year plans keep on rising and you've already put all the good land into production. You then start to move into these more marginal ecosystems.
Both are operating on this fallacy of endless growth, this notion that we can extract as much from the land as we want without it failing. Which is not how the land works.
After a few years, this goes wrong. The water pumping is filling up the land with salt and pesticides, and the land is growing waterlogged. There's this momentary decade or two of prosperity that seems to work, which encourages greater expansion, of course. And then the bill becomes due, and that bill is generally very dusty. It's the idea of domination over nature.
Also, there is colonial domination in all of these places. People living there don't have the power to push back. I think in all of these places, there were people that knew this wasn't a good idea.
That brings us nicely to nuclear testing, also operating on a fallacy that there are no people or animals in the Nevada or Australian deserts. Deserts happened to be—atmospherically speaking—the worst place to test these nukes, given the amount of dust they fire into the atmosphere.
These places that are sort of seen as less important—they really, really aren't. When you detonate your bomb, either essentially on the surface of the Earth or on a tower, you're not just getting the explosion. It's also irradiating the metal of the tower. It's also radiating the sand on the ground. And that all is also being blasted up into the atmosphere, by the force of the detonation. That becomes the fallout cloud. In the United States, it blows on the prevailing winds and much of the way across America, essentially from Nevada blowing east, getting as far as Washington DC and New York.
On an individual level, it's very hard—or impossible, very often—to get that causal certainty [between irradiated dust and health problems]. It becomes easy to deny, right? If your individual causality isn't known—you have thyroid cancer, but thyroid cancer takes a long time to develop—it could be caused by other things. On a human level, it's very, very unknowable, which makes it for some people much more terrifying. It's this enemy you can't see, you can't be sure you avoid.
Long before the Industrial Revolution, the United Kingdom was burning a lot of coal and London was an extremely dirty place—like, actually blackened. Can you talk about what London was like before somebody had the bright idea to pass air quality legislation?
London's air became modern before the Industrial Revolution. England has been deforested for a very, very, very long time, because it's been quite heavily settled. Particularly in the 1570s, there was war with Spain, and the need to build big warships with big timbers. And there was an ever-rising population, so there was just a shortage of good wood. The other sort of geographical quirk is that in the north of England, there's coal, and it's near the surface.
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Within a couple of decades, you go from a mostly wood- and charcoal-driven society into one using a ton of coal per person per year. And it's filthy coal. It’s sulfurous, so it smells literally hellish. Of course, it gets worse. In the Industrial Revolution, you get the invention of the engine, the ability to actually multiply the power use, which multiplies the coal inputs needed. London specifically just becomes this prototypically particulate-filthy, horrible place.
Now we are indoctrinated into removing any bit of indoor dust that we see because it's socially unacceptable. Even before coal, burning wood indoors produced a lot of dust, so the home has always been a dirty place. How did that attitude shift?
First of all, it requires you to be able to see the dust well. Electricity is one big factor, or gas lighting—just more lighting in the homes so you can actually see more clearly. Secondly, it's the expansion of consumerism, and the invention of desire. A home in the Victorian period, if you're wealthy enough, is quite flouncy, ornate, very different to the quite austere Tudor era. Once you've got beautiful mirrors and plates and things like that, dust shows up more. Then thirdly, the public health side and awareness of the dangers of microscopic things. Having an ordered, neat home has always been valorized, but this is the idea that it could be sort of pristinely, spotlessly clean.
After World War II, the United States sees a rapid period of social change as white Americans flee the cities for the new suburbs and rising prosperity makes them a new consumer demographic. Brands and housekeeping manuals promptly pop up to educate white women in the attitudes, behaviors, and anxieties proper to the housewifely role. Instead of vacuum cleaners functioning as a labor-saving technology, the standards of cleanliness demanded of them rise. Magazines and adverts tell women they ought to dust surfaces and hoover every floor daily in extravagant daily routines. It keeps women at home and out of the workforce, preserving jobs for men returning home from war.
Dust is really bad for the manufacturing of electronics. How did the “clean room” enable modern technology?
The problem is that regular indoor air, even if it’s relatively “clean,” still contains an enormous number of particles. A cubic meter of air might contain 35 million particles over 0.5 micrometers in size—and each one of those particles can interfere with or contaminate delicate chemical and electrical processes, such as making photographic film, or building microprocessors for computing.
The World War II Manhattan Project is famous for inventing the nuclear bomb, but they also invented the HEPA filter—high-efficiency particulate absorbing filter—to remove “fissionable particles” from the air. Clean rooms are a kind of industrial housekeeping, an obsessive and seemingly non-glamorous, behind-the-scenes process. But we wouldn’t have modern microprocessor technologies—nor indeed the atom bomb—without them.
There is a huge amount of uncertainty about climate change and dust. Decarbonization will actually lead to a bit of warming, since there will be fewer aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect light. At the same time, the planet will keep naturally producing dust. When it comes to what humans are producing, how does that complicate climate change?
Firstly, what is the dust doing in the atmosphere? How is it reflecting the sun's rays out and cooling the planet, versus is it trapping heat in? It's doing both, depending on what is made of or where it is in the atmosphere.
Secondly, dust has impacts on clouds: A particle can be a nucleus around which water vapor can condense. There's also been a move to cut sulfur content in shipping fuels, for example, which is potentially going to increase temperatures, because the sulfates are very reflective.
Black carbon travels and lands on the ice in Greenland, the Arctic, and the Antarctic, and ties into a series of albedo feedback loops, where the dark ice absorbs more radiation from the sun, melts more of the ice, and exposes more land that has previously been covered by ice. Utterly unvegetated land is exposed, and some of that produces dust that pops onto the ice sheet and increases the melt. It's feedback loops within feedback loops within feedback loops.
