Dust

Dust is a book with an extraordinary global story to tell, but - and - also with an ethical argument to advance. Robert Macfarlane

SuperbTelegraph

BrilliantSunday Times

Eye-opening . . . impressiveGuardian

PowerfulNature

Like a detective dusting for fingerprints, Jay Owens masterfully reveals the hidden traces of modernity by following some of its smallest fragments.James Vincent, author of Beyond Measure
__________

Dust may seem inconsequential, so tiny and mundane as to slip below the threshold of thought. Yet within the next one hundred years, life on Earth will be profoundly changed by heat and drought - and that means dust.

In this ground-breaking book, Jay Owens argues that dust is a legacy of twentieth-century progress and a toxic threat to life in the twenty-first.

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles tells the gripping story of how the relentless drive for profit and power has turned the world to powder. Combining history and science, travel and nature writing, Owens shows how the modern world was made through environmental devastation - and then brushed the consequences under the carpet. From particle air pollution and nuclear fallout to desertification, dried-up seas and melting glaciers, weve profoundly altered the planet we live on. The cost to human health - and to the natural world - proves immense.

From the California desert and the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma to the desiccated remains of the Aral Sea and the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, we are shown that some of the planets most remote and forgotten places are central to the modern world. With clarity and insight, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles helps us understand our legacy and discovers the big ideas found within the smallest particles.
__________

Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet

The result is an original and illuminating book in which Owens takes something apparently insignificant and uses it to expose the terrible consequences of our exploitation of the natural world.The Times Literary Supplement

From Mark Kurlanskys Salt and Laura Martins Tea to Jared Diamonds Guns and Germs and Steel, can we now add geographer Jay Owenss Dust?Telegraph