The subject of Jay Owens's new book has long been trying to kill me. Like millions of people around the world, I am allergic to dust. I have long considered it an enemy. But Owens is out to broaden our perspective.
While each particle (微粒) of dust may be tiny, together they have outsized consequences. Approximately 2bn tons of dust are lifted into the Earth's atmosphere each year, Owens tells us, both absorbing and reflecting the sun's energy and seeding clouds — therefore directly affecting global temperatures and climate. Like water, dust is part of an essential ecological cycle.
Owens's own fascination with dust started in 2015, with a road trip through California. Owens was transfixed by the story of Los Angeles, whose growth and modern existence was only possible through the systematic theft of water and the creation of a dust desert to the east.
Early in the book, Owens unpacks the history of hygiene (卫生), exploring how dirt and our relation to it has changed over centuries, and cleanliness — or the pursuit of it — defines our modern lives. After the Industrial Revolution, emerging ideas about the relationship between dirt and disease made dust something to be fought against- a responsibility that fell on women. The poorest people tended to have the least time and money to clean a house; often, their jobs were to clean the houses of others. "The history of 20th-century cleanliness is, thus, a history not only of the making of sex and class distinctions, but racialised inequalities."
Perhaps the most emotionally stirring chapter in the book is that in which Owens retells the story of the nuclear age not through mushroom clouds, but through the radioactive dust they left behind. One study estimated that the effects of atmospheric nuclear testing would eventually result in the deaths of 2. 4 million people from cancer, a threat "that has gone substantially unnoticed because radioactive dust is such a delayed killer".
One reason to think about dust, Owens writes in Dust, is "to challenge ourselves to try to see the world beyond our easy imaginings".
