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Episode 5: Our dusty world.
361 Plays11 months ago
Dust.
It’s really too small a thing to worry about, isn’t it? When we think about the environmental challenges we are facing in the 21st century, we tend to think big – global warming, the ozone hole, mega volcanoes, earth quakes, or perhaps the devastation brought by large scale conflicts - even, at the very worst, a nuclear explosion.
We tend not to think about the small things, the very smallest things, like dust.
This is perhaps because we usually imagine the modern world to be shiny and clean; dusty things are old. But in this episode I will be talking with Jay Owens, who shows us how central dust is to the modern world, from the dust in our homes to the dust from nuclear fall out.
Jay's recent book, Dust: the world in a trillion particles, was published in 2023
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Transcript
Introduction to Beyond the Map
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Beyond the Map, a podcast that looks beyond the obvious to understand the hidden geographies that make our world. I am Jo Sharp, Professor of Geography and Scotland's Geographer Royal.
What is the significance of dust?
00:00:24
Speaker
Dust. It really is too small a thing to worry about, isn't it? Yes, it can be a bit embarrassing when friends come around and you realise there's a thin film of dust over things you wish were sparkling clean. But the famous anthropologist Mary Douglas said that dirt was just matter out of place. Isn't this true for dust too? Isn't it just wee bits of stuff in the wrong place?
00:00:47
Speaker
not just in the wrong place, perhaps, but also the wrong time. When we say something is dusty, whether it's a book or a professor, we often mean that it's old or old-fashioned. The modern world is imagined to be clean and dust-free.
00:01:02
Speaker
But really, dust is nothing to worry about on the scale of things we've considered in this podcast so far, isn't it?
Dust and Environmental Challenges
00:01:08
Speaker
When we think about the environmental challenges we're facing in the 21st century, we tend to think big, global warming, the ozone hole, mega volcanoes, earthquakes, or perhaps the devastation brought by large-scale conflicts, even at the very worst, a nuclear explosion. We tend not to think about the small things, the very smallest things, like dust.
00:01:31
Speaker
Let's look beyond the dusty bookcases of my office, although we will be returning here later to a few examples.
00:01:38
Speaker
At the end of September 2023, the Guardian newspaper reported that 98% of Europeans were living in areas with toxic air. In the United Kingdom, 75% of the population is living in areas where exposure to this toxic air is between one and two times the World Health Organization guidance. In Germany, 75% are living in areas where it is more than twice this recommended maximum level.
00:02:08
Speaker
These measurements refer to PM 2.5, tiny airborne particles, mostly produced by burning fossil fuels. Some of these can pass through the lungs and into the bloodstream affecting almost every organ in the human body.
00:02:25
Speaker
It is estimated that these particles have led to 400,000 additional deaths per year. In addition to this, environmental disasters often have dusty consequences.
Consequences of Modern Agriculture
00:02:38
Speaker
In his book, The Earth Transformed, environmental historian Peter Frankapan calls the drying of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan as a result of the introduction of modern farming, the worst case of ecocide in the history of the Soviet Union.
00:02:54
Speaker
He says the following.
00:03:24
Speaker
and 40 kilometres in width. He continues, this now directly affects some five million people with one in two women suffering from serious gynaological diseases as a result. We might think that this is a Soviet example from our dirty past. We are now working towards a greener, cleaner form of production. But as we saw from the discussion with Laurie Parsons in the Carbon Colonialism podcast, it's really not so straightforward as this.
Electric Vehicles and Microplastic Pollution
00:03:52
Speaker
The switch to electric vehicles seems like one such clean move. No more dirty petrol and diesel emissions. But at the moment, vehicle tyres are a leading source of microplastics. Plastic dust, if you like. Microplastics are found in high concentrations throughout the Earth's environments, even in the Arctic, and within each one of us.
00:04:16
Speaker
It is estimated that almost 7 million tonnes of particles from tyres and vehicle brakes are emitted each year. This is actually considerably higher particle pollution than from car exhausts and it is set to increase with electric vehicles because their batteries make them heavier.
00:04:34
Speaker
as has the trend in car sales towards larger vehicles, what some people have called auto obesity. And this together creates more wear on brakes, on tyres and on road surfaces, creating more dust.
Dust's Role in Modern Society
00:04:48
Speaker
The batteries, of course, also require minerals, which have to be mined. Cue more dust.
00:04:56
Speaker
So the more that I've explored this, the more that I realized that the tiniest of things are absolutely central to the way our modern world is. Why don't we think about dust more? Thankfully, my guest today, Jay Owens, has. Her book, Dust the World in a Trillion Particles, came out in 2023 to fantastic reviews.
00:05:18
Speaker
So this podcast is looking at the hidden geographies that make our world. Dust is something that seems so small and insignificant. You say rather brilliantly, it's at the very limit point of formlessness, the closest stuff gets to nothing. And yet you show us how fundamental it is to the modern world. It's just the perfect example of how different times and scales interact to make the world.
00:05:44
Speaker
and you start with dust in your office and I couldn't help when I was reading it but look around my own office and I'm sure everyone reading the book will look up at that particular point and look around their room and I think in our imaginations the modern is clean efficient hygienic and dust free but you argue that it's modernity itself that creates the problem of dust and there's so many wonderful examples in in your book but can we start with the problem of dust in the home perhaps start with where
00:06:14
Speaker
of us think about it.
00:06:16
Speaker
whether it's the problem of dust or the problem of procrastination for me at the time as I was a student and working on my master's at UCL and trying to work out what to write a master's thesis about and sort of working through just studying urban geographies there and working through all the sort of standard topics and then wondering, you know, as the mind wanders as it does, why is there so much fluff under my table? How can there be so much fluff under my table? I was living in a new build, newly converted studio flat
00:06:44
Speaker
and it was indeed clean and modern and white and light and bright and the furniture was all quite new and yet there was this fluff and it kept on reappearing and each day one would sweep up the fluff and the next day there would be more fluff and I wondered where it came from, I wondered what it was doing, I wondered what it was made of.
Historical Perspectives on Cleanliness
00:07:03
Speaker
I wondered what I had to do about it. The balance, you know you're procrastinating in all of these circumstances, right? A very relatable feeling. And so is my worrying about the dust? Is this a sensible degree of hygiene? Or is this me slacking off from trying to write a master's thesis? Yes, is the answer to all of these questions. But I got interested in it. I mean, it wasn't dirty. And that was a sort of paradox that started me writing about this. It wasn't
00:07:32
Speaker
coming from a background also in anthropology and Mary Douglas and ideas of dirt as a matter of place.
00:07:39
Speaker
was this stuff out of place at all? Or was it where it ought to be? It was where I wasn't. And it wasn't yucky. It wasn't gross. It wasn't in the same category as other kinds of dirt of discarded bits of food or bodily waste or it wasn't muddy or it wasn't sticky. It lacked viscosity. So what was this stuff? It was a sort of
00:08:02
Speaker
It was strange because it didn't fit into usual categories and that started to think as an interesting medium to think about. First, for domestic space, what do we learn by the behaviours, the house cleaning manuals, the rules for dealing with dust? What does that tell us about what substance it is and what does that tell us about mid 20th century society and the role of women?
00:08:24
Speaker
But then beyond that, by thinking through something sort of tiny and transgressive, where can that idea take me? And turns out that was much, much further than anyone might have ever dreamed possible. Took you right across the world. But I loved the way that you kind of gave us a history of dust in the home in a way that it wasn't that people, again, we've got this image of people in the past as being dirty and that it's only recently that we've managed to get clean.
00:08:51
Speaker
But you suggest that it's actually changes in the modern world that made dust a problem, the invention of electric light. Suddenly we could see dust, I suppose, all through the day instead of just on a very sunny day. And then, fascinatingly, the rise of consumerism with the empire and emerging connections around the world, suddenly there was stuff that people had to get dusty. If there isn't stuff, is there the problem of things getting dusty?
00:09:18
Speaker
And exactly what kind of stuff and what kind of surfaces it's made of. Dust shows off much better on smooth shiny glass type surfaces. You need a really pristine glazed or ceramic or glass type surface for it to really show up brilliantly. If you're working on a rough wooden table or sort of earthenware or a kind of rough whitewash wall,
00:09:44
Speaker
It's got that roughness of texture, so a little bit more roughness by a bit of dust being on top of it. You know, not going to really show up. But I felt, I mean, it started off in that line of thinking from trying to reading the sort of historians of the medieval and early modern periods who were very keen to defend their subjects from accusations that medieval people were very, very filthy.
Modern Changes in Dust Perception
00:10:04
Speaker
The idea seems to have stuck. I don't know what we blame it on, Blackadder, possibly. I was good to say that's a quandric is probably the reason that we think of the Middle Ages as dirty. You know, up to his knees in muck, you know, I mean, you're loosely aware of people's sort of longhouses and things like that and kind of co-living with animals a bit like that. But the historians sort of seek to exist that they weren't
00:10:27
Speaker
as filthy as it was all that, that people did bathe or wash, even if they were not having baths as such, that, you know, you have to think back to Roman and Byzantine, you know, you've got full, you know, full sauna steamer and bathing facilities going on there. So it's okay, people aren't filthy, filthy, but you do have different ideas of cleanliness and that it's, and how that changes, how that's historically constituted is interesting.
00:10:54
Speaker
it's the Victorian clutter becomes this moment you've got the electric light and you've got the stuff for just to sit on and you've got a sort of
00:11:03
Speaker
middle class who are seeking to distinguish themselves by their possession of fine objects. And at that point, you know, just alongside, of course, the rise of cleaning technologies that marketing and advertising perhaps has a lot to answer for here in terms of certainly the escalation through the 20th century of standards of cleanliness that are accepted. There was a thought that technology will be labour saving and that didn't really work through
00:11:32
Speaker
No, and the fact that it has such gendered patterns that I had a sense of some of this history, but you argue that there was a concern of middle-class women not having enough to do. I mean, in this series, I spoke to Leslie Kern, who talks about the modern city and the fact that there was concern about women, middle-class, genteel women being out in the public.
00:11:56
Speaker
And I suppose there was a sense of that being a kind of dangerous, dirty space, so they had the protection of the gentility of the home. But I hadn't thought in terms of this as being something for women to do, but the fact that there was that kind of morality linked to cleanliness, linked to a particular gendered ideology as well that emerged at this point.
00:12:15
Speaker
a couple of different points. Yes, there's a certainly a post world, I mean, I end up looking at America in the post World War Two period, particularly where there's this drive to get women back into the home and not taking jobs away from our brave boys. So you get a real like peak housework of the housework manual is just assigning a solid eight hours a day, you know, as soon as the kids and the husband is out of the house and off to school through to the time the husband is back through the house waiting his martini and just constant dusting labour there and
00:12:44
Speaker
I mean, with best will in the world, I can't see how there was enough dust to really go around and justify it, but still the sweeping the hoovering the washing down of blinds was all actively prescribed. But also a shift in the earlier in sort of, you know, around 19 early 1900s, as the servant in Britain, servants moved into other forms of work. And you've got middle class women having to do their own housework in a way that they hadn't got a bit of an expanding middle class.
00:13:13
Speaker
and not the labour that they have relied on to do that. And the curiosity that hoofers and vacuum cleaners and all of these tools and swiffers and gadgets and things are supposed to make that easier, but just seem to raise standards throughout that period. The marketing is focused on having the cleaner home rather than any idea of what women could do if you freed them up with more time. And if you can do the cleaning in an hour, what then? No, no, no, you must spend five hours cleaning.
00:13:42
Speaker
Well, that's the dangerous thing of what women might might do. Because again, you link it to the suffragettes that, you know, one of the things they might do is go and speak to other women about. And one of my absolute favorite couple of lines in the book is you say enter the domestic science expert, a group of ladies who, if ever there's a feminist hell, will be tortured eternally with feather dusters. These were the women who made careers out of telling other women that they couldn't have careers because housework was a big enough job in itself. I mean, it's
00:14:11
Speaker
There's some astonishing people. I write about a woman called Christine Frederick, who is sort of this efficiency expert in the 1920s and 1930s, who, her husband, Mr. Frederick, is a sort of businessman. And he brings into account the ideas of Taylorism and efficiency and all of the kind of production line, observation of people's working
Nuclear Dust and Health Risks
00:14:32
Speaker
patterns and efficiency monitoring there. She takes it into the home.
00:14:36
Speaker
and turns it into a business empire. This woman is tireless and extremely smart and very, very enterprising. He is part of the movement that ends up setting the standard for how high your kitchen counters are, in the sense that there's a useful triangle between your sink and your oven and your prep area. Every gesture, the reaching up, how high should you reach, these micro-efficiency experts
00:15:01
Speaker
intellectually brilliant but dedicated to and you know herself she profits substantially and has a very interesting career but it's all in the cause of making women better at staying in this small space.
00:15:16
Speaker
Quite a paradox. The power of geographical studies like yours is that you can link through the immediate and domestic sphere into things that are happening at other spatial and temporal scales to show that this is not just, and I say that sort of with scare quotes, it's not just something that happens in the home, but this is something that cross these scales. And I suppose of the different examples in your book, nuclear bombs are the opposite scale, I suppose, in terms of it being global and
00:15:46
Speaker
and terrifying. I grew up as a teenager in the 1980s under the threat of the mushroom cloud, absolutely convinced that that was going to be the end of me and imagining the nuclear winter that would ensue and what it was going to be like to live through this. This was literally what drove my teenage nightmares.
00:16:03
Speaker
But you ask us to shift our attention from the moment of the big dramatic explosion, that aesthetic that is burned into the minds of those of us who've seen it on various programs. But to move from that to the ensuing dust that you say is more important, what's important about this shift?
00:16:22
Speaker
I think two things. Firstly, it's that the dust actually existed and happened as a consequence of the 1,030 nuclear tests that were done in America, in France, in the British, in Australia and other countries around the world. That the mushroom cloud has existed sort of
00:16:43
Speaker
well, twice used in war and then as the object of fear and anticipation. But the radiation has already existed, particularly from the above ground tests in the 50s and 60s. And it's where the harm of those tests was done. The deserts in which those tests took place, so in Nevada, in the United States, at various atolls in the Pacific, they weren't uninhabited, and I write about that at some length.
00:17:12
Speaker
They were very, very underpopulated, and they weren't as far from centres of population as these things happened. The tests themselves, the explosions, did not kill people for obvious reasons. It was reasonably properly managed. But the radiation
00:17:29
Speaker
is thought by the IPPPN physicians for the prevention of nuclear war to have potentially be going to kill not just having caused the deaths but to cause in future over a million people
00:17:45
Speaker
through cancers, through the impact of radiation on the body over very, very long periods of time. It's an enormous death toll and it gets completely forgotten because it lacks the single moment in time and the single location and the ease of consequence measurement that a moment of the bomb does. It's people getting thyroid cancers 30 years later.
00:18:10
Speaker
You have to analyze this statistically. You have to look at it against comparable rates of death in other populations in other places. No individual knows necessarily if their death or the death of a loved one was caused by
00:18:24
Speaker
radiation from nuclear testing. It's an entirely statistical, different sort of diffuse process, very in that sense dusty, you know, in that sense difficult to think with and therefore easily ignored. But, you know, what I think is important is to actually recognise that the
00:18:42
Speaker
nuclear testing, this idea of building a deterrent in order to save lives has actually taken many, many lives. It's not just a sort of spectacle in the desert of bright flashes of, I mean, at some points in Las Vegas, a whole industry grew up around watching the distant flashes of people drinking sort of nuclear cocktails on rooftops and having people in Utah having little viewing parties to see this green flash on the horizon. And, you know, and
00:19:10
Speaker
Then a few hours later, a day later, you know, there's a bit of dust on people's cars or something like that. And the milk they drink has actually been completely irradiated, but they may or may not have received the instructions to flush that. And even the awareness of the harm has just been, I think, very, very limited. And it's a tragedy that needs to be, and there are people campaigning to make that much more known.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, because I think, you know, I was very aware of the mobile nature of nuclear fallout with Chernobyl. Obviously, we were all looking at the maps that were kind of heading towards us. But you're right. I think you say it's because it's so small, it's
00:19:54
Speaker
And it's about statistics and it's about a much longer time period it's so easily denied and no one's there with the cameras fifteen twenty years later and what would you point the cameras out anyway and it's it really is i think one of the clearest examples of this idea that you talk about the book from rob nixon this notion of slow violence.
00:20:15
Speaker
It's so much easier to understand violence when there's a perpetrator, there's a victim, there's a direct line of calls, and something dramatic like a mushroom cloud. We can see what's happening. But some of the most pernicious, some of the most powerful processes that are working in different ways, whether it be health inequalities or racism or whatever, are things that we don't see the same way because they're diffused. They're very everyday. And this is such a chilling example
00:20:41
Speaker
of that and the combination in the book of your showing the maps of the drift of the dust across the US particularly, but also the colonial implications of this. And again, this resonates so nicely with a conversation that I had with Laurie Parsons earlier in the podcast series about carbon colonialism.
Environmental and Colonial Exploitation
00:21:01
Speaker
He's using that kind of language of not a dust, but of cleanliness that our new modern green industries
00:21:08
Speaker
in the west can seem clean because we've got these hidden supply chains that basically all the crap goes somewhere else and here we've got a similar kind of process that's in order to protect those of us in the west from the threat of nuclear war we have tests elsewhere and as you said you know there's this
00:21:27
Speaker
ideology that deserts are empty, they're unpopulated, that different parts of the world populations are perhaps not as valuable. So the French and the British use their colonial territories to do the tests. And of course, the other thing is there's not going to be the same kind of health surveillance long term in these populations. Absolutely.
00:21:48
Speaker
I think, particularly in the Australian case, which is a curious one, it's often pointed that Australia is independent, but still has sufficiently close colonial relationships. So Britain is just practically sort of invited in, do you want some desert to bomb? But it's the indigenous ways of life in particularly the Australian deserts aren't recognised as present and aren't recognised as inhabitants. And this has been an issue for, of course, colonised people in the United States as well, trying to make
00:22:17
Speaker
reclaim land claims and treaty claims when their modes of living on the land are not settler agriculture necessarily and so there aren't little fences and there aren't nice farms that you can point to and say we have always been here and but yet people have always been here but through more mobile ways of life and particularly in Australian Outback you move very large distances because it's a bit to say sparse and this is a harsh environment and
00:22:45
Speaker
In those settings, some of the Australian situations, there was certainly actually some risk of people not being told that there was nuclear testing on their land or not being kept away from it adequately because their presence was
00:22:59
Speaker
not known to the authority, and they were not thought to matter in this way. But every single nuclear test was taking place on what is either indigenous or nomadic people's lands. Even stuff up in Novaya Zemlo, a test took place in Russia, caused risk to the Nenets population in Siberia.
00:23:19
Speaker
And it reveals the marginalisation, of course, of Indigenous people spatially, that they are pushed into the most empty places because the richer and more economically productive places have been taken. I got very angry reading lots of bits of this book. Good, but I'm sorry. It is right for the anger to be recognised. But as various people have said, the introduction is not an easy read, that you realise scales of harm.
00:23:49
Speaker
the just the millions of deaths per year at air pollution. Another example of this sort of slow violence that it's not so immediately visible, but you say don't the idea that it's actually one of the major killers in our society is sort of slips under the radar a little bit and people continue to drive with burning stones, just the energy usage from other things we do. And it's really hard to think about. You have to think about more fundamental changes to life than is necessarily comfortable.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yes, and it makes it difficult to bring these changes in because of the diffuse nature of the impacts, because there isn't that direct cause and effect in the sense that I can't point to all the people with their large SUVs in the city and say, you've caused this. If they'd hit a child, yes, we can see the cause and effect. But when it relies on statistics, I think
00:24:41
Speaker
particularly at the moment, it's sometimes difficult to have those kind of scientifically informed discussions about what should be done.
Controversies in Urban Emissions Control
00:24:51
Speaker
all science becomes political. In London, we're seeing a lot of controversy about the EULEZ, the ultra-low emissions zone, in which 9 out of 10 cars were absolutely unaffected. And it's basically only older diesel cars that are being asked to pay a pollution surcharge to be used. But it's been spun into the culture wars. It's
00:25:12
Speaker
I think it hits people's own, I mean, that one, at least nuclear testing was done by some other bastard, you know, whereas cars, people don't want to be thinking of themselves as the bad guy. And they're taking these journeys for good purposes, of course they are. And being asked to recognize that that is causing harm to other people is uncomfortable. It's difficult to think with, you know, this is why I sort of started, kept on
00:25:36
Speaker
writing and traveling and exploring with dust because it is difficult to think with. It's not an easy substance. It's not sort of black and white to spoil a cliche here. So it's good. It's good for our thought. It helps us think through complexities more, but it doesn't make always for easy campaigning. It doesn't make for appealing issues.
00:25:58
Speaker
No, I think it's really effective as a way of making material some of these processes, you know, small material, but nevertheless, it's I think that kind of that materiality that the tangibility of it starts to start to make meaningful a lot of these things that these processes that are otherwise very difficult to grasp.
00:26:16
Speaker
If a lot of people are thinking about the problem of dust beyond looking around the room they're in whilst they're reading your book, the obvious other example that comes to mind is the American Dust Bowl, which I think a lot of us probably learned a bit about at school.
Lessons from the Dust Bowl
00:26:29
Speaker
And, you know, we're told something about the problem with climate, perhaps some poor farming practices. But it's another way of thinking about how modernity has led to the creation of dust and the problem of dust.
00:26:44
Speaker
Absolutely. And I mean, that one's also, it starts as a colonial story about the white settlement of the plains in the sort of 1870s, 1880s, due to about 1900. The core of the Dust Bowl region was really one of the last places in the United States to be settled and for farming. But, and you know, and then just 30 years, it sort of turns the powder. So, but
00:27:07
Speaker
The arrival of farming itself, problematic, colonial-wise, but ecologically, not one thing. It was the expansion of farming after World War I. You've got the closing of Russian Ukrainian grain shipments, so you've got a change in the world grain market, so it increases the price of wheat. And you have the recognition in the American way, which turns out to be quite good at growing wheat,
00:27:29
Speaker
that there's a huge amount of money to be made. And so what were individual family small farms become very quickly aggregated into much bigger units. It becomes a really industrialized mode of farming. It's all fueled by debt. People have mortgages. They've taken out the latest shiny tractor.
00:27:51
Speaker
And it's, I mean, at one point, the High Plains was called the most modern place in America. It's the last thing you would think about if you go there now, but it's debt, it's financialised, it's tied to world markets. You know, it's more like working at the sort of the stock exchange than it is. It's mode of economic gambling and farming practices that had been recognised and were known, the idea of letting the soil rest, cover crops, things like that.
00:28:20
Speaker
were just not economically viable because you've got large landowners seeking to maximise the profit from their land, non-resident farmers, people kind of commuting into farms to farm them without much necessarily sort of personal involvement that a resident farmer might have for their lands in these sorts of situations.
00:28:38
Speaker
So, it's the rapaciousness of demand for just production at all cost and any cost that stresses the land and takes it far, far beyond its carrying capacity so that when you have some very, very high heat and drought years for a period of the 1930s, you've got a landscape that cannot cope with that and cannot recover. Previously, when it's been 50 years before, when it's prairie grass grazed by
00:29:05
Speaker
the grassroots hold everything together. You've got high winds there, you've always had high winds. You've had big 20 multi-year mega-droughts in the past, and indigenous populations had moved away at certain times that the population density of the plains would rise and fall a bit, depending on the ecological conditions, because yes, sometimes it was much less habitable than others. Capitalism, high modernity, that sense of domination over nature for the profit, takes away those
00:29:36
Speaker
I don't know what we call it, mitigation takes away those balancing factors and just says exploit, exploit, exploit. And then you have just complete ecological devastation, towering walls of dirt, and just genuinely apocalyptic looking landscape for sort of between five and 10 years.
00:29:54
Speaker
The descriptions of it are staggering in terms of the scale of the amount of movement of material and the kind of feedback loops that I didn't know about in terms of the electrostatic that you had in the middle of these storms, you would have barbed wire fences kind of glowing because of the static electricity, but also of course,
00:30:12
Speaker
As you explained so well in the book, that then is a feedback loop that the static picks up more dust and just makes the whole thing even worse. And again, something that is based in one place but has implications elsewhere. You had snowplows moving the dirt across the country because of the amount of material that was being moved. Yes, it helped become a political issue when some of the big dirt clouds ended up blowing east over Washington and New York.
00:30:41
Speaker
Roosevelt and the politicians in session are like, oh dear, we better do something about this then. Being able to see it and tangibly touch it makes a big difference in terms of recognizing it's not a distant problem. Astonishing quantities of sediment moved, I mean, I think 350 million tonnes in inside a year, you know, it's a significant fraction of the sediment that flows down the Mississippi River, one of the biggest rivers in the world. It's geological, you know, this is
00:31:10
Speaker
It's not the image of human impact on the planet as just a kind of little thin surface layer like this is.
00:31:19
Speaker
This is planetary. But I think what makes it all the more comprehensible in the way that you present it is it's not just driven by this profit motive. I mean, we've seen this with agriculture in a lot of places, particularly in parts of the global south where development projects or colonialism is sort of moved from multi cropping and fallow periods towards cash crops. But there's also, you also explain that there's kind of a morality of making the land productive.
00:31:48
Speaker
When we look at how everyone's working together, yes, there's that kind of capitalistic drive, that modernistic attempt to kind of capture nature, and we can be very critical of that because it seems so hubristic. But then when you listen to what some of the individual farmers are saying about their motivation, and there's a kind of morality
00:32:09
Speaker
to work and to labour and not to do anything seems to be kind of immoral. They're not the bad guys straightforwardly because these are people who are doing what they think is the right thing. In some instances, yes, I focus particularly on an autobiography by Laurence Fabida. He's a farmer of Nebraska, if I call correctly. And he's not a big mega capitalist. He is a farmer farming his own fields.
00:32:33
Speaker
And he's an astonishing figure. He is how hard he labors to save his palm is actually intensely moving. And he's probably making more efforts than his neighbors at certain points to do things. We're calling it listing up the Earth, which is kind of ploughing big ridge furrows into it to slow the passage of the wind.
00:32:53
Speaker
and decrease, by slowing the winds, decrease how much dust it can pick up. So this actually informs some of the dust defenses we see much more recently on Owens Lake and other places in California. It's about, that's a different story. But his hard work is astonishing, but is he always doing something that's maybe ecologically the correct thing? Slightly harder to say. But the morality attached to the planes at that time was
Marginal Places in Development
00:33:18
Speaker
was profound. As I say, it really was the center of America in an identity sense that manifest destiny that was being talked of in the 1860s and when in terms of settling the plane, that this vision to possess the whole of the confidence. People talk about through the territorial expansion and making this land productive was
00:33:39
Speaker
the essence of what white Americans thought being that about that it's, you know, it seems so marginal now, but it was it was the center of the place, you know, and the story throughout the book, marginal places are central to the making of the modern world that we think of it as empty. Now we think of deserts as
00:33:56
Speaker
Again, we're taught to think of it as empty, that through nuclear testing, through the water supply in the Green Los Angeles, through the dust bowl, that these are the hearts of the world we live in now. It was made in these places just as much as it was made in the big cities.
Exploitation of Nature Across Systems
00:34:12
Speaker
And yet, despite the importance of that notion of manifest destiny, the fact that America was different, was God-given, had this mission. The surprising thing is that we're seeing almost exactly the same thing happening in the USSR. And the example you provide there with the RLC, it's not capitalism, but we come to the same place.
00:34:32
Speaker
Absolutely. And it's why I talk about modernity in the book, because I'm aware that the USSR in so many ways, the Aral Sea being one example, the Virgin Lands Project in terms of expanding farming, the nuclear testing is doing really very, very many the same things as Americans. And I'm sure there are certain historians or socialist scholars who might
00:34:55
Speaker
quibble about precise wordings about this is the USSR is locked into a world system of trade and competition and economic competition with the US. So such that for all the state socialism was meant to be a different, vastly different economic model is actually ends up repeating caught in the same competition traps that
00:35:16
Speaker
a huge amount of the Aral Sea becomes drained because the Amadario River gets used to irrigate cotton and in absolutely escalating cotton targets through from Lenin, through Stalin, through Khrushchev, you know, 3 million a year, 3.5 million tonnes a year, 4 million tonnes a year, until the targets are absolutely impossible. There is no more water to produce that much cotton until the ground is
00:35:40
Speaker
kill is dead with salt. Cotton is a terrible crop. It's incredibly water intensive, but it has the ability to grow in deserts if it's watered enough. So it just produces, what's the word, facilitates. It has the affordances that enable human beings to make terrible economic decisions. And it's
00:36:05
Speaker
So yes, the RLC becomes drained by this rush. The dust bowl is wheat growing and the RLC is cotton growing.
00:36:15
Speaker
that absolutely the same shared attitude of scientific domination of nature, that with increasing scientific knowledge and good engineering, that natural constraints don't matter, that they can be overcome, that there is freedom from scarcity and freedom from the arbitrariness of natural calamity with the sufficient appliance of domination, essentially.
00:36:38
Speaker
And also, I think they're a sense of morality, I suppose, as well, that we have to kind of show that our way of doing this is better than capitalism. We can exploit nature better than capitalists do. I mean, again, some of the quotes from Mao as well as the Soviet leaders, an overwhelming sense that nature was there to be tamed, to be exploited, to be used in the ambitions to create a socialist future, a communist future.
00:37:04
Speaker
One of the things, one of the difficult things to recognize is that in many of these instances, it is a desire to lift people out of poverty. Well, within capitalism in some sense, but to the goal for progress is not an evil one. It's not a, it's, you know, there's the people are trained, or there is a goal of creating some sort of better world, you know, that when I write about the Owens Valley in California, and it's water is taken to grow the city of Los Angeles, but two people in cities need water. Yes, they do.
00:37:35
Speaker
directly waste. I'm very critical of this. I'm very pro. Los Angeles is increasing its water saving methods substantially and stopping taking that water.
00:37:44
Speaker
And, you know, the history is that there's, it becomes a logic of the greatest good, actually, and this is stated explicitly by some of the politicians at the time, that the moral thing to do is to take these natural resources and deploy them for the good of the greatest number of people. But that always means that cities win, and that more marginal, more rural, more remote places will
00:38:07
Speaker
never succeed and never receive environmental protection if it's always for the good of the greatest number. But it also makes it a very easily hijacked argument. People who otherwise don't talk a lot about
00:38:23
Speaker
the most marginalised society using that notion to hammer away environmental changes so that we're hearing that, to go back to the ULA's example in London, we've suddenly got politicians saying, oh, but that's going to target the most vulnerable. And again, it comes back to that
00:38:43
Speaker
I suppose this kind of slow and fast violence distinction, we can see that taking an old car or charging someone to drive an old car into London is directly impacting their livelihood. We don't see the impact that's having on however many people in terms of the environmental impacts of that car.
00:39:02
Speaker
We've talked a lot about how the use of dust as a focal point for the book makes tangible things that we might otherwise not be able to understand as well. And I think it also provides us with a warning about heroic attempts
00:39:21
Speaker
to provide techno fixes to our current predicament.
Cautions Against Technological Fixes
00:39:24
Speaker
And this was back in the papers again yesterday about some of the unintended consequences of trying to come up with big technical, again, modern, I suppose, solutions to the kind of climate change, to the environmental degradation that we're witnessing. So what is it that Dust tells us about as a warning about these sort of techno fixes?
00:39:48
Speaker
generally to be cautious of grand claims, I think. I talk about the Owens Valley in California where basically water was taken away from the valley by Los Angeles for a series of rather fast legal deals in the early 20th century.
00:40:09
Speaker
The valley then turns to dust, it became America's largest dust source. And then in 2000, after decades of legal action, finally, it became admitted, we've got to do something about this, then we can't actually have such big health hazards just hanging out here in California. And over 20 years, over $2 billion has been spent on dust defenses and stopping this dust. And it has worked, actually, the air quality is now
00:40:37
Speaker
considerably better. There's an ongoing legal faff about whether precisely it's hit safe limits or not. I think the lawsuits will never end in that place. But it's done it through absolutely sort of terraforming this dried lake, 110 square miles, turned into a completely industrial landscape at the same cost it would probably cost to build housing on it at that scale. So this in from water to stop the dust, using gravel, using a bit of managed planting,
00:41:07
Speaker
and it's producing a very, very artificial environment. And it has worked, you know, that there is much, much less airborne dust there than there has in the past. But at what cost, at an absolutely vast cost, it's not an ecological solution that would have been bringing the water back. That could have been done a lot more cheaply, and that restoring the lake to the lake it once was. That could have been done more cheaply. It would require Los Angeles, well,
00:41:37
Speaker
fairly complex game. It would require, actually, probably more cheaply as cheeky because it would require Los Angeles building a lot of water-saving methods. Actually, just hydraulically bringing the water back to a lake costs less than $2 billion. But the water-saving building the desalination plants in Los Angeles doesn't. So, okay, I can be fact-checked on that one. Sorry, I didn't mean to sort of snotty there. I just had the understanding from reading the book that this was a kind of more natural attempt to intervention, what was being done in terms of wetlands and... No.
00:42:09
Speaker
It's become naturalized, but through the power of nature to bring life back in its own way. The birds were not brought back by human action. The birds just saw some nice water and go, let's sit on it then. Let's eat some tasty brine flies. I was reading in the papers two days ago, I think in the New York Times about
00:42:29
Speaker
a plan to seed the Atlantic Ocean with iron dust in order to feed the phytoplankton, to make algae and that they should proliferate and then capture CO2.
00:42:40
Speaker
and into organic carbons and then fall to the sea floor and take it out. And this is indeed a natural system. And in this way, mineral dust is a large part of the carbon cycle. It's part of the oxygen cycle. It doesn't just sit there on its own. It plays a huge role in other world systems too. And dust from the Sahara replenishes the Amazon. I mean, dust is not always a problem.
00:43:04
Speaker
No, no, indeed. And it's like when it's being identified as a source of geoengineering to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And the same with solar radiation management, there's certainly plausible mechanisms for whether human intervention can actually repeat that at a scale that delivers the results that the boosterists promise. The New York Times editorial op-ed writers were
00:43:29
Speaker
very confident about it and calling for more research and various commenters are citing other papers and responses going guys this has been trialled at certain senses and it doesn't operate at the scales and at the orders of magnitude that you are claiming here whatsoever and similarly with geoengineering there's just the huge questions about unintended consequences and control but recognizing the complexity of dust in climate modeling helps us understand of how completely unpredictable
00:43:55
Speaker
dusty geoengineering could likely be that these are not simple models. It is interfering with every other climate model. It has feedback loops within feedback loops within feedback loops. Mathematically, it exceeds the scale of model ability. I'm talking about work from Erica Thompson, who is a mathematician and modeler at UCL now. She's writing about the limit points of models where it's not just uncertain entry parameters, but actually uncertain
00:44:25
Speaker
dynamics within it. I oversimplify that terribly for this. Everyone needs to go read her book where she explains it far better. But complexity is not always reducible to a definable set of outcomes. And parts of climate systems are, there are significant unknowns and more computing power is not necessarily going to give us
00:44:49
Speaker
very, very clear answers. Yes, that's a good idea. No, that's a good idea. And it makes all decisions intensely uncertain and deeply political. I hadn't actually realised until recently just how much large-scale attempts there had been to interfere with climate, to change climate, particularly around cloud seeding for rain and some of the geopolitics of it that the Americans were thinking, well, this is great because the weather systems means that we can influence Russian weather, but they can't
00:45:17
Speaker
They can't do it to us back because of the way that the weather patterns go. The scale of some of the trials before the Beijing Olympics to try and have the right weather, I had no idea there was quite such a lot of large-scale interventions. I think it was just this week a call to have an international moratorium on these kind of interventions until we understand them better.
00:45:42
Speaker
The precautionary principle makes a lot of sense there though sometimes the wording of these gets tricky because they're asking for more scientific research to be done on the one hand but not on the other hand no large-scale trials and empiricism. Unfortunately I think we are so close slash past a brink on the ecological crisis that there's not we have to consider
00:46:08
Speaker
these things. There is no easy return to be colic, small scale world. But how do you research something that is also an absolute potentially a vast hazard? And how do you know that academic research is okay, but somehow commercial research isn't, but all of this stuff is academic commercial partnerships. There is no
00:46:26
Speaker
People have a fantasy that there is a sort of pure scientific academic research that is good and you know Terrible Silicon Valley God complex geo engineers who are bad and it's not
00:46:39
Speaker
that's important that they're the same people. But I guess the anxiety would be that it's back to the modernity that you've been writing about throughout the whole book, that we're looking for another way to manage the efficiency of systems. When you start talking about the greenbell in the Sahara, which originally was one of these kind of heroic ideas of endless large-scale tree planting,
00:47:00
Speaker
which didn't work. But then... Great green walls across the Sahara and sort of round the top of much of China in order to stop the increase of the desert.
Small-Scale Environmental Interventions
00:47:12
Speaker
Great green wall is a metaphor. It's very hard. It's sort of imperishable. It's a barrier. Billions, I believe, of trees have been planted. And somebody pointed out if this had worked, it would look like the Amazon. It certainly does not. Billions of trees have been planted and sort of
00:47:27
Speaker
millions of trees have mostly died with some successes in some place. And that's the interesting point that it doesn't work as a mega project, but it does when operated in more locally specific ways in terms of sort of identity with sometimes just like kind of legal and economic barriers that meant in one country farmers were kind of incentivized to chop down trees on their property because otherwise I think they got taxed as having a firewood asset or something like that, you know, or
00:47:54
Speaker
identifying the right species in the right place, using, you know, often they're quite ancient techniques of planting in pits and mulching them in and, you know, sort of designing little channels of water actually stays around the roots of the trees and things like that, rather than, you know, big, big tree planting projects are leopardy industrial, you have a guy with a very big kind of drill punches a hole, and then you have another guy that punches a tree into the ground. And it's like, it's sort of thong, thong, thong, thong, it's,
00:48:20
Speaker
The three is not being, the sapling is not being nurtured and given much love. But when you do give the sapling a bit more attention, then it has a better chance of sticking around. And so you say we need to move from an image of the hero to one that's a bit more like a janitor or a caretaker. And I really like that kind of metaphor as a way of thinking about how we go forward.
00:48:42
Speaker
A friend of mine, philosopher Robin James, has said that who cleans up after other people is as important to political question as who governs. And I love that as a provocation, and that was kind of where I was starting with. There's also a book, Verhes, Francis Verhes, Decolonial Feminism, and she says the question is, who cleans the world? And that is the key question. I kept thinking of that as I was reading your book.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yes, the sense of janitorialness is it's a mode of care. You know, not a name drop too much, but another friend of mine, Deb Chachra, has a book coming out on infrastructure as care and all of these little unheralded systems behind the maintenance of the world, you know, maintenance isn't glamorous and isn't sexy, and you don't get a sort of
00:49:24
Speaker
a big prize in your name on a building for keeping the sewers flowing and all these sorts of little things. But it's how the world goes around. And, but yes, in that dust is an argument for thinking that that scale as well, not just the global. Brilliant. I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much.