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GA Conference Book Club 2024 - Jay Owens' 'Dust'
The document discusses the 2nd annual book club centered around Jay Owens' book "Dust", which explores the multifaceted meanings and implications of dust in relation to human life and the environment. It addresses the impact of atmospheric dust on climate, agriculture, and health, highlighting historical events like the Dust Bowl and present-day air quality issues. The text also incorporates reflections from notable figures, such as Carl Sagan, emphasizing our interconnected existence on Earth, represented as a 'mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.'
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GA Conference Book Club 2024 - Jay Owens' 'Dust'
- 1. GA Conference 2024 Welcometo the 2nd annual Book Club discussion
- 2. This year’s bookchoice: “Dust” Jay Owens Hodder and Stoughton (2023) 'Dust is a book with an extraordinary global story to tell, and also with an ethical argument to advance. Robert Macfarlane
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- 4. Jay studied SocialAnthropology at the LSE followed by a Masters in Modernity, Space and Place (Geography) at UCL. Graduate thesis: ‘Dust: Disturbing the Domestic’ explored dust as a medium of the domestic uncanny, and as an imaginative framework to create disruptive and radical interpretations of lived space.
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- 6. https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/23321/atmo spheric-dust-how-it-affects-climate-environment-and-lif e-on-earth Mineral dust inthe atmosphere predominantly affects Earth’s climate by scattering and absorbing shortwave and longwave radiation, which directly affects the surface temperature. More than that, it affects life on Earth, through its various direct and indirect interactions with the biotic and abiotic components of the Earth system. Dust affects the very basic process of rainfall through its direct and indirect effect thus regulates the hydrological cycle and the monsoon systems, which ultimately affects the distribution of water resources and agricultural production. Dust aerosols also fertilize aquatic and terrestrial plants as they supply essential nutrients such as Iron and Phosphorous through long-range transport. Severe dust storms can also reduce visibility, degrade air quality, and cause health and environmental problems.
- 7. On Dust: “…it’s whatis left of an object when all form, structure, context and legibility are stripped away — when the object is destroyed, and only the fact of its materiality remains.” https://medium.com/@hautepop
- 8. Dust to dust…we are made from it… Genesis 2:7
- 9. For me, itstarts with this particular mote of dust… From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgAnh8OB83U Carl Sagan
- 10. P.113 of thebook - Entropy - similar cadence “Everything around us is falling apart: our clothes, our carpets and chairs and duvet covers.; the brakes and tyres of our cars… the surface of the road. Brick and concrete, tile and plasterboard, the soil itself. Everything we build, all the achievements of human civilisations past and yet to come - all the joy and beauty of nature, which doesn’t accomplish anything and is all the better for it - it all meets the same end given time.”
- 11. Themes and locationscovered in the book: Anthropocene and fossil fuel combustion Dust Bowl - 1930s - migration Volcanic eruptions and atmospheric particulates e.g. Eyjafjallajokull 2010 Wildfires Fallout from nuclear testing Air quality in urban areas Ice cores and evidence of past climates and events from Greenland and the WAIS; cryoconite The decline in the Aral Sea and the polluted dust of the former sea bed Owens Dry Lake in the USA / Great Salt Lake (Utah)
- 12. Stories of dust… DorotheaLange: Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1936; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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- 14. Catalonia - Over1000 days of drought
- 15. Dust Bowl days(and Blues) Soil management is still as important today as it was in the 1930s - perhaps more so. Investigate the various ‘x harvests left’ stories - how true are they?
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- 17. Fen blow Strong windswhip off the topsoil - the soil is fine as it is silt from the former sea bed - partly why it is so good for crops such as sugar beet. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22201168
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- 19. How will Iuse this book? Sections in several topics we teach.
- 20. Consumption - moreitems ‘gathering dust’ The contemporary problem of ‘clutter’ - where the items it lands on are important. Industrial Revolution and growth of manufacturing placed objects in people’s homes where, as Walter Benjamin said, they became dust collectors. One in 8 of all girls over the age of 10 worked in domestic service by the end of the 19th century. Cleaning, preparing fireplaces and waxing floors. Dust as a mode of class war. “Dirt is matter out of place” - Mary Douglas
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- 22. Cleanrooms - iPhonemanufacture & size of components Size of transistors in this device are remarkably small and dust would be a huge problem. Impact of earthquakes.
- 23. Eyjafjallajokull 2010 Capturing storiesfrom colleagues of where they were at the time of airspace closures.
- 24. Air Quality -monitoring devices.. COVID19 - mask wearing Cities - Ella Kissi-Debrah verdict Wood Burners
- 25. Activities and questionsusing the book What is the impact of dust in our lives? Which types of dust will we encounter?
- 26. Some links torelevant GA journal articles… https://www.geography.org.uk/Journal-Issue/fb5c6db5-fbad-4a93-aca1-8510d709c bd9
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