In this episode, Kate sits down with author Jay Owens to talk about her book Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. Together, they unravel the paradoxes and challenges posed by dust - a small particle that makes a big impact throughout history. Discover how dust connects the Sahara to the Amazon, influences snowmelt, and carries historical significance, embodying both awe and horror. Dust underpins everything - it is, as Jay says, “a boundary crosser, a transgressor” and makes itself known in ice cores, the aftermath of the atomic bomb, in the drying up of bodies of water, and the pollution from our highways. It is the mark of the modern world and our incalculable impact on it. It underlines our interconnectedness and highlights the uncertainty about what happens next. This is also a call to salvage, to look at the externalities, and embrace hope at a local level.

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Howdy. I'm Kate Cavanaugh, and you're listening to the Mind Body and Soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for our

land, ourselves, and for generations to come by looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another.

Communities above ground mirror the communities below the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

As the saying goes, as above, so below.

Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

Hello, and welcome to the Mind Body and Soil podcast that is ever so slowly transitioning to the Groundwork podcast as I get my stuff together.

I am your host, Kate Kavanaugh, and it is such a pleasure to be here with you each and every week exploring the threads of

what it means to be humans woven into this earth.

I have an episode that I am so excited about, especially as we start in on the dry season here in the United States, at least

for for those of my listeners that are in the west.

My guest this week is Jay Owens, whose book Dust, the Modern World in a Trillium Particles really impacted me.

As I was going back over my notes for the show, I couldn't believe how many quotes I've pulled from Jay and her work.

And I know that I had was I was really genuinely nervous for this episode, because I just think that Jay has written a book

that is about so many different pieces of our modern landscape, including what modernity itself is and might mean.

And in Jay's words, dust is actually a lot about water because dust in itself is about the absence of water.

And those of you that have been longtime listeners will know that exploring issues related to water is near and dear to my heart.

I wanted to start this off with a quote from Jay that I didn't get to recount in the podcast. At least, I think I didn't. It's been a minute.

But But either way, it's good to really drive this home.

Jay says, so what might a dusty problem entail?

A problem of one sort, a challenge to economic growth has been solved by creating another problem, one that can be more easily

brushed under the carpet, denied, ignored, or displaced as somebody else's responsibility.

It's slow, taking at least decades to build and decades to resolve if this happens at all.

The problem operates on difficult to govern scales, probably very small and very large at the same time.

And it contains positive and interlocking feedback loops.

So it's a dynamic and unpredictable problem.

There's the possibility of tipping points and phase change consequences where the problem goes from bad to calamitous in a blink.

A dusty problem definitely does not operate within standard political boundaries or election cycles, making it particularly

tricky to act upon and sort out.

And above all, a dusty problem is an environmental injustice where the people who have caused the problem aren't the ones dealing with its consequences.

I really loved exploring dust with Jay.

Like I said, it encompasses an aspect of looking at water, looking at the very idea of modernity and what that means, looking

at incredibly complex feedback loops that we can't even begin to understand. Right?

And I think that this is really encapsulated for me in the idea that we have a sort of dust cycle, right?

The dust from the African Sahara fertilizes tropical rainforests in the Amazon. It feeds phytoplankton in the ocean.

It melts snow and changes the albedo, it helps form clouds, it heats, it cools, it does all of these different things that are deeply interconnected with one another. And yet it is unseen.

It is the thing that gathers on these smooth, modern surfaces that we want to wipe away, that we want to sweep under the rug.

And so in that, I think it really encapsulates all these different aspects that we've been exploring of interconnectedness and unseen and away. The book is incredible.

It starts as a history of looking at water rights in the Owens Valley in California.

And it then travels across space and across time to look at the drying up of the Aral Sea in Turkmenistan.

It goes all across different aspects of nuclear testing in New Mexico, looking at dust in ice cores in the Arctic.

And Jay writes it with a really beautiful prose that is at times poetic and is at times a great call to action for what it

means to be right here at the the peak of what well, I wouldn't call it the peak, but some would call it the peak and some would call it modernity.

And I just think it's fantastic, and I can't say enough good things about it.

So I really hope that you will pick up Dust, the Modern World in Atrillem Particles and explore it a little bit more for yourself.

As for a little bit of housekeeping this week, if you enjoy this podcast and you want to help support it, one of the best

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That really helps others find the podcast and gives it that certain flavor of people knowing that others enjoyed it.

So please please share what you enjoy about this podcast in in a little review.

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I wanna give a big thank you to Rob Kropfel and Jillian Lukewski, who are sponsoring this episode of the show with their sundries

farm garlic, which is back on sale for shipping in September for their seed and culinary garlic starts.

We'll have a really fantastic little story in this episode about Sundry's Farm coming up.

Thank you again for listening to the podcast.

I can't wait for all the explorations that we have coming up.

And without further ado, here is Jay Owens.

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You know, it's funny, I as I was thinking about as I was thinking about this book, I feel in many ways that a lot of the conversations

that I've had on the podcast have been circling the idea of dust without really touching it, whether we've been talking about

desertification or topsoil erosion, or talking about water or sand, or I all of the whirrings and machinery of capitalism.

I think that in many ways, there are that it was something that I was that I hadn't seen that I was speaking about.

And I would love for you to introduce us because I think that it is something that is both it it's so paradoxical and slippery

in its nature that it is it is ubiquitous, but not seen.

And it is everywhere, but it goes unnoticed.

And it is incredibly small with incredibly big implications.

And I loved how it had this amorphous quality.

And as soon as I picked up your book and had begun reading it, I I saw it everywhere, and the externalities of it too.

And it it became this thing that I was suddenly awake to.

Just this this gift of a topic for a writer.

I'm incredibly lucky to have have found it because it is precisely something everywhere and incredibly familiar while also

just sneaking below the sort of the threshold of thought or conscious awareness a lot of the time such that, you know, there

haven't been tons of other books about it before.

And it's this chance to say something unexpected about the everyday, which is not easy to find.

And I'm I'm so thrilled to really sort of had this opportunity in my life and have been able to take it in that way.

It's perfect too, because I think that, you know, you you said something that it's it's very ordinary, right?

There's some there's a sort of mundane quality about dust as we perceive it in our everyday.

And I've been thinking a lot about the mundane in my life and how once I shine a light on the mundane that that all of these things start to unravel from it.

And I think that that was dust's other quality is that as soon as you touch it, it feels like a substance that is quote from

the book quote from the book because I think it it touched something really lovely for me, which is dust is a boundary crosser, a transgressor.

The philosopher Michael Marder calls it the breath of matter on the brink of spirit, both solid yet insubstantial, an element

as much of air as it is of earth.

Dust is matter at the very limit point of formlessness. The closest stuff gets to nothing.

This paradoxical nature of dust is, of course, the main reason I am interested in it.

How rich to think with a material that isn't one thing or another and doesn't stay where it's put.

A substance that blurs boundaries and refuses black and white certainties for the subtleties of gray areas.

Thank you for picking that.

I loved this.

That that is I wanna I I like that paragraph.

It does it's that's a really good one to capture that this the spirit of this thing.

Like, the the contrast between something that is so absolutely everyday and familiar.

And once you dig into it, you're like, wow. This stuff is weird. This stuff is fascinating.

This stuff, you know, into the dust under our sofa come, you know, potentially space dust, potentially meteorite dust, potentially

stuff from other planets, and the sense of enchantment in a way of the everyday and horror.

You know, some big feelings come into that fuzz on your sofa.

That's perfect. One of the things that has come up a lot lately for me is that double sided coin of awe and horror that we

can look with something and absolutely marvel at at I think oftentimes right now, it it's largesse and its impact on the world,

but also with awe at at where it is.

And and you say this, that that the dust underneath the doormat could be it contains the world and not just our world, but

maybe the dust of many worlds and of time to that.

This is and this is one more thing that I kind of want to introduce to people before we really dive in is that in some ways,

this felt like the terminal end of the waste of all wastes. Right?

That as we've explored some waste streams on the podcast, dust is the sort of evidence of the entropic arrow of time, as it

falls apart, as everything falls apart, and everything will become dust.

It's dirt that's lost its name, you know, dirt that's lost its origins, lost its specificity.

It's no longer garbage or trash or the waste from this or that. It's just dust.

You know, its origins obscured in that kind of sense. Yeah. That end point.

Yeah. And I think that makes it all the the more unseen.

I it was it was really fun to pick up the book and and find a familiar landscape.

And I think that this this surprised me initially.

And you start dust in the Western United States, where I'm from.

So I'm I'm from Colorado, high plains desert.

And I think that I started thinking about dust very early on.

My father grew up during the dust bowl in Oklahoma, Oklahoma, and I had grown up in Eastern Colorado thinking about dust and

then entered into agriculture, which is a big creator of dust and, sort of sets off topsoil erosion at times, maybe helps

it at others if we're doing it if we're doing it in certain ways.

And at the same time that there was this familiar landscape, you introduced concepts that were unfamiliar to me and stories

that were unfamiliar to me, both within the Dust Bowl and the Owens Valley, and wrote about how dust in many ways is a story about water in its absence.

And so I'd love to tease out the relationship there between between dust and water.

It's a funny one because the geographies of water and water politics are some that I'm fairly familiar with and have studied.

I had professors and during my master's degree were water geographers.

But I didn't actually realize I was writing a book about water or the inverse, the opposite water.

What happens when the is gone, the absence of water, and it's that consequences of that.

It didn't fully dawn on me how central that was to my book until I gave it to my editor, and he's like, hey. This is water. Keep talking about water. It's it's actually so central. Yeah.

And but that's writing about, you know, writing about absence, writing lack is a sort of a strange thing to do.

It sort of sneaks in behind the threshold of your your foot awareness there.

And but there have been such brilliant books about water politics in the American West.

I think I'm most familiar with the works on California, writing on the dust bowl as well.

You know, there have been Timothy Egan's book.

Also I got from Power on my bookshelf. You know, just really Yep. Phenomenal works of scholarship.

But what happens after that is the sort of the question I'm interested in there and I think deserve some attention because

once landscapes have been desertified or once the lake has dried up, you know, the place doesn't stop existing. What happens next? And what can happen next?

What can happen to those landscapes that are ravaged? Those are not healthy landscapes.

But I think it's really important to me as well that we don't talk about them as just, like, ruined as of the past. You know?

I write quite a lot in the book about the dust bowl because one of the things I learned was just how important the high plains

US was to America overall in the 19 twenties thirties.

That it was the center of, you know, economically, its role in farming was hugely important, but it was a sort of center of

the political imagination in the sense of what it meant to be America.

The modernization there, the improvements made in agricultural technologies.

It wasn't an empty place, but quite the opposite.

I think now that you talk about you've you've seen headlines have talked about sort of depopulation and decreasing population

there and sort of there's not much in the way of press coverage about the Oklahoma Panhandle or Kansas or so and so forth into the coastal media.

But those places haven't stopped existing, much the same with the Owens Valley once in California, once the water had gone. There are still people living there. There is still something happening.

So let's you does take it encourages us to take a long, long, long view. Hell to write with sometimes.

If you want to begin a chapter 110000000 years ago when such and such volcano erupted. Oh, god. Geological histories.

But it encourages you to take a long view and not just sort of look at the moment of change or catastrophe, but to kind of go, how did that get here? What happened next? What could happen?

What could happen in the future as well? How can these places be healed?

They can never be restored back to where they were, but they can get a hell of a lot better.

I think that's a really important message, and one I've been really, really happy to see has landed with readers. You know?

Could feel like you're writing a book about environmental disaster here. You know?

There is some apocalyptic scenes that Oh, yeah.

Dust bowl fairly fairly high among them.

Of course, these, you know, churning walls of dirt, a kilometer or more high. What happens after that? Well, you know, land regrows.

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Yeah. There's so much I wanna tease out.

And and the first thing I wanna tease out of that is looking at some of these arid landscapes and seeing something, that the

way that we look at deserts as something that is done, that is ruined, that is past is and and seeing again, not seeing them,

that they become they become unseen, and that there is still life there.

And that there is something that happens after the disaster, that happens after we have intervened, whether it's with a nuclear

bomb or the diversion of water away from a landscape or the invention of the plow and the way that it changed the ecosystem

of the plains, that that there is something that is continuing into the future, and we have to become stewards of that and

to begin to and to to borrow a word from you, to begin to look at what it would mean to perhaps not perfectly heal, but to

salvage that space and to tap into the life that is still very much there.

Stewardship is such a great word. I probably don't use it enough, in fact.

But I think it's conceptually, you know, it's I think it's an important term within regenerative agriculture, if I'm right.

But it it's that sense of recognizing human responsibility without hubris, isn't it?

It's about saying that we have a responsibility here, but it's not a dominating word. It's a guiding word. It's a partnership word.

And I think that's a critical, absolutely essential mental model in there.

This also may be worth saying with some of these landscapes, you know, it's not a standard place for a British person to have

necessarily get really excited about, like, taking it at the Eastern Sierra.

I thought

it was Not Eastern California, specifically, or, some sort of the part you know, drive driving through parts of Oklahoma or Kansas or things like that.

Not typical holiday destinations, it's fair to say.

And I've really benefited from friends here, and I write them into the introduction for a reason because this book wouldn't have happened without friends of mine.

I talk about 2 guys who I first went to California and Nevada with.

I've also really learned a lot from a friend of mine called Joel Childers who lives a bit north of Reno, who loves exploring

the abandoned gold and silver mines of the Great Basin.

And, like, by riding along with him, you know, I got I got a chance to go off road, go into some fairly empty places out there,

places you wouldn't normally see, you wouldn't normally know to go look at. And people's enthusiasm is infectious. You know?

People's sort of passion for places is contagious. It rubs off.

And so through going out with him, he's a keen photographer.

I'd be sort of assistant camera, holding the camera bags. Yeah.

Through that, you do learn to sort of spend some time in place, watch the light change, think about where it's come from a

lot, think about how it's changed over the years, and to develop a sort of affection. I write out of love. I really hope that's apparent.

I write about places because I love them, and I care about them, and I kind of want to communicate that to other people.

It's, it's not scientific rigor on that, part. It's the

travel words,

the passion comes through. Kelly Therese Pollock:

I think the passion comes through immensely.

And I know that that it was on that trip, as you kind of traverse these landscapes, that the idea of dust sort of began to come together for you.

And I think that I think that the best writing, and I think that the best science writing in particular is a marriage of what

it is that we love and also data.

It it is qualitative as well as quantitative, and it is to feel that we are a participant in a space in the interconnected

environment that we are a part of, even if it's even if it's temporary, and we're passing through, that love can still develop

and that care can still develop in that.

And so it does come through, and I think that it it's all the more beautiful for that.

Thank you. Am I right in thinking we both have anthropology degrees?

Is there a bit of that going on here?

Yes. There is.

The insistence on qualitative. The insistence that the experience of doing the research or being in the place that the writer's experience is central to the story.

There is not more objective to take yourself out of there because you need to show people the person doing some of the interpretation. You know?

You don't I mean, you don't want to buy one by yourself too much. Right?

But you do need to give a little bit of sense of the person who's telling you this stuff because that helps the reader understand

what they're hearing in the context of what brings you to it, I think.

It does. And I also think that it speaks to, in many ways, like dust.

I mean, we are inextricably interconnected to this place.

We are the cause of dust, and and we are making more dust.

And we are experiencing both I I I don't wanna put it in terms of black and white or good or bad, but we are experiencing

a wide spectrum of impacts from dust that then change us.

And I think that one of the things that the book does is it elucidates these feedback loops between us and our environment

within this within this particle, within this particulate matter, and that that we're all building on one another and interconnected

and affecting all of these different spaces in ways in ways large and small that reverberate throughout ecosystems.

And I think that writing yourself into that is that we are a part of this place, and and have reaching effects both in time and space.

Like, it's really important to me that this the interconnectedness is not in the slightest bit metaphorical. You know, we inhale dust.

What dust does to our lungs, the way smaller particles pass through our lungs, into the bloodstream, into the brain, once

we're talking about the really tiny, tiny ones.

You know, it is physically in our bodies, factual statements, microplastics, heavy metals, all all chemicals that ride along on dust as well. You know, it gets inside us.

We aren't entangled in some sort of moral or metaphorical sense. It's the particles inside our bodies.

That material reality is really straightforward and terrifying to think about, really quite frightening.

Certainly, dust impacts different people differently depending on where they are and what kind of air they're breathing in,

but it does impact all of us.

Absolutely every last last one of us is inhaling this. There is no avoiding it.

There's a kind of that universality, that immediacy to everybody in the book.

I mean, you hope I hope I don't want to make anyone afraid of inhaling. Please do continue to breathe. Very important.

Please don't let me use any readers through the sun.

But, yeah, what what we breathe matters, you know, the the air is most important thing is planned.

It's intimacy in many ways. And and this is something I often come back to through the lens of food, right?

Because our food becomes us, that that these particles that break down in our metabolism and go through a one cell wall thick

lining of our intestine then become a part of us. They inform us.

And we have this constant exchange between plants where our carbon dioxide becomes their tissues, their oxygen becomes ours.

And I think that dust speaks to a a manyfold intimacy with our environment, both both the built world that we have created

in the Anthropocene and also the natural world.

And it is it is both, and it is the product of all of these different spaces.

And and I I loved that because dust also becomes us.

And and we are made out of these particles and places that are coming from far reaches and that are that have a lot of impacts.

And and and so I do think that DUS spoke to intimacy in a in a in a certain way.

Very much. You know, from some of the specifics, for example, atomic testing, nuclear testing, particularly the above ground

tests, which took place from sort of 1945 through to, I think it was the early sixties, you know, detonating bombs above the

surface, and those might have happened in relatively depopulated places.

Significant consequences for people locally, but also the particles from that get into the air stream.

They can travel across America in sort of 4, 5 days.

They can travel across the world, and they can get inside everybody's bodies.

That the delayed death toll, the very, very slow cancer death tolls from, from nuclear testing, thyroid cancers, things like that most visibly.

That's one very specific event in time in history that gets inside our bodies and in another way.

There's also a lot of really emerging science about the impact of air pollution on the brain.

Worth mentioning that I do count air pollution as dust when I'm looking at particulate air pollution.

So this is the solid particles, whether it's from mineral dust, whether it's from roads, whether it's from cars, whether it's

from, carbon, from fossil fuel burning, forest fires, and so on and so forth. You know?

We call it air pollution once it's flying, and we call it dust once it lands on something that's all kind of the same particles, just different points in time.

So, you know, that air pollution is increasing, research looking about what this does to the brain, that it's actually impacting,

you know, not just lung diseases, not just heart diseases once particulates get into the bloodstream, but crosses the blood

brain barrier and the impact on things like dementia, the impact on Alzheimer's disease.

And, also, I believe into looking at things, ADHD, depression, some of the neurological consequences in here that it's, I

don't know, that seems almost more intimate in the way that it impacts our sense of self, which is a terrifying thing to say.

But the our environment and our cognition, our environment, and our sense of self, these things are are connected.

You know, as you give that brilliant example, of course, with food, you know, we can recognize that the diet we eat might

change, our energy levels might change, the clarity of fogginess we have there. So too, yeah, we really

I love that you put that that that this might impact our our sense of self and our self and and who we are because I think

that the we are the environment and that what this speaks to is that this dust is, I mean, the friction between everything

we've ever made and and that becoming us and and that in turn creating a sense of care.

The nuclear the chapter on nuclear test sites, I just found incredibly impactful.

Pull out this quote,

really pull out this quote, really quick here just to kind of to kind of talk about it.

Most importantly, thinking with dust is as always political.

It carries us beyond national borders to see the commonalities between nuclear tests tests worldwide, in their carelessness,

the populations they deem expendable, and the colonial logics used to decide who that is.

It turns our attention towards the question of who has to deal with what's discarded.

That is who has to clean up nuclear test sites and who must live with nuclear dust in the long term.

It might help us see the full picture, not just the glossy Life Magazine photographs.

Focus on the bomb, and you miss the actual disaster.

And I think some of what we were talking about with earlier, the what happens after and the places that we sort

of

hide and ship things off to so that that we don't have to see their effects, are incredibly incredibly seen within the context of this book.

And I kept returning to this idea of the unseen.

You even and and I put this at the top of my notes.

You said I'm cautious of these rewords.

Too often, the promise of renewal is simply cover for shipping the problem elsewhere.

That was one of my favorite little pieces because I do think that this showed us where we where we ship problems elsewhere

into realms that are unseen into deserts that are empty.

And then we ignore the the the literal and the metaphorical fallout.

I mean, nuclear waste is such a, or nuclear what's nuclear infused landscapes, perhaps, is the phrase. You Yeah.

The ground in Australia, for example, where they did a series of atomic bomb tests in the desert.

And the ground around the test site is sort of turned to glass, and it is irradiated.

And, you know, you've got this material.

If you want to clear up the site, I mean, you still have to dig a hole essentially and put, you know, a fit or two of topsoil

and material at that point into into a hole.

You know, it doesn't not it doesn't stop being radioactive at any point in time. It it can't.

It can just be one place or another place, very similar with mining waste, in the Four Corners region of the United States

and elsewhere, that the the land sort of impacted by mines land impacted by nuclear testing.

And, of course, nuclear waste itself, it we can't make it disappear.

There's this real there's no powerlessness exactly, but there is a real material obstinacy, right, in this is nature or the

material world just we can't make the problem go away uniquely.

This is there there is just only mitigation.

There is only finding the least harmful solution, finding the least it's all least bad. You know?

That bad situation is least bad rather than good.

You know, there aren't any great answers there.

Remediation is incredibly expensive, potentially can be afforded.

People did want to make that point in but it is 1,000,000,000 of dollars rather than a couple of 100 couple of 1,000,000 here or there.

That the the costs for decisions made decades ago are are high.

Yes. And and they've they've followed us. You know?

This idea that we were just testing a nuclear bomb, I I had a moment when when reading that chapter, right, that sort of removes

us from the idea that this is still a nuclear bomb, that we are still irradiating all of this topsoil, that we are still mining

uranium in communities where there is a lot of waste and a lot of dust that is harmful, and that that that sense of harm reaches

far into the future as as something that I think we have changed in so many different ways.

I it completely changed that radiation will never will never leave us. Right?

It it marked a a different era, you know, whether it was in an ice core, whether we now look for low background steel. Right?

There's there's such a low level of radiation that all metals have some of it.

And for really fine instruments, you have to you have to use low background steel that was produced prior to nuclear testing.

But that this harm endures within communities and within people and lives that it continues to take into effect.

My mother is just turned 70 yesterday. Happy birthday, mommy.

And she lives in Surrey in England, and she does Pilates.

You know, you gotta keep yourself limber in these these days. And she does Pilates.

And one of the other gentlemen in her Pilates class is about 85 or 87, I believe.

And she was talking to him, and he sort of said, oh, I received a medal from the government the other day. What was it for? She asks.

And to recognize that he was, as a soldier conscripted in the 19 fifties, this would be, he was exposed to nuclear testing

at Christmas Island, an island in the Pacific, which was, I think, then a British colony.

And he was, you know, a young man on a ship in cotton shorts and a shirt, told to cover his eyes, put hat fingers in front

of his eyes while a bomb goes off a couple of miles away.

There's been huge campaigning, a group called Lab Rats here, for newly affected veterans.

They've been trying to say that this was above and beyond the usual call of duty here, and this needs be acknowledged by the state as an injustice, really.

And so my mother's Pilates friend finally got his medal this this point in time, and that's just, you know, it happened half a world away.

It happens some sort of, what, 60, 70 years ago that these things can linger on.

Yeah. And it I mean, you get a I I mean, I can't help it if feel, oh, you get a medal, you get this consolation prize for

for this exposure to this material that fundamentally altered, you know, in some way, something about about you at a at a genetic level.

It's interesting. I went to a conference from for Lab Rats a couple of years ago up in Manchester, and everyone there is certainly

very aware that the harms done can't be undone.

But the sense of aggravation that in fact it wasn't seen was really, really difficult for these veterans and their families.

That that there was a sacrifice that they had made, unknowingly, but that sacrifice had not been recognized by the government,

that there were there were harms done, and they had just, you know that sense of being little people, you know, there's a

there's a phrase in my book from a woman who called, Mary Dixon, who was a downwinder campaigner, campaigner against the continued impact of nuclear testing in Utah.

And she's just like, the attitude of the authorities were just those were just people in Little Utah. Where's that? She says.

They were Mormons and cowboys and Indians. Who cares?

You know? 18 year old British military conscripts, much the same.

Indigenous people in Australia and Algeria, much the same.

This sort of and particularly in in that in the campaigning for nuclear affected people, you've got some really unusual seemingly

unusual, allegiances between veterans, between indigenous people, between Mormons, between rural people who are all been affected by this way.

And they're all quite different populations, but they've all been seen as not important because they live in somewhere small

and far away from centers of power, and that's not right.

Did you I'm you did such a good job of seeing these unseen populations, and

this unseen thing in the first place, or if that was something that you intentionally went in with this idea of seeing some

of these unseen places and people that have been have been affected by dust?

Good question. What order did that happen in? It's it's hard to say.

The book became more about indigenous lands than I knew at the beginning. I think that's fair to say.

Like, as I said, I have a degree in social anthropology.

You know, it's useful in enabling you to think about global scale histories and places that aren't in the usual history books

and things like that to be interested in what seemed like remote or out of the way places.

You know, so I was aware certainly about some of the environmental politics of these places.

But like the water, these sort of threads draw themselves together as you write, and you realize, okay.

It's not just, in Owens Valley, in in Piahunu that and Los Angeles.

It's not just that story, and it's not just the nuclear testing story, and it's not just one of these places.

It's not the not the long history that produces the Dust Bowl.

Keeps on happening in the same way.

And you want to try and join those dots together and sort of say that, you know, to talk you end up talking about colonialism. You end up talking about settlements.

You end up talking about send core periphery relations become really essential to the way of writing, actually, because I

think in a lot of times I'm writing, it's not just it's not settlers as individuals causing a problem.

It's a system of London, of Moscow, of Washington, DC against small amounts of way in rural rural places and sort of politics of that.

And, you know, I I came in knowing that was that that sort of geography, that that structure was was really central to it.

And then the specifics of who to be talking to and who were relevant kind of came through in the grassroots of going to places,

reading the books, doing the research, recognising what was important about each specific place, and to to ground it in local realities is important.

They want to write there's there are some books, actually.

Michael Marner, who you, quoted from earlier, is a philosopher, He writes this lovely book on task that's completely different

to mine because he's thinking about it philosophically and sort of the role of,

microscopes and vision and perception in it's Sure.

There's cans in there and all sorts of things.

And it it could not be less like my book, and we're both writing about dust.

But so you bring in what you know already.

You're viewing on what you're interested in, and I'm quite material. I'm interested in places. I am interested in specifics.

I'm not sort of an abstract thinker if I look enough I write about dust and, like, things. Tell me about things. Tell me about places.

Which you do you do amazingly. I you know, you said you said in that bit that these things sort of keep happening again under

the in in similar in similar ways and that you're writing some about these structures and systems.

And and, you know, correct me if I I I kind of connected this too to modernity.

And I think that one of the things that absolutely fascinated me with dust was this connection to the idea of and you and

you return to it time and time again.

I mean, it's in the it's in the byline of the title, but I have I have all these quotes about modernity here because I think

that it was really interesting to touch on this effect of modernity and our idea of progress and the way that that we have

attempted to control and to have these sort of linear ideas of of asymptotic growth.

And I think what has been done, at least from my view, in in the name of that, and and to call that progress, and then to

have dust, which is so incredibly nonlinear and is made evident by the progress of our smooth surfaces of of capitalism.

Like, that is a a part of what illuminates dust.

And to just really to really touch on modernity.

And and so I'm curious what brought you into weaving that theme in, and then maybe we can dive a little bit deeper into modernity.

So I think that's about looking for connections between places too and to understand causes.

And, you know, in individual place situations, we're talking about sense of, I mean, there's that sort of, destiny in American exceptionalism in the frontier. There's that narrative.

There is, of course, profit, the dust bowl in particular, looking at agricultural profits that could be made by running the land too hard.

Then you've got the atom bomb, and that's not about money, is it?

It's I mean, there's a there's a grand narrative of capitalism versus communism, kind of, you know, great power struggle that's driving nuclear, armaments. But, you know, okay. We've got capitalism. Sometimes we've got colonialism. Sometimes we've got this. We've got that.

Like, there's something connecting these things, but what is the right word?

And modernity seem to be the precise term to use.

What's the ideology behind why we might treat places like this, this short termist, lack of consequences thinking.

You know, sometimes it's capitalist, but, indeed, I write about the USSR and, you know, in Uzbekistan.

I talk about I don't write about it at length.

You also had a dust bolt, essentially, in Kazakhstan, from the expansion of wheat growing, very, very structurally similar

to what happened in the United States.

Again, I don't fit it into the book, but you've got quite you've got a number of examples from Africa as well, from south

Southeast Asia, from about soil degradation, from the intensification of agriculture.

And so to you need something as big as modernity to talk about the shared values there about relationship between people and

land, about that nature is something to be exploited, that nature is something that can be controlled, that that kind of straightforward

linear top down control can be achieved, and things will get steadily better each year rather than, you know, what I try to argue for.

I think it's a recognition of, as we're talking about stewardship, it's a recognition of our responsibilities, but also, you

know, we are very small and quite powerless compared to natural systems as well and that we can't always have our way.

We can't you you can't fight nitrogen cycle. Right?

You can't fight you can also can't fight dust very well.

You know, these these things,

it looks like a bigger than you, though. They don't care. You know?

They don't they don't care what you think you can do.

They're just they are just physical systems, and they will operate in that particular way.

You better respect them because they won't respect you otherwise.

And that sense of of modernity as the actor there, it it also creates a space because we can talk about sort of this is about

high modernity in particular, that kind of early 20th century or we might say sort of 18 seventies, 18 eighties through to

19 fifties or sixties, it is actually quite a time bounded period.

You know, I'm certainly not arguing against science, for example.

I am certainly not arguing against enlightenment values.

It's our argument in the favor of a more selective look at those things to say what exactly do we take from that?

You know, more scientific, more scientific humility.

And then, also, I you also to try and sketch of what next because, you know, particularly towards the end of the book, you

know, I'm talking to these NASA scientists doing absolutely cutting edge science to understand the earth system science, you

know, to understand the role of dust within the planet as a phenomenally complex interconnected system of, water cycles, carbon

cycles, mineral, geological, so on and so forth.

And that's, yeah, it's cutting edge science absolutely, but it's also they're interesting.

They all talk about how interconnected it all is.

They all come back to this, and they're using terms from ecology.

They are speaking in a not dissimilar language to some of the indigenous folks I've been interviewed who also talk about,

of course, the interconnectedness of natural systems and people within that.

And it's like there's you know, we took complexity science and increasing you know, what started off with some some cybernetics,

which was still a bit command and control oriented, so a little bit to prodomination, I think it goes, you know, into into

recognition of complex systems and ecosystems and ecology, which is both science but is sort of a new science, an able sophisticated

one, hopefully, this is better able to recognize the nature of the world we operate within.

I that that was so perfectly said, and I think that this was the first time, and I feel like I had been looking for a book

that wanted to discuss some of the reasons that we had we had sort of driven forward this idea of progress in the name of

making the world more controllable, the sort of idea of of domination.

And, also, you fold in the idea of cleanliness.

You fold in, you know, this idea of being able to eradicate certain things.

And I think that that has very much driven that idea of separation.

And then to bring it around to that sense of interconnected systems thinking, where you have an earth where that is interconnected,

and all of those systems are interacting in a way that they are affecting one another throughout these these incredible, fascinating,

beautiful feedback loops where the the Sahara is providing a lot of the phosphorus for the Amazon, and an entire continent

away, and and the idea that dust is changing our climate based on its shape and color, and exactly what it's doing within the air.

But I I really I really the aspect of modernity hit something very deep for me, just as as what you said, as a way of connecting

all of these sort of different political systems and different economic systems as as some of the reasoning behind what we

do and why we do it in that way.

It's it's interesting. There's been a sort of there are a number of friends of mine from London, people I have known for 10

or 12 years hereabouts, and we have all ended up writing books about this in some sort of way.

There's a book you will love by James Bridle, Ways of Being. You will adore it. I do.

It's one of the most more most fabulous coverts as well, which doesn't matter if it's quite nice, isn't it, when they do?

So so James' book looks at sort of the entanglements of, both more more biological mind of of ecosystems, of, consciousness

of animal life, but also taking that through into AI and computational science and thinking about systems on those sorts of terms.

And like me, James is sort of arguing that we're trying to critique simplistic or outdated notions of machine logic in a sense,

but that doesn't mean in in slightest bit rejecting science or rejecting, computational studies.

It's about using more computational analysis and, you know, in my terms, my NASA aerosol scientist using huge computational models that were absolutely technically impossible. Each each,

sort of era of climate modeling is doing something that would have been impossible 5 years before. And we can only see dust. We can only think about dust.

We can only measure dust because we now have computational power that starts to be able to look at the world, to just sort

of, you know, to be able to break down the planet into small enough grid squares, to be able to slice up the atmosphere into

different layers and to recognize, you know, there's one thing going on down here, something else happening higher up in the atmosphere.

And so it's computation that lets us see that, and that is a fantastic thing.

And also my friends Georgina Vos and Deb Chakra have books about infrastructural systems, which are fascinating.

And again, that look about that intersection of of complexity, about how systems work and about where we sit within them,

about how recognizing our agency within systems, systems, recognizing that systems are often things that people make, that

humans make, and that we have to their infrastructure is not for something outside us or beyond us, but it's something you

can shape and something which you can use to make the world better.

Yeah. Deb Deb is coming on the podcast in in March, And so and and I love James Bridle's book, and and that is very much right up my alley.

Forgive me for not recognizing that you would, of course, have read it already.

No. No. No. You're fine. I you know, you talk talk about you talk about some modeling of systems within the book.

And I think that this is a really beautiful place where where we can't eschew some of what we have created within modernity

for how it might be able to help us salvage some of what we have created with modernity.

And I know that one of my really inter it's more of a textbook, but, Freejov Capra wrote a book called systems view of life.

And in it, he sort of details some of the mathematics that gave rise to actually being able to model ecological systems, which

are the hardest to model mathematically because they are so interconnected and complex.

And I I love when something when our own because I think so often, we want things to be simple. We want things to be contained. We want them to be clean. We want them to be tidy.

And what ecosystems show us is that the the mess is this beautiful

that interconnected in that same way and that consider all of the or at least attempt to consider, and and let me be really

clear about that, attempt to consider all of the different multifactorial outcomes of any single action, as humans, whether

that's within an ecosystem or within a community or or whatever that is, that that it's not singular, that it's not this linear space.

The sense that there's a mess, the complexity is irreducible.

You know, that is the fact of the world. That it's interesting.

It's almost a matter of our, sort of, intellectual intuitions here in a way that you maybe you learn as a child or the sort

of the idea that truth is often very simple. You know?

And in mathematics, often is the case that the elegant mathematical proof is the correct one.

But increasingly, I think with some of the other systems stuff, it's like, no.

It's it's complicated all of the way down. You know?

The the entanglements, the, the nonlinear dynamics that mean that small changes in original conditions can produce very disparate

end results, and you can never measure the original conditions perfectly.

All of that is intrinsic nature of the phenomenon being looked at.

And so your gray areas become a useful metaphor here.

The idea of learning to think with uncertainty, it's part kind of part of thinking with dust.

Something I tried to develop is that sense of thinking quite probabilistically, you know, to instead of yes or no, black or

white, that this thing is how confident am I in my knowledge Or how certain is this thing?

And something might be 75% true, something might be 25% true.

And so just to to to to hold in mind that there are maybe multiple possibilities in the situation.

I find that idea of thinking with DAS to kind of useful and extensible and a good lesson to take away, working with fuzziness

of things and to kind of sometimes letting that that be. You know, we want certainty.

We want certainty in interpersonal relationships, let's say, because sometimes they're not knowing it's a fact.

You brought in something that that was perfect within the book because I think that thinking with dust and uncertainty, I

think we are at a very uncertain point in time.

And I think that where we go from here is uncertain, and I think our models will be uncertain.

And I think that so much of this has that that ring of uncertainty.

And I think that on a more philosophical note, I think as human beings, anytime we're faced with uncertainty, sometimes we

go back to that sense of wanting rigid control, that idea that that we can have domination or power over an outcome.

And I think that thinking with DUS suggested that instead of looking for that, you look for the the the interconnectedness,

and to find instead of these power structures and interconnected web of of care in the face of uncertainty.

One of the people I speak to in quotes is a woman called Erica Thompson, who is a PhD in climate modeling.

I think she worked on Atlantic storms, and she's a mathematician at University College London now.

And she's written a book on modeling and the uncertainties in modeling.

And I think I've been been I draw upon her work at the end of my chapter on dust in the earth systems and dust in climate

modeling to say that actually some of the uncertainties dust poses there are irreducible, that it is not necessarily possible

to if we knew more, we could then model it.

The kind of complexities that it puts into models are so vast and so significant that no. No. No.

There are just limits to modeling here.

She argues that better and far more mathematically than I do, but that's the gist.

And what I think is very important about what she says there is that we what this means is we have to not be reliant on models

or data to tell us how to act.

You know, the models in this case will never be 100% certain and will never be, you know, completely mechanically deterministic

down to the last photon of consequence. You know?

We have to accept there is uncertainty there.

We have to choose to act based on things like the balance of probabilities, or based on the idea that certain outcomes are

so terrible that we should put in efforts to avert them even if they aren't certain.

And, you know, certainly, our political systems aren't well set up to work on that basis.

You know, that kind of precautionary principle is hugely important to, I mean, about everything from health to ecological thinking. Right?

But to recognize, again, that that sort of fuzzy, dusty logic, we don't know that this is certainly going to happen, but look.

There's a 25% possibility percent possibility there. That seems pretty terrible. Let's let's work to mitigate that.

And so uncertainty isn't a reason not to act, and that is a really, really important lesson.

And it's fantastic it's fascinating to me how it comes out of mathematics, and it certainly comes out of her very technical work.

Perfect certainty isn't I mean, isn't a fact of the world some sometimes, and we need to think about action, differently.

Yes. Yes. That was I I really enjoyed that little section around around modeling.

And I think I think in the same vein that you have uncertainty, you have these these feedback loops.

And I I pulled this just since we were talking about messes and and and problems because I think that it sort of builds on this.

In the last chapter, you say that we must act in a world that is a mess and only getting more disorderly. Our planet is a mess ecologically.

Carbon dioxide levels climbing, the boundary of planetary systems being breached, and temperature ever rising. We're in a mess politically.

Whether you call it a poly crisis or a clusterfuck, you don't need me to elaborate.

We're even in a tangle theoretically, the system scholars argue.

Every problem interacts with other problems and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems.

I choose to call such a system a mess, Russell l Aacoff wrote in 1974.

High modern rationalization got us into this

you

This just this just delighted me. And I I think that again, so oftentimes in that same vein of simplicity, we think about

problems simplistically, that that there's there's this one piece, this one problem.

And I think that oftentimes, we then, you know, as you as you put it, in the the cautious of rewords, we we ship the problem

elsewhere and then and then pretend that it's not a problem anymore.

And and by doing that, I think we've created these problems that really build on themselves and are as interconnected as some

of the systems that you're exploring within dust.

And so we have this kind of mirror set up where you have inter interconnected ecological systems, and you have interconnected

problem systems of of politics and of modernity and of different communities, and they're kind of all converging in this in this one space.

Where do you start? I mean, I think that's a question a lot of us ask, a lot of us feel.

We feel overwhelmed by, you know, poly crisis. Right? Clues in the name. It's big.

And it is, you know, it is messy and it's interconnected.

And and and where do you begin where do you begin to get a purchase on it?

And so there's a sort of there's an argument here for dust as as method.

I think what I'm saying is you want to start with, I think, material physical realities of substances or particles or things. You know?

It seems to get lost when talking about cisterns.

Whereas if you start with, okay, what have we got maybe coming out of a specific factory or what is going on with this particular

river or what is why is there this chemical in my jeep, you know, that.

Start with something really specific and then follow that thing. Where did it come from? Where does it go? What does it do? What does it connect to?

And start from a really small and specific thing.

Go on a journey with that thing.

And that's that's a method of seeing the system.

That's a method of trying to take these very big ideas and actually getting a sort of comprehensible human scaled thing you can hold in your mind.

But also a thing that allows you to see where you might intervene or what might be done. You know?

Rather than you can look at the plant as a whole and you're like, Jesus. Right. Wait a while. How?

But if the problem is not, you know, how do I fix climate change, but, okay.

We've got a a dust problem in my town or we've got it was air pollution in my neighborhood, you know, or something or or whatever

the environmental, whatever the social, whatever the issue might be, you know, taking it down to kind of a smaller scale, what can I do locally? Because we all act locally.

That's the only way we can act, the immediate ripple effect of things you might do and things you might change. And it gives hope.

It gives hope that things might be changed.

And it it's one of the tensions of this book.

You know, I really didn't want to write a sort of disaster book that's just like this is going to be done, and I talk in everywhere I go.

You know, people do have hope or they they don't have the luxury of not hoping.

They are doing things locally, and they can see how those ecosystems can be made better. They see how places can heal.

They can see how people's health can improve you take resources of pollution.

And, you know, each of these things individually is is a source of hope. None of them individually are enough.

I still don't know how exactly to think about my I'm I'm locally optimistic in each of these places, if that makes sense.

You know, I can see that things can change and are getting better, and this amazing scientist at University of New Mexico

thinking fantastic, interactive research and and community outreach in terms of thinking about nuclear nuclear problems and

and and health problems and physiology and tech engineering. You know?

There's just so much great work going on by stuff that doesn't necessarily make national and international press, but but should.

So you can be very locally optimistic about that, and we just have to hope for lots of local solutions to build I mean, no.

That's not not that's not kind of politically correct.

There is, of course, a variable for transnational institutions and global scale lobbying and large competitive activity.

That's difficult for most of us to affect.

And I do think it is important to also look at these sort of these local and kind of medium scale interventions to recognize

that change does happen, that it's not just some sort of slide down into the abyss.

There are good people doing hard work and making things happen, and that's really important not to lose sight of.

You made such an anchor out of that within the book.

And I think that as I've been exploring some of these topics, at times, I feel overwhelmed by the largesse of everything,

that it feels like something that is crushing.

And it often comes back to whether it's on the podcast or in in in the book, the idea of hyperobjects, right, that just this

sort of massiveness, and and looming quality.

But within so many of the stories in the book, I I think almost all of them, there is this grain of you call it a discipline

of hope, which I loved because you also said that not hoping or or despair is a luxury.

And I thought that that was that brought something back home for me.

Like, to despair is a luxury, but when we have that discipline of hope and community action of really caring, you can begin

to see shifts within some of these landscapes.

And the book starts in the Owens Valley, and it ends towards the Owens Valley too with what is a really big shift.

Maybe not a perfect solution, but something that has begun to shift and change that landscape in a positive direction.

Okay. Absolutely. So to summarize very briefly, the Owens Valley or Paiute Hoodoo in Paiute language is, an area in Eastern

Sierra, kind of, Yosemite and go a little bit further east.

And it is, there's a lake known as Owens Lake or Patriata, which was drained to provide water to Los Angeles in the early 20th century.

Troy Lake beds become a huge source of dust.

You got tiny sedimentary particles that blow up in the wind, and it was the largest dust source in the United States.

You know, just a huge health consequences in the area and, you know, a lot of a lake, which is important. Culturally, it's important socially as well.

And in you know, you got the development of the environmental movement in the sixties seventies. You've got decades of litigation.

And as of 2000, there's requirements on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power that they have to engage in dust control

books to stop some of the dust.

And so there's a $2,000,000,000 building site, essentially, on what was the Tri Lake Bed, doing different dust control methods,

using different shallow flooding, gravel, techniques to stop, you know, the surface of the lake bed and being able to get up in the air.

And, you know, it's not a natural place.

As I say, I call it a building site because it does kinda look like one, except now, actually, it's filled up with water quite extensively from heavy snowfall last winter.

But, you know, it it it's not a natural place in this sense, but the levels of dust have come right down.

It's very, very close to being in attainment as terms say. And meanwhile, the birds came back.

The birds just saw you just had some water, and the birds that migrate at the western, coast west coast were like, hey. It's got brine shrimp. Brine shrimp are tasty. They're flying a long way.

We need to go and eat some brine shrimp.

They descend in their tens of 1,000, and they meet sort of within a decade.

This place becomes from desolation, becomes a sort of bird reserve, becomes this this fount of life. You know?

It doesn't it's not the unspoiled place it it once was.

You know, there used to be a steamboat across the lake.

It used to be 20 or 30 feet deep, but it is still full of life, and it is a hell of a lot less dusty.

And that's what can happen, and that's what can be done, and it changes so fast.

This was the other thing that really struck me, and this is water again.

Just add water, and these places spring back into life, and they don't actually take it can take decades to cause the damage,

and then the water in a few short years can cause ecosystems.

You know, there are seeds that lie dormant.

They're they're seeds buried in the ground.

Plants come back, birds, opportunists, and if they see a shrimp, they'll eat it. You know? It's good.

It's astonishing that there is a sort of vitality there that's pretty unquatchable, and that is something I think you can

have a lot of faith, and that's something you can have believe in.

You just have to give nature a chance sometimes, and she'll really surprise you.

Yeah. I've seen I I've seen this I've seen this time and time again in in certain agricultural spaces that that change can

happen really fast and in the face of destruction that took a significant amount of time to make.

And I think that, again, you know, tells us that there's a there's a pleasant sense of smallness within that that that we

both have the power to to change things rather substantially, and we don't.

And it is outside of any any power that we've had.

And and as soon as you just a little bit of water and something something comes back to life.

And I think that in the book, you refer to this as salvage, and you talk about the word salvage.

And and I I really loved this because I think that so often within the realm of looking for solutions, again, we see that

sort of perfect unmarred surface that that I think we've inherited from ideas of capitalism and of progress.

And and you say instead, and I'll I'll read a little quote about this.

The word I've come to think with is salvage.

To save something valuable or important from disaster, a rescue carried out in difficult conditions, a rescue that may not

completely succeed, but you do what you can anyway.

To salvage a difficult situation isn't to solve it, but to fight to avert failure and strive for even a crumb of something better.

An architectural word for reusing and repurposing, for bricolage, jagat, hacks.

It's a word halfway between salvation and garbage as the writer China Mia V, might be pronouncing that wrong, told the Boston Review in 2018.

This shit is where we are, a junk heap of history Suturing, jerryrigoring rigging,

cobbling

together, finding Suturing, jerryrigoring rigging, cobbling together, finding unexpected resources in the muck, using them

in new ways, a strategy for ruination.

A lesson that it is worth fighting even for ashes because there are better and much, much worse ways of being too late.

It is worth fighting even, perhaps especially, amid the dust.

That phrase of of his, it's worth fighting even with ashes.

I found that pretty early on, and that was just then blazoned across the top of the chapter.

It's just this sort of north star that you steer towards in your writing that this that is what we are trying to do.

That is what I am trying to say.

That, yeah, that that, yeah, that phrase.

I think I think we get lost in that, though. Right?

I think that that overwhelm, that largess that presses in on us, where there are all of these problems, and and none of them

have clear solutions is that that you lose that desire to to continue to fight.

And so to bring that back into both a smaller space and to remove some of that perfectionism and to and to invite people to

go in go in, even if it's even if it's ashes, even if it's dust, like, there is still so much that's worth saving here.

And there is still so much life in those unseen places. Like, we might look at

this place in time as being ruined in the same way that we see nothing in in a desert.

And and then to go and to realize that there are all of these seeds of life, and that a desert is in itself teeming with life,

and that there are people and traditions and communities left behind that are still there to start something in a shift, to be there with the shifting scape.

Yeah. The hope comes from your relationships, and that's relationships to community and that's relationships to place.

And I I think the reason that a lot of the people I spoke with, you know, was able to be hopeful because they had a deep relation with a particular place.

They weren't just thinking kind of they weren't getting overwhelmed by a global picture because they were focused on something very real and specific.

And perhaps those of us in cities in particular, you know, who are maybe not as bound to a specific landscape in some ways

are we lose sight of that, you know, and you end up thinking only at the kind of the abstract level and maybe not getting

getting getting your fingers dirty, getting down into the dirt, and kind and kind of connecting with specific places or or

communities, you know, that enabled you to see what changes, to see the impact of change, and to remain materially grounded in the specificities.

I don't know that it's good for us to solve the abstract things.

You know, this at that point, everything is overwhelming, but the hope is specific. Hope is material. I was quite local.

I love that. I've I've I've been thinking a lot about how we are of place, and I think that the big move into urban centers

definitely does shift that sense of place.

And you have a lot of the population of the world living in more urban places.

But I think, historically, we've always had that sense of of both being literally made out of place and the air we breathe

and the food we eat that is attached to a place, but also being connected and rooted into a place and and and feeling that sense of locality.

And I have questions about how we I've lived both in cities and and much more rurally.

And I have questions about how we can create that sort of more more rooted connection, that that material connection to hope within urban environments?

Oh, absolutely. It was something I, you know, struggled by me pushing it, but, yeah, certainly, I live in the city.

I live in London, and I am somebody who cares about specific places and goes back to particular places, both within the UK

and internationally, but I don't have the relationship to my part of London that's quite that's quite as as rich as it could be in some sort of ways.

I wonder about where I will end up in, you know, another decade. Where do I want to live?

What kinds of places to prove myself within?

I've got a great community on my little street.

My street is very sociable of that front.

There's some good stuff in my region, but yeah, it's, one of the places in the UK, actually, I'm particularly interested in

is the Lake District up in the northwest of England.

And you've got some brilliant farmers up there, particularly around the writer James Reebanks, who is also, best selling author,

and his wife, who's also actually a best selling author. They're quite a remarkable couple.

But, you know, there have been work there. It's about water.

It's one of the wettest places in the country, so quite different to the landscapes I write about. But Mhmm.

The generative work there is about slowing how water comes off the hill so that it doesn't flood, And there's been work to

re wiggle the landscapes to actually take, rivers that have been canalized and just that had been sort of you know, there

have been emphasis on training the land and speeding up water flow, but that just speeds up flooding.

And so the regenerative work there that a lot of folks are doing are rebuilding flood plains, letting the rivers wiggle slowly, building ponds, building marshy areas.

And, again, changes there have happened in about less 5 years very, very quickly.

You know, the river gives a chance to wiggle again, and the river very happy happily slows down and starts building up its

natural sort of mud banks and gravel banks, and the the plant life grows back.

And, like, some of these people's farms have changed in 5 years, 10 years, if that's absolutely fantastic.

And, I mean, there there's a lot of policy problems in terms of funding all of this and our environmental subsidy schemes

and all of us, which have a great welcome. Apologies to American readers.

It's not necessarily any better over here.

It's it's very, very, very tough, but a lot of good people fighting good fire.

Really small scales, like these really valley level ecosystems.

We've got a complete hydrological systems there.

You know, the water comes off the hills, and it's all your farmland, and you can do something about that in that sense.

And, yeah, I love love the changes I'm seeing there. It's really, really exciting.

Yeah. There's a sense of agency there that I think is is really beautiful, and and that interaction and seeing it on these sort of smaller scales of time.

One thing I was gonna ask as we sort of talked about the coming back to a more local sense of care is also dust played so much with time for me.

It felt like it bent time in many ways, that it was a measurement of time within ice cores, but that it was also I mean, when

you think about the cosmic dust and and being able to actually measure the big bang, and you also think about how everything becomes dust given enough time.

And and thinking, within the Owens Valley and the Paiute tribe, there was a lot of thinking on that more 7 generation scale

of thinking into the future that that this care has to extend well beyond.

And that I think so much of modernity has taken a right now, what is best for right now, that, whether you're talking about

the Dust Bowl and and sort of the extraction of fertility from the plains was good for right now.

And it was the extraction of the water from the Owens Valley to build Los Angeles was good for right now.

And and, I mean, the same in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where you have the cotton farming that is drying off the the water from the RLC.

And so I I wonder how that marriage of sort of locality, but on a much longer timescale, how we might think about it at that or how you think about that.

Dustin, it's paradoxes. You know, you got to be like, okay. Committed. You know? We keep local, extremely not.

And this sort of superposition of time in particular, The sense that the deep the deep past remains very relevant now.

You know, for example, some of the Dust Bowl lands, why is it so why does that land become dust so easily?

It's because it's made of lowest rock that tens of 1000000 of years ago was ash from a volcano.

So it's not, you know, igneous rock. It's all glued together very well. It's it's squashed volcanic dust.

So it doesn't take so much wind.

It doesn't take so much effort for it to turn straight back into dust again.

So it it brings tens of millions of years of history together, sometimes even more months.

I mean, I don't write extensively about space dust in the book.

It's basically I had to stop somewhere. Yeah. It would have been It's good. It was

good to stay on Earth. It was good to stay on Earth.

I think that was a good call. Exactly.

Some people are like, why aren't these other things in here?

And it's like, did you want to 600 page book because my editor didn't?

That might have.

Well, you Well, you know, lobby Hachette and see if we can get another one.

It's it's easy. Things that happened that massively long ago, geological facts that have immediate bearings on the now.

But also to recognize that we are making geology.

I mean, that's one of the sort of tenets of anthropocene thinking, whether it is the sort of nuclear layers, but whether it's

just a sort of physical transformation of the Earth's systems launched by large scale agriculture industry and 8,000,000,000

population, you know, with what we're doing to the carbon cycles and nitrogen cycles.

It's it's all it's not just a now.

It is also a sort of layers of geological record.

It's, ice cores became a particularly objective fascination form because they are, you know, so remote and so elusive. You've got to go to Antarctica.

You've got to go to Greenland and drill for 3 kilometers.

You know, this is this is staggeringly difficult to do.

And then at the bottom of that, you find dust alongside gases and dust and and dust and debris from a 100000 years ago, and

that helps you understand the ice age before the last ice age or helps you understand interglacials.

It helps you understand how climate systems can move sometimes, you know, locally in those but I say locally, sort of, you

know, Greenland scale locally, but can move sometimes incredibly fast during a period of the younger dryer.

So there's this kind of regional changes in temperature of, I think, 8 or 10 degrees, in a space of a span of about a decade

and tells you on that it's understanding an ancient history as this means to potentially understand the future, to understand,

to be able to improve our abilities to model what might happen in the century centuries ahead.

And, again, that's that's a compression of past and future, deep past, not so distant future.

But the two things speak to each other.

It's it's not as if a sort of, you know, the past isn't dead and the future is here now.

I love that. The past isn't dead, and the future is here now.

And I think you saw that, and I have to I just have to bring this in that that you can see, the minting of money, the the

way that the byproduct of of different metals being smelted and what that said about the the rise and fall of of various entities throughout time.

Yes. One one of the all time great pieces, dust research that one.

So to ex explain a little bit, this is from looking at ice cores in Greenland again, if I remember correctly.

And it's looking at, lead and lead from has been carried in air pollution, how the lead levels change through period of time.

And you get that that scientists are able to see that this rises and falls at a period 1800 or 2000 years ago in and they're like, what what's going on?

Where this lead is from human activity.

You know, nature doesn't put a huge amount of lead into the atmosphere, but, silver smelting and metallurgy, you're working with renewable ores, does.

And it's ends up they end up figuring out that this is connected to the price.

This is connected to the Roman Empire's economy and how much silver they are needing to mine and how much money they are needing

to make in Spain in 2 200 CE or or thereabouts related to the fortunes of the Roman army and how many soldiers you have to

pay and how and how much literal physical currency is needed and the spikes because, of course, an ice core is incredibly it's really precise resolution.

That's why they're so astonishing that each year's snow captures it in sequence and traps that year's atmosphere and traps

that year's dust as distinct to the next.

So it means that you can reconstruct events from 100 or 1000 of years ago on a year by year scale, which, you know, lots of

other, you know, other forms of record have not got that that quite that of a specificity.

And so you can actually look at it about progression of, you know, Roman wars in the Roman economy.

It's like we are mind blowing mind blowing.

I mean, there's there's a there's a lesson in how we are connected to them. That that really is.

Absolutely. And I think it also illustrates, you know, you said before that we are changing geology in a lot of ways.

And it goes back we are terraforming the planet in in in search of of various materials, I think, and and really changing that geology.

And it's it's worth peeking at and, I think, worth exploring in a lot of different ways.

This has come up on on the podcast in a in a myriad of ways.

I mean, even just been thinking a lot about did a podcast with Ben Goldfarb, who wrote the book Crossings and a book Eager

about beavers, and just how much the eradication of beavers in the United States vastly changed, everything about our geography, but also about our water systems.

Being a part of the scene, you got to them.

They're doing their little bits to, you know, to cause these enormous impacts. They're fantastic, isn't it?

They they're they're amazing. And they absolutely they have their own ways of changing, changing geological sense of things

and redirecting water and creating deposits of sand that are that are later mined or bring in fertility, whatever it is.

But that there that we are changing the shape of things.

And I think that this brought in really acute and specific awareness of of that change and that change through both locale

and and time, like we like we just talked

about. It's a design to kind of just to map where we are and what we're doing and and the recognition that, you know, as people

who as, you know, somebody who who benefits from that prosperity, broadly speaking, as somebody who is a Westerner and is,

you know, reasonably comfortable and has an iPhone and has the technologies and has these things enabled by mineral supply chains and and, you know Yeah.

That's that my life and my comfort is not just a sort of a given.

It is a material consequence of supply chains and systems and physical changes to the planet, and and where I sit is connected

back back to all of these things.

And there's also a lot of good work going on around clothing, actually, particularly as well as a way of recognising opposition within supply chains.

And a lot of people at the moment are thinking about how we can be more sustainable in our consumption there and reduce the

impact of decisions we barely think about.

Do I buy a new t shirt? It all traces traces and all.

But not least, actually, that cotton is an incredibly water thirsty crop. Grows very well in deserts.

So as long as you can dump enough water on top of it, it will grow in all sorts of places, which, makes it appealing if you

want to make a lot of profit, but requires empathy and vigilance.

As you mentioned earlier, that's how the RLC got dried up was the growth of cotton production in the from actually from 1920s 30s through into the 1970s.

It's demand for British cotton to for Russia to match and and to close population and to equal America, dries up a sea, dries

up the 4th largest lake in the world. And so you talk about terraforming.

Yeah. The 4th largest in the world.

That really struck me and and disappeared in a very, very short amount of time.

And I think that that also speaks to a lot of when I think about California grows with the majority of the food for, at least,

a big share of the food for the United States.

And and speaking about cotton growing really well in a desert because that is a sense of having almost a control and an experiment

that you don't have to worry about there being too much water, which is, you know, in theory, harder to mitigate.

And so you just add whatever water you need, and you have this this perfect, I'm putting this in really big quotes, climate in in which to grow something.

And I think that you then I we pick the deserts the world over.

I I think that California is more visible, especially to us here in the United States.

But we sort of outsource that that sense of fertility or our clothing or these things that aren't being produced here at home.

I one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is that we see food more easily within the supply chain, or we think about it.

And I don't know if that's because we have a certain intimacy with it or because we feel like we have a a hope of knowing where it comes from.

But so much of our surroundings, whether it's the it's the cotton in our shirts, or it's the cobalt in our phones, or it's

the sand in the glass in our phones, or screens, or our windows, or the silicon chips, is something that we can't that we

can't see and we offload into these unseen places.

I think it's sand is a really good comparison there, actually.

The other thing that fascinates me is alfalfa, which appears to be a Yeah. Asset across the American west.

You will know more than me.

I'm sure this is here. Please correct me if I'm not fully up on this.

But, yeah, because those things, we don't consume them directly. They're ingredients to make something else. The sand goes into grass. Mhmm. Alfalfa goes into cows. Right?

And it's you know, America is just kind of exporting water. It's an ancient aquifer paleo water.

A finite, quite a finite resource is being used to grow, you know, not tomatoes or some things that at least have some sort

of direct benefit being used to grow alfalfa that's then being shipped internationally.

And, yeah, I think, surely, alfalfa might grow somewhere else as well.

You know, this this this water is as precious as gold. Yes.

And a commodity crop like alfalfa is not necessarily the best use for it.

Let's keep a little bit more of it in Salt Lake. No.

I and and what you're speaking to, and I'll I'll probably get some of the so in there's a a township in Arizona, that is growing alfalfa for Saudi Arabia predominantly.

And it uses 50,000 gallons of water a year, I believe, which is is enough to support a sizable, municipality.

Not that I think that we should necessarily be putting new new cities in the middle of the desert either.

But all of this is going to water alfalfa that we then export.

And this is water that is either it's it's paleo water, as you said, it's groundwater, or it's coming off of the Colorado

River, which is now on a 100 year end contract, between 7 states, including California and Arizona.

And it is wild to think about that that this that water, and you say this really well in the book, and and especially towards

the end, it it is it is the resource, and it is life.

It is it is a life powerful resource.

I have a I have a quote in here.

But I think that that is see if I can find this.

And I think it's as simple as water is life.

That's the phrase that people confuse him. Yeah.

We are particularly, indigenous folks and people are speaking to in, in Owens Valley and the phrase used in some of the declaration

and so on and

the protests there that, you know, it it it water in these, watersheds circulates.

And if it even if it is being pumped from groundwater and just going into a crop, it then soaks back into the soil again,

and you can have some sort of recirculation into a river system.

Is a sort of yes. It does strike me as a risky intervention at a systemic level, very, very short term as as as a move there

that there is, you know, is not more water going back into the into into these aquifers, that the 100 year rain forecasts

for the for the west don't necessarily look strong, is, yes, incredibly precious. You yeah. That's let let's conserve every shot. Let's use it very carefully. It's very precious stuff.

I think that that you touched on the idea that it's unimaginable.

It was sort of unfathomable to me that we that we would pick this crop to grow with it and and then export it. And, it.

And I think it also speaks to what we said earlier that you have these systems, these structures, these ideas in place that

we keep kind of finding ourselves in the same spot.

And as we begin to kind of wrap up, like, I think that one of the things I've been asking myself is how we recognize that

spot that we're in, that how we begin to see that pattern of extraction,

the on these you you call them the hinterlands, which I loved, the the sort of idea that we

we export we import fertility from places that are unseen, and and and we just keep doing it.

And I and I think that to break the cycle, is to see it and to begin to you use the word witness in the book, which I which

I really liked to to see that this is a part of a structural and systemic pattern.

And to recognize it can be done differently in most instances that there is probably a less damaging use of that land.

There is probably a shift in crops.

There is probably some there is something that can change in these things, and nothing is nothing is set in stone.

I mean, I think what gets quite apparent in agriculture is if if we don't change things now, it is going to be forced upon us.

It is going to be, the water, certainly, in parts of the high plains. You know, that aquifer is drained. The water will just run out.

That we, I mean, there's a sense that it's it's already is mega trapped in that season. The rains will not come.

There will not be a choice, and you can either start to grapple with that now and start to set things up for the next 50 years, the next 70 years.

Peter, you know, if you want the future of the farms for your children for the generations after that, or they will have to make those decisions themselves.

There there is not there is not a sustaining of extraction.

It's physical we're talking just hard physical limits of physical systems here. It's not negotiate. We can't negotiate. Consequences come to you.

Yes. But but as you said and as you said at the beginning, there is a different way of doing this.

And I think that that is something that I keep coming back to.

And and that isn't always well illustrated, but dust really illustrated it.

It's this idea that my friend James calls it a sort of ability to tell ourselves a new story.

We have been telling ourselves the story for so long, and and we have the capability to change and to shift that storyline

and that reaches in into the future, and and I think carries with it too the past.

And and I think that that is where where dust has those two things come together, that we can begin to shift this, that we

can change our relationship to this, that we can break that cyclical pattern.

So if we look back at how some of these landscapes worked historically, you know, what crops grew on them naturally, what

how people occupied them in a dry heat, all of these sorts of questions.

There are clues within that to what the sustainable use can be in the future as well.

You know, be that patterns of irrigation, be that crops, be that livestock or the bet what's best to grow in the land, be

that, how where where people find themselves within the it shows that it shows that other ways of being have been possible and can be possible again. I think that's

that's also something to take. You know?

The past isn't past, as we've been saying.

Yeah. Past isn't past, and I think I one of the things I really wanna take away is that sort of discipline of of hope and

and to come back to being able to trace what you can in your locale, in your community.

And and that change change happens faster than than you might think at at first blush.

That's a perfect note to end on.

Yeah. I think that's perfect. And I I just I just wanna thank you immensely.

I I really mean it when I when I told you earlier, and I I don't wanna I don't wanna offend your British sensibility, but

it it was a bit of a gobsmacker, this book.

And it really did it really did change something pretty pretty big for me.

And so I wanna encourage everyone to read it and tell us where there will be links to the book in the show notes, but where else can we find you?

Because this isn't all that you write about.

You have some really beautiful musings on sort of the the intersection of technology in these places

too and of intelligence.

It's the

main thing I've been focused on for some time, so it's been the focus of that writing.

I'm just about starting to think about what I might write about next.

I mean, I I come back to the southwest. I'm interested in the Salton Sea. I'm interested in lithium. I'm interested in Yeah. Salt lake.

I I like I love a dried up lake bed. What do you do?

Strangely happens you find yourself within life, but, I love terminal basin. They're great. They're fascinating.

I love that.

Who knew? Who knew? No.

I know. I know. I mean, I love supply chains, so that's not a again, these are these are things that I surprise surprise us later on in life. Yeah.

Yeah. I've just been updating my website. So j Owens.

Me is still the place to link there.

I need to change one URL, which if I'm organized, I'll manage to do tonight so that my Google links don't entirely break.

But, yeah, that's placed a link to.

Now there's a thing called other writing, which is a place to signpost in there.

And then I need to get back on and finish an article I am supposed to be writing about solvency.

In fact, so fingers crossed it's out next week.

Fantastic. Well, we will link to all of that so people can find you, and I've recommended the book a lot already, and I I

can't wait to share this with everyone.

And I'm so appreciative of your time. So thank you for coming on.

Oh, God. Thank you. It's been a fantastic I love having the space for a lot of nice expansive conversations, especially for luxury.

You know, sometimes you hop on on radio, and you've got 5 minutes, you've gotta hit your sound bites.

But, it sounds to be able to talk more widely and with somebody who's read as widely as you have, and you've probably spoken to everybody.

You've had you've got to you get some great guests. It's terribly impressive.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. And I oh, gosh. I agree.

I tell everybody I'm a long format girl.

I don't really know how to how to keep it short.

And this is such a this is such an expansive topic that I wouldn't want to keep it in too small of a space.

So Okay. It's been an absolute pleasure. So you have a fabulous afternoon.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Mind Body and Soil podcast.

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts?

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body, and soil.

If you're looking for more, you can find us at groundworkcollective.com, and at kate_ kavanaugh. That's kate_kavanaugh

on Instagram. I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the band Alright Alright for the clips

from their beautiful song Over the Edge from their album The Crucible.

You can find them at Alright Alright on Instagram and wherever you listen to music.