Dust

Jay Owens

£12.99

In stock

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth’s surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider – it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought. This book sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight.

ISBN: 9781529362664 Category:

Description

‘Superb’ Telegraph
‘Marvellous’ New York Review of Books
‘Brilliant’ Sunday Times
Eye-opening . . . impressiveGuardian
‘Powerful’ Nature
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Dust may seem inconsequential, so tiny and mundane as to slip below the threshold of thought. Yet within the next one hundred years, life on Earth will be profoundly changed by heat and drought – and that means dust.

In this ground-breaking book, Jay Owens shows how the modern world is made through both the creation and expulsion of dust. From particle air pollution and burning fossil fuels to land degradation, desertification and nuclear fallout, we find out the immense challenges confronting people and the planet.

With clarity and insight, Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles helps us understand our legacy and discovers the biggest ideas can be found in the smallest particles
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Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet

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

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

‘From Mark Kurlansky’s Salt and Laura Martin’s Tea to Jared Diamond’s Guns and Germs and Steel, can we now add geographer Jay Owens’s Dust?’ Telegraph

Additional information

Weight 0.281 kg
Dimensions 12.8 × 19.6 × 3 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

400

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

304.28 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K

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