Dust

Highlights

By using regenerative braking, electric vehicles do produce about 75 per cent less brake dust than petrol cars – but they generate more tyre dust, road wear and resuspension of other road debris, because their batteries make them on average heavier

About 6.1 million tonnes of tyre wear particles are generated each year, representing a not insignificant 1.8 per cent of global plastic production – plus there’s a further 0.5 million tonnes of brake wear particles, too.13 This makes road dust the source of fully a third of the microplastics in our oceans

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet,’ John F. Kennedy once said, and yet we do not all breathe the same air. Indoors as well as out, dust is a medium of deep environmental injustice.

Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has argued global warming is a ‘hyperobject’, something so massive and so widely distributed across time and space that it becomes too large to understand.21 The coronavirus pandemic was another hyperobject, so is capitalism: impossible to really perceive as wholes, in full totality, yet, nonetheless, we speak of them as things. We might try to get to grips with their effects and their impact through data and statistics or use a lot of big abstract nouns in order to try to gesture at the scale of the concepts we think we’re dealing with. But this doesn’t always succeed and so we are left anxious, struggling to situate ourselves – and, crucially, our capacity for action, for change-making – amid such monstrously vast challenges.

Dust is the definitive externality – a consequence of industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties, without this impact being reflected in market pricing. Bees pollinating other people’s crops for free is a positive externality. Dust, as you may guess, is a negative one. The coal mines and factories that powered Britain’s Industrial Revolution made a capitalist class very rich, while the cost was borne by their workers in their bodies and lungs and blood

But land isn’t just a ‘resource’. It’s places. It’s people. It’s alive.

Once again, we borrowed from the deep past to sustain our needs in the present. This is never sustainable

Capitalist market forces could never be the solution: the imperative is to extract advantage and profit, producing environmental short termism, exhaustion and crisis

year-in, year-out growth. Such a thing can’t be sustained anywhere, but that’s a matter for another book.

Yet putting oneself in the photograph is how pictures are taken these days

The world has turned its back on the Aral Sea disaster: it’s old news now, and the region doesn’t trouble the international press with more than a handful of stories a year

But there is no true safe limit for radiation exposure: that’s the nature of its random, stochastic risk. It just takes one atom to decay and zap the wrong bit of DNA to create a cancer mutation. Instead, as Carr Childers writes, ‘acceptable exposure is a flexible and, more importantly, a social determination—one deeply informed by the entwined imperatives of war and industry

Carried by winds in the troposphere, the fallout from these tests landed primarily on the East Coast. The Eastman-Kodak plant in Rochester, NY, complained that the radioactivity had damaged thousands of dollars of photographic film. The AEC put out a press release insisting that it was fine

Nuclear fallout does not kill quickly and decisively, like a bullet, but slowly and stochastically, a random, statistical build-up of risk over months and years that cannot be fully measured for decades, even centuries, until the full toll of cancers it causes can be counted. It’s a fuzzy risk – and therefore a deniable one

Casinos marketed their north-facing views, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce issued a calendar of scheduled testing dates, and tourists flocked to the city to stand on hotel rooftops, sip ‘atomic cocktails’ and watch mushroom clouds swell in the early dawn. For a moment, Cold War dread might be imagined as something like a thrill

If this much mass death can be rendered essentially permissible (through attribution to old age, endemicity, comorbidities and poor individual decision-making), then of course America and every other nuclear testing country can repeatedly nuke people for several decades and get away with it. TV news cameras don’t turn up when someone dies fifty years after a bomb goes off

But – as a substantial body of human rights scholarship argues – memory is necessary. It’s ‘necessary for coming to terms with and righting the wrongs of the past and thus preventing future violence’, sociologist Amy Sodaro writes: ‘there is an ethical duty to remember

And above all, a dusty problem is an environmental injustice, where the people who have caused the problem aren’t the one dealing with its consequences – separated as they are by distance and time, but also wealth, race, class and power

But people and authorities talk of ‘repair’, ‘renewal’, ‘restoration’. When we’re talking about nuclear mining waste, the phrase is ‘remediation’, a word of implicitly low expectations: remedial work for land that, like a school child, hasn’t met the necessary level of ‘attainment’. I’m cautious of these ‘re-’ words – too often the promise of renewal is simply cover for simply shipping the problem elsewhere

None of the people in those places believe the land they live on is ‘ruined’. It’s not over; it’s not past tense. What’s happening might be limited, deeply compromised and massively insufficient, but there are green shoots, from which a new way of being may grow.

of living not as masters but participants in a world of complex systems and environmental limits

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. Ackoff wrote in 1974

High-modern rationalisation got us into this predicament, but it doesn’t get us out

not as forgettable externalities but intrinsic parts of the whole

But enough: enough high modern heroics. This is a salvage job at best, our hero less the entrepreneurial innovator than the janitor. The ideology of ‘innovation’, novelty and disruption that guided the twentieth century urgently needs replacing with an ethics of maintenance and care if we are to make it through the twenty-first