Episode 5: Our dusty world.

Dust.

It’s really too small a thing to worry about, isn’t it? When we think about the environmental challenges we are facing in the 21st century, we tend to think big – global warming, the ozone hole, mega volcanoes, earth quakes, or perhaps the devastation brought by large scale conflicts - even, at the very worst, a nuclear explosion.

We tend not to think about the small things, the very smallest things, like dust.

This is perhaps because we usually imagine the modern world to be shiny and clean; dusty things are old.  But in this episode I will be talking with Jay Owens, who shows us how central dust is to the modern world, from the dust in our homes to the dust from nuclear fall out.

Jay's recent book, Dust: the world in a trillion particles, was published in 2023