Speck by speck, dust piles up

 Apparently, the amount of airborne dust doubled in the 20th century, according to a recent scientific paper in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The claim sounds outlandish. The amount of dust in the world must be a constant. The finding was somewhat surprising even to Natalie Mahowald, the lead researcher on the study and an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. Climate change seems to be one source for all the new dust. Human land use is another, she said.

Alternately, I asked, have researchers considered the possibility that the dust might have come from under my bed? Recently, my wool Schlitz hat fell down there. When I retrieved it, the hat had grown a full, gray rabbinical beard.

Dr Mahowald’s study didn’t measure dust from human sources, like our burping tailpipes and pilling sweaters, she explained. “Dust is such a vague term. I’m being very particular here: soil particles suspended in the atmosphere.”

Mahowald seemed to have her hands full figuring out what all that dust might do to the earth’s oceans and climate. Academia can be petty that way.

So I compiled my own advisory panel of lay experts. They were people who live in white apartments and people who collect books by the myriad. The future is looking like a dustier place, I said. What can we do to prepare?

We could start by closing the windows, said Jane Novick, who lives on the fourth floor of a prewar building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. The buses and taxis crawl by all the time, she said.

“My husband tries to open the window,” said Novick, 62, who volunteers at a pediatric hospital in Manhattan. “I say, unh-unh.” The 4,000-square-foot apartment isn’t all white. There is some cream and beige, too,  Novick said, and a celadon-coloured couch. The Novicks employ a regular house cleaner, she said. But “I must DustBust every day. Sometimes a couple of times a day.”

Cleaning consequence

All that cleaning can have an unintended consequence: Oddly enough, it actually breeds dust. In fact, cleaning is one of the three main sources of household dust, according to research on indoor particles. Cooking is the second; movement is the third.

Every step disturbs tiny particles of dirt, fibre, soot, pollen, paint, food and dead skin. In common parlance, it’s all dust, said Richard Flagan, the chairman of the chemical engineering department at the California Institute of Technology. As soon as these motes lift off a carpet, “you induce air currents” that propel them around the room, he said.

Novick has learned to live with her dust. She has edited her possessions: the books, photos and travel mementos.

Brooklyn-based design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg makes the case for cleanliness in aesthetic terms. “Dust is not a problem for the minimalist,” she said. Working under the name “swissmiss,” the 37-year-old graphic artist favours plenty of white space. The same rule applies to her condo in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, which Eisenberg shares with her family.
Visitors to the apartment, she said: “say, ‘Wait a minute where’s your stuff?’ ”

Eisenberg’s secret? Being a “minimalist in the living room,” she said, means being a “maximalist” in the closet. It’s a honeycomb in there, though space might be tight for a bee.

For her, cleaning is not so much an activity as a state of being. She remembers having a no-mess childhood in a small town in Switzerland. Her mother ran an orderly home, she said. When one of the family’s au pairs lagged in her housekeeping, Eisenberg’s mother sent her a gentle reminder.

“She wrote with her finger” on the dust that had gathered atop the grand piano in the parlor, Eisenberg recalled, leaving a single Swiss-German word, “sau.” Or in translation: pig.