Stories propel the phosphorus dilemma to an unfinished climax
The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance (2023, W. W. Norton & Co, 228 pp.), bursts with stories, some of which you may not want to hear. Exploitation. Greed. Pollution. But insight, bravery, ingenuity and persistence, too.
In the riveting style of a newspaper reporter, Dan Egan draws us into one of the biggest environmental dramas of our time: the discovery of phosphorus as a soil amendment, the worldwide quest for it, the profligate use of it in the US, and the ways phosphorus is poisoning our fresh water, from Lake Erie to Lake Okeechobee.
His clear, fast-moving prose can tempt the curious, whether that be teen or adult, scientist or nonscientist:
Simanski was alone on the shoreline that day as he ambled, eyes down, over the sweep of rocks squeezed between the tongues of the lazy, glassy Baltic waves and a thirty-foot-high bluff when he spotted what he thought was a piece of fossilized oyster shell about the size of a US quarter. He didn’t consider the orangish stone a prize find, but he thought it was worth bringing home to show his wife. So the sixty-eight-year-old stooped over, picked it up and dropped it in his pants pocket….
After about ten minutes, Simanski heard a pop and felt a sharp pain near his hip, and when he looked down he saw yellow flames flaring from his left leg. “It was like lightning coming out of my jeans. Like a flash,” said Simanski, who was initially more baffled than frightened….
Bewilderment turned to terror after Simanski shoved his hand into this pocket to snuff out whatever it was that caused the fire and he felt nothing but a viscous substance that had the consistency of melted chocolate. When he jerked his hand out of his pocket each fingertip was covered in the goo and ablaze like its own candle.
Egan explains that those orange nuggets in the Baltic region aren’t gemstones but fragments of “some of the most dangerous stuff you can find on the periodic table—elemental phosphorus.” When bonded with oxygen, phosphorus becomes the stable phosphate that is essential to life, the “P” in our fertilizers that, along with nitrogen and potassium, spurs plant growth.
With a degree in history and a graduate degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, Egan gravitates to the long view of how we ended up where we’re heading. And where we’re heading is dire. We’re raiding dwindling phosphorus reserves and pouring it on crops. As phosphate drains to lakes and oceans, it’s feeding algae that choke waterways, suck out the oxygen, and disrupt the balance of life itself.
The phosphorus boom bedevils us still
The Devil’s Element is divided into two main parts. In the first, The Race for Phosphorus, the author takes us back several centuries to a time when guano, crushed bones, and pulverized rocks were discovered to boost crop growth, and the intense competition over who could mine them.
If his wince-inducing details don’t lure you onward, the predictions from some of his sources will. In the “War of the Sands” chapter, Egan writes, “Unlike manure, which is manufactured daily…the phosphorus rock deposits that sustain the world’s modern agriculture system do not regenerate on a human time scale. This will, eventually, likely pose a problem for every person on the planet….” Then he describes billionaire Jeremy Grantham’s ability to predict bad times ahead, like the tech bubble in 2000 and the 2008 housing crash. Regarding phosphorus fertilizers, Grantham says, “’There seems to be only one conclusion: their use must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve.’” While scientists disagree about exactly how long our reserves will last, there’s consensus that Morocco and Western Sahara have about 70-80% of the planet’s phosphorus reserves—and those are destined to be more valuable than oil.
In the second section, The Cost of Phosphorus, Egan unfurls several environmental sagas. After goliathian Procter and Gamble hooks American households on phosphate detergents, one scientist living in the wilds of Canada gathers the data and a photograph that turns the Tide (so to speak). Due to state bans and voluntary reformulations by manufacturers, U.S. household laundry and dishwasher detergents are phosphate-free today, but agriculture is a different story. The phosphates in fertilizers not absorbed by crops, in combination with those in livestock manure, continue to pour into the Great Lakes and other U.S. waterways. “The number of animals in the…[Lake Erie] watershed more than doubled to twenty million between 2005 and 2018,” writes Egan, “while the amount of manure-based phosphorus added to the watershed grew by 67 percent, to 10,600 tons annually. Those farming operations collectively produce as much excreta as a city of at least several million people. And…it eventually winds up in Lake Erie.”
As a journalist in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences and the author of The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (2018), Egan knows this dilemma well. But he admits to not being prescriptive. He ends the book with only a few ways we might be able to get ourselves out of the harmful algal-blooming mess we’ve created. The brief chapter called “Waste Not”—in the equally short Future section—explains the need to better manage manure in agricultural settings and sewage in cities. He delivers a quick overview of the immense potential benefit of upscaling urine-recovery technology by describing the University of Michigan’s bathrooms, the Rich Earth Institute’s urine diversion projects, and the sewage treatment plant in Hamburg, Germany—powered by captured methane and deriving phosphorus atoms from its biosolids. The overarching message isn’t lost on the reader: people are trying, but there’s no easy fix.