For his senior thesis work at Princeton, Jack Lohmann spent a month on Nauru, a Pacific island once rich in phosphate rock and now a decrepit relic. Nauru’s history of destructive mining is a cautionary tale to which Lohmann devotes an immense swath of his new book — White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World (Pantheon Books, 2025).
The book unfolds the relationship between humanity and phosphorus rather than describing practical ways that societies can recycle human nutrients now. A few solutions are mentioned in passing, almost as a teaser (“In Japan, half of all human sewage is still made into fertilizer.”). Lohmann concludes: “Putting waste at the center of farming—where it always, until recently, had been—is a democratic action…. Waste is universally emitted and individually controlled.” You can’t argue with that. But how do we get out of the fix we’re in? White Light doesn’t answer this question, yet it’s still an important read for people who are seeking to understand the role of phosphorus in modern agricultural settings.
Partly lyrical and sometimes journalistic, White Light explores how phosphorus is central to life, growth, and rebirth. The black and white illustrations that begin each chapter, created by Alice Maiden, resemble block prints and gently remind us of nature’s cycles:
“In the moments that follow the death of a whale, when the light disappears and is swallowed by dark, the body’s weight draws to the base of the sea and compresses. It settles in mud. It forms an environment known as a whale fall, a world that will last for decades.”
Lohmann reminds us that rocks containing phosphorus — a rare element that’s critical for life —lend it to plants, which relinquish it to an herbivore’s bones, which ultimately find their way back to the sea. The author is critical of how industrial agriculture doesn’t foster soils containing organic matter, bacteria, and fungi. These are needed to make phosphorus-containing fertilizers fully available to crops. “On the whole,” he writes, “crops generally absorb one-fifth of the phosphate that is applied to the soil…. Around the world today, 70 percent of cropland contains more phosphate than it needs—although many of those soils, depleted of life, do not provide their phosphate to the crops that grow within them.”
In describing modern industrial agricultural practices, Lohmann pivots to those being studied since 1843 at England’s Rothamsted Research, the world’s oldest experimental station. “Each year,” he writes, “the amount of phosphorus that slips away through…wasted sewage, unused manure, food waste, and erosion—totals more than the amount that is mined. If phosphorus were reused as it once was—and as it still is in some communities around the world—mined sources would be all but unnecessary.” Rothamsted, so rooted in the past, is looking toward that future, and so must all of us.
