September 17, 2024 • 48 mins
Phosphorus is an element that wears many faces. Its overuse as a fertilizer has polluted freshwater ecosystems, transforming rivers and lakes from thriving communities to lethal zones devoid of life. Its role as an explosive has brought fiery death and suffering to many during times of war. And its dwindling global supply poses an existential threat to humanity. Because phosphorus is not just a destructive force - it is essential for all of life on this planet. In The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance, author Dan Egan explores the multi-faceted nature of phosphorus and the surprising ways this element has shaped our world. Egan, Journalist in Residence at the Center for Water Policy in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences, transports readers from the guano-covered islands off the coast of Peru to the fertile fields of the American Midwest, from the 17th century laboratories reeking of boiled urine to our tenuous future as the demand for this element outpaces its supply. Tune in to learn about this powerful yet underappreciated element.
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Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast Will
Kill You. You are listening to the latest episode in our
tp w k Y book Club series. In this series,
which is one of my favorite things about making the podcast,
(00:59):
we interview authors of popular science and medicine books, asking
them all sorts of questions, from how did you get
the idea to write this book? To what are your
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you'd like to check out the full list of TPWKY
book Club books, those we covered last season, the ones
(01:22):
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(01:42):
course our book club books, nonfiction books and memoirs we
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(02:05):
Any questions you wish I had asked, any recommendations for
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we'd love to hear them. And one last thing before
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enjoying the podcast, please take a moment to rate, review,
and subscribe. It really helps us out. Okay, now on
(02:28):
to the book of the week. Environmental journalist and award
winning author Dan Egan joins me to chat about his
recent book, The Devil's Element, Phosphorus and a World out
of Balance. I'd wager that for most of us, phosphorus
doesn't factor into our everyday thoughts or vocabulary. But this
(02:48):
element holds in it the key to life as we
know it and thus the power to ensure our continued
survival or map the path of our ultimate col lapse.
And that fork in the road is rapidly approaching where
we either decide to deal with the massive phosphorus imbalance
(03:09):
we have or just let the clock run out and
see what happens. Not to be dramatic or anything, but seriously,
this is not a problem that's just going to go
away without intervention. But what is this problem? Like, what
do I mean by phosphorus imbalance? Great question. Phosphorus is
an element found in all living things. It helps to
(03:32):
make up our DNA, our bones atp and without it
life would not be possible. As a resource, phosphorus is
hugely important as a fertilizer and is widely used around
the globe in agricultural settings, helping us maintain the enormous
global food supply we need. Over use of the element
(03:54):
has led to this paradox where over exploitation of phosphorus
for use as a fertilizer is leading to a global
shortage at the same time that too much phosphorus an
agricultural runoff, is polluting waterways, promoting toxic algal blooms that
have tremendous implications for ecosystem and human health. When we
(04:16):
think of wars fought over natural resources past and potential,
oil or water probably springs to mind before phosphorus would,
But that might just be the future we're facing. In
The Devil's Element, Egan takes readers through the past, present,
and possible future of phosphorus. He shares the fascinating story
(04:37):
of when phosphorus was first discovered and how it earned
its devilish nickname. He tells the tale of Peru's quote
unquote inexhaustible guano islands and the lessons we should have
learned from them. He explores the impacts phosphorus has had
on the Great Lakes and traces the increasingly frequent algal
blooms in fresh water across North America to ethanol production
(05:01):
in the Midwest, and he ends the book by turning
to possible futures determined by our relationship with phosphorus. What
might happen if we fail to correct this phosphorus imbalance
and permit its continued over use. How can we begin
to bring the scales back into balance and give ourselves
(05:21):
more time to recapture phosphorus from the most polluted areas.
The Devil's Element is an eye opening and gripping read
that will have you wondering how on earth we're not
all talking about phosphorus all the time. So let's get
to talking about phosphorus right after this break. Dan, thank
(06:09):
you so much for being here today. The Devil's Element
was such a fantastic and eye opening read and I
am so excited to dig into this overlooked but incredibly important, essential,
really element, phosphorus.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I'm happy to be here. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
So, starting right at the beginning, what is phosphorus, Where
is it found? What do we use it for?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Well, phosphorus is an element, but it's not really found
as as an isolated element in nature. It's always bound
with oxygen atoms to create phosphates, and phosphates are really
the backbone of our whole food system. It is a
critical fertilizer that humans have become addicted to over the
(06:54):
past two hundred years, and it's worked miracles on the
crop lands. But the problem is we only have so
much of it, and we're burning through it at an
unsustainable pace, and that's having that's gonna have consequences on
our food supply in the coming years and decades, decades,
I would say, but it has immedia consequences right now
because we're using it over using it to such an
(07:17):
extent that we're following our waters. Because it's not good
at just growing you know, soybeans and kernels of corn.
It also when it hits water, grows algae and increasingly
it's it's spawning outbreaks of toxic algae. It's like we
turned on a gusher and we can't really turn it
off now without you know, causing a lot of pain
(07:38):
and suffering across the planet. At the same time, we
should be able to control the flow much better to
eliminate the downside of phosphorus and enhance the upside. And
the upside is it puts food on our tables.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
How did you first become interested in phosphorus and these
like this phosphorus paradox and the monumental problems that the
world is facing with this element.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You know, I was like everybody else, they didn't know
how to spell it. I didn't know what it was.
But it was doing some research for a book that
came out in twenty seventeen called Death in Life for
the Great Lakes, and one of the chapters in that
book dealt with Lake Erie and its history, how it
was declared America's dead seed back in the nineteen sixties,
and how we resuscitated it with basically the Clean Water Act.
(08:26):
And what the Clean Water Act did was it put
the screws to industries that were polluting the lake. And
the big problem at the time was detergent synthetic soap.
It was largely in the fifties and sixties. When you
buy a box of tide or whatnot, it was almost
a box of phosphorus. And once they figured out that
(08:47):
that was causing Lake Erie to turn, you know, distressingly
green and killing much of the aquatic life, they decided
to do something about it. And so when I was
doing this research, I was like, WHOA. The Great Lakes
book was largely a product of like ten or twelve
years of reporting that I did at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
(09:10):
and I enjoyed doing that book, but I kept thinking, boy,
it'd be fun to write a book from scratch, And
when I came across phosphorus, I thought I'd love to
do a book on it. I ended up doing that
and it was quite a challenge, but it was enjoyable
as well.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So you mentioned the Clean Water Act and how powerful
it was in that it really did kind of slow
the progress of pollution in some areas. But as you
point out in your book, this Act included a giant
loophole for agriculture. Why was that loophole left in and
what consequences did or does it continue to have?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, it made sense at the time because once they
figured out that, you know, our waters from coast to
coast and really around the world were turning green because
of what we were overdosing them with phosphorus detergents which
would just flow right through the wastewater whatever wastewater treatment
plants existed at the time and into the water.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
So so once we realized that what was going on,
that really spurned the Clean Water Act, and they came
down heavy on industry because that was the major.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Polluter of phosphorus at the time. With the detergents. Agriculture
was largely largely left alone because in regulatory parlance, you know,
they refer to it as point source and non point source,
and point source is basically anything that comes out of
a pipe or a smoke stack. And the Clean Water
actilated the Clean Clean Air Act, it really required that
(10:39):
we stopped polluting wantonly from these pipes and smoke stacks,
and if not eliminated completely, then you know, severely limit
the amounts that we were discharging, and that worked, and
it worked really well for a couple of decades. Agriculture
was left alone because they thought this non point pollution,
which is basically you know, stuff just coming off the
(11:01):
landscape was too diffuse and not significant enough to really,
you know, warrant some heavy regulating. But that was in
nineteen seventy two, and you know, fifty years later we
farm a lot differently than we did at that time.
And I'm going to talk specifically here about you know,
the capos, the concentrated animal feeding operations or factory farms.
(11:24):
You know, it used to be that a herd of
one hundred cows was a big deal. Well, now I
live in Wisconsin, America's dairyland. It's not uncommon to have
eight thousand or ten thousand head of cattle. And you know,
they do more than produce milk. They make manure and
they do it just like milk every day, and it's
got to go somewhere. And historically, you know, the rule
(11:45):
of thumb is it takes an acre to sustain a cow.
And this is the beauty of the phosphorus molecule. It
doesn't go away. So in simple terms, a cow in
a pasture would eat grass. The cow would poop that
would have the phosphorus from the grass in it, and
it would replenish the crop land. So it was like
(12:07):
a virtuous cycle, a never ending loop. Cow poops, grass grows,
cow eats grass, cow poops, and on and on and
on and on. Well, we don't have the acreage to
sustain you know, these these that's why they call them
concentrated feeding operations. They're basically today the cows aren't typically
out in past year. They're they're in a barn being
(12:29):
fed grains from you know, wherever, and and the amount
of manure that they create is substantial. It's bogglingly huge.
A rule of thumb is one cow produces about as
much waste as eighteen times as much waste as a human.
The difference is human waste goes through treatment and you know, largely,
(12:52):
and cow manure just goes on the land, whether the
land needs that nutrient infusion or not. And if it's overdosed,
it does what everything else does, is it flows downstream
when it rains, and it ends up in our water.
As they said before, then it's not growing crops we want,
but it's growing toxicolgy.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
And I want to circle back to some of these
downstream effects and the consequences of these algal blooms and
so on. But I kind of want to talk about
the title of your book as well, the Devil's Element.
Where does that name come from? And you know, does
it relate to when people first recognize the significance of
the substance. There are so many good little stories that
(13:31):
you share in your book about this name and sort
of the magic of phosphorus.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it's been called the Devil's element for centuries, and
you know, more recently people think of it because it
was the thirteenth element discovered back in I think it
was sixteen seventy nine in Hamburg, Germany, and it was
discovered by alchemist who was trying to isolate the Philosopher's Stone,
this mythical material that they believed at the time could
(14:01):
transmute base metals into silver and gold platinum. And the
idea at the time was that all metals are slowly
evolving to a more precious state, and what we need
to do is just find out what's causing that evolution
and speed it up so you could turn lead into
gold and get rich. So this guy, his name was
(14:22):
hennig Brand, operating out of Hamburg, Germany in the late
sixteen hundreds. He thought it could be derived from the
human waste stream. So he did a lot of tinkering.
And these guys were serious laboratory operators at the time.
I mean, they had equipment that we can't even replicate
today in terms of how high they could keep heat
(14:45):
for weeks on end. We can do it on an
industrial scale, but we don't have the earthenware today that
they did. And so, through a bunch of urine and
a bunch of hocus pocus, he eventually baked out of
these of the human waste stream these waxy, glowing nuggets.
And this was phosphorus. It had been cleaved from its
(15:05):
oxygen atoms and it was in its elemental form, and
it was a real bewitching substance at the time because
it glowed in the dark and if you like smudged
it on a wall, you would leave a streak that
glowed in the dark. But unfortunately, if these little nuggets,
you know, not much bigger than like a marble, heated
(15:27):
to just above room temperature, maybe eighty fahrenheit, they combusted
and burned it, you know, ferociously hot. And that's really
where it got its name, the Devil's element. And there
was really no practical application in the late sixteen hundreds
or early seventeen hundreds for this other than it was
just a curiosity. You know, it didn't turn anything gold,
(15:47):
you know, turned out urine can't turn anything gold. Maybe
a snowbank, but that's about it. So it was it
just became a curiosity for a while. And then you know,
as is you know, as how it goes with humanity.
We eventually figured out how to weaponize it, and at
first we were using it as match tips, Lucifer match tips.
(16:10):
That may be another reason for the term devil's element,
but eventually we made bombs with it, firebombs and cndiary bombs.
And coincidentally, Hamburg, which is phosphorus hometown, was basically burned
to the ground in nineteen fifty three by the Allies
dropping incendiary bombs that were largely made of phosphorus, and
(16:32):
so the name persists today because the stuff is dastardly.
When those bombs dropped in the nineteen forties, you know,
they would burn through anything that they hit, you know,
whether it was a roof of a home or somebody's skull.
I mean, it was really really bad stuff. But if
it hit water, it stabilized immediately, and so it looked
(16:53):
like it looked like fireworks when you just see those
globules just kind of coasting from the clouds down into
you know, I had a Fourth of July celebration. That's
what it looked like. But when it hit the water,
it wasn't like ash that just disappeared. It solidifies and stabilizes,
and so unfortunately today it looks a lot like amber.
(17:15):
And the region around Hamburg is rich with amber because
it used to be, you know, a conifer forest and
all the resin you know, over time it became amber.
So there's there's long been amber hunters on the shore
of the Baltic Sea or the Elbe River. And sometimes
when people grab and think is amber is not it's
(17:36):
one of these unburned chunks of phosphorus and they put
it in their pocket and boom. I opened the book
with a guy who was beach combing on the Baltic
Sea and he picked up what he thought was a
fossilized oyster shell and put it in his pocket, and
his pant leg just exploded and or his pocket just
(17:59):
burst into flavor. Since he had to go into the
sea and this was December to put the flames out
and every time he came back out, it would flare
up again. And they were going to take him away
in a helicopter, but they thought he'd take the helicopter down.
They didn't know what was going on, and they finally
took him away in an ambulance packed with wet towels,
and he survived, but he sustained about burns to about
(18:21):
forty percent of his body. And that's not It doesn't
happen every day, but it's not uncommon. You can google it,
and there's warning signs on the beaches and on the
river banks in that region of Germany to stay away
from things that look like amber. You know they're using it.
They use it today too. It's not supposed to be
used as ancendiary bomb. It burns so hot and so
(18:46):
brightly that it's used to eliminate the night sky or
to create smoke screens. It's not supposed to be dropped
on people, but it is, and the consequences of that
are and it'll burn to the femur and then some
so and through a skull, and yeah, the devil's element.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just
a few Welcome back, everyone, I've been chatting with Dan
(19:31):
Egan about his book The Devil's Element, Phosphorus and a
World out of Balance. Let's get back into things. As
you mentioned, we talked a little bit about this this
phosphorus paradox where there's both a shortage and an over
use or pollution issue. And in your book you discuss
some of the issues with the shortage, and you know,
(19:52):
what will happen as the world runs out of its
phosphorus supply. What are some of the estimates for when
that might happen, either within the US or you know,
just the globe.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Well, let me rewind just a little bit to just
explain that. You know, ever since we've discovered it, we've
craved it, and we've found new sources, and we've inevitably
run out of those sources. I mean, it started in antiquity,
when you know, farmers just intuited that, you know, you
put certain stuff on crops and it makes them grow better.
And you know, commonly that was manure, animal and otherwise
(20:28):
humans included. But there was only so much manure in
you know, sixteen in the sixteen hundreds, So the British
were really were they were really under the gun to
keep their crops productive, because you know, it's an island
nation with limited crop lands. And they eventually figured out
that bones, and they didn't know why, but bones worked
(20:50):
really well and that set them propelled them into some
really weird places, including so the Battle of Waterloo was
in eighteen fifteen, I believe, and in the five ten
years after that the British went over and looted that
whole battlefield. They haven't found any bones. They found one
set of remains. It was like a curiosity a few
(21:10):
years ago, but it's just been widely held that there
are no bones at Waterloo because the British took us
back to England, ground them and especially built mills and
spread them on the crops to grow turnips and wheat.
But there was only so many bones to go around.
So then we chased after new substances and turned out
(21:31):
bird poop is a spectacular source of phosphorus, and that
sent the British and later the United States to the
western coast of South America, to these desert islands off
of Peru that are just basically mountains of dried bird poop.
And at the time they thought that their mountains were
there were so many of these islands and mountains of
(21:51):
bird poop that it was an inexhaustible resource. And this
is talking. We're talking like the eighteen forties to the
eighteen eighties. By the eighteen eighties and nineties, we'd run
out of it, and that sent us on the hunt
for more. And now chemists were involved, and they had
figured out that it was phosphorus, so they could just
find phosphorus rich material use it as crops, and that
led us to sedimentary rock deposits. They're relatively scared scarce,
(22:15):
and they're scattered around the globe, and that's what we've
been relying on ever since, like say the eighteen eighties
eighteen nineties, and in the United States, our main deposits
are in Florida, and we are, you know, on course,
we're burning through them at such a pace that we're
not going to we could run out in three decades
or four decades. At that point, we're going to be
(22:36):
dependent on other countries for our nutritional security, which is
a big deal. It's probably a bigger deal than energy
security because there's workarounds to oil, but there is no
workarounds to phosphorus. It's in every living cell on the planet,
no phosphorus, no life, no crops, And it just so
happens that seventy to eighty percent of the known reserves
(22:57):
left are in and the occupied territory of Western Sahara.
And that's a pretty volatile place right now and could
become more so as countries like the United States and others,
you know, start scraping for phosphorus to put on their
crops to feed they're.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Citizens, in addition to these Peruvian guano deposits. And it
does seem like, at least in recent decades, there's been
like restoration of some of those areas where hopefully there
can be a more sustainable cycle of this, but there's
also been exploitation, not just of phosphorus as a natural resource,
(23:34):
but of people that live in these areas where phosphorus
is located. And you shared one of these stories in
your book. Would you mind taking us through that again.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, Well, the indigenous people of the Western Sahara, you know,
they are nomadic people, and you know, I had been
for a long time, and we're all the way up
until the nineteen seventies when Spain opened up a phosphorus mine,
a phosphate rock mine on their land, and then Spain
(24:09):
pulled out real soon thereafter, and Morocco occupied it and
has controlled the mind ever since, and much of the
native population of the area has been, you know, basically
warehoused in these tent camps. They were supposed to be,
you know, they were talking over one hundred thousand people.
(24:31):
It was supposed to be a temporary situation when Morocco
came down and occupied the territory in the nineteen seventies,
right mid nineteen seventies, and the native people sought refuge
in nearby Algeria, and it was just at the time,
the thinking was just let's hold tight and we can
go back home in a matter of months. And I
(24:54):
talked to a young woman whose mom was born in
the camp and whose grandmother was put in the camp
when she was in her teens, I believe. And so
you've got generations and generations of these people growing up,
you know, exiled from their land, and nobody really had
an interest in that land until they found the Phosphorus.
And so there was a low grade war that went
(25:17):
on from the mid nineteen seventies to the late nineteen nineties.
And it's the UN broker a very fragile peace that
is kind of fraying. Now there's been guerrilla attacks on
the mine, more specifically on They built the world's largest
conveyor belt. It's about one hundred kilometers long to take
the product from the mine across North Africa and out
(25:40):
to the Atlantic where it could be put on boats
and shipped around the world. So this stuff is, you know,
incredibly valuable, and it forces people to do things to
each other that they otherwise wouldn't. And you know, it's
an old story for humanity, but this is one that
(26:00):
not enough people know about. They don't they think about
climate change, they think about oil deposits, but they don't
think about rocks, special rocks in the ground that really
sustain the modern agriculture system.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, it's funny to think of when phosphorus first being discovered,
people had hopes that it would turn substances into gold.
But it seems like as valuable as gold in some situations,
are even more so.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Absolutely absolutely, But you know it has its downside, which
we've talked a little bit about. I mean, it's it's
a life accelerant and not all that that's not we
don't want all of that life. Specifically, we don't want
these blobs of toxic blue green algae that are you know,
(26:48):
they're they're getting worse almost by the year because climate
change is warming up the waters, and this stuff loves
phosphorus and loves loves warmer weather, and they're getting both.
And they also feast on the extra carbon in the atmosphere.
So this isn't a problem that's going to go away
on it's own by any stretch to the imagination.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Reading about these inexhaustible quote unquote inexhaustible supplies of phosphorus
in certain areas and then just how rapidly we burned
through them, it seems like we're not learning that lesson,
Like over and over again, the same things are happening.
And maybe this is more of like a philosophical question
that can't be answered, or the answer is just this
(27:31):
is what humans do. But why do you think we
haven't learned the lesson that inexhaustible doesn't really exist.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Well, because it's been relatively like these deposits, like like
the bird boop and like the bones and like the manure.
It just seems like you have an inexhaustible supply, but
you don't. You know, we're hitting a cap every time
we think we find something new. I don't know. I
think it's been because it's been relatively accessible. But those days,
(28:01):
at least, you know, on our side of the planet,
are coming to an end. And it's not doom and gloom.
We're not going to starve to death. The beauty of
phosphorus is it doesn't go away. It's just like I
was talking about the cow and the grass and the poop.
It's just it cycles over and over and over. But
we're overdosing crop lands to such an extent that it
(28:23):
just gets flushed off, it doesn't get taken up by
the crop for which it's intended, and it goes into
our water. And this is the water problem. I mean,
I think they're both coming to a head. In two
thousand and eight, I think it was driven largely by
the ethanol rush, because you know, we started everybody started
growing corn for fuel. Today forty of the corn we
(28:44):
grow in the United States goes towards ethanol, and that's
that's that's a huge demand of phosphorus. But we're coming
to the point where we're going to have to start
recognizing the virtuous circle of life that phosphorus stitches together.
What we did was we took that circle and we
turned it into a straight line where it runs from
(29:04):
mind to crop lands to water and along the way.
You know, it does a lot of damage. We can
be a lot more intelligent and measured in our application
of not just uh phosphorus coming from rocks out of
the ground, but also the phosphorus in the manure of
you know, the waste stream of the American agriculture system.
(29:26):
We can engineer. You know, we'll never get to repair
the true circle of life, but we can we can
stitch it pretty close together. And doing that, we'll do
two things. We'll preserve the resources the phosphorus rock deposits
that we have today, and we'll also protect protect our water.
You know, you can just google toxic algae and you'll
(29:51):
see it's it's just ravaging water from Florida to Washington State,
the Great Lakes and around the world. And that's it's.
It's a phosphorus problem. We need to keep that phosphorus
on crop lands and out of the water. And by
doing that, we won't be burning through it at such
a reckless and unsustainable pace. We'll also be protecting the
(30:15):
water that you know, we don't want just to swim in,
but we want to drink it. Safe water and safe
abundant food should not be mutually exclusive enterprises. And when
you start peeling away, you know the situation they are
and it's because of the misuse of phosphors.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And I want to get into some of these, like
the interesting technologies or ideas on the horizon in terms
of how we can repair this cycle. But I want
to kind of get back into like where the sources
of phosphorus pollution are coming from. So I know we've
talked about agriculture. Are there certain crops or certain farms
that are that are the biggest defenders when it comes
(30:55):
to phosphorus pollution or is it just certain areas within
the US where are the biggest defenders.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
First of all, I don't want to disparage the agriculture
industry or farmers. You know, there's nothing more noble than
trying to put food on the table. But they're operating
in a system that increasingly isn't working for them, and
it's not working for society in general because they're not
regulated appropriately. We talked a little bit about this before,
but when the clean water Act was passed, the farms
(31:23):
were small, and the manure and the phosphorus that that
contained was pretty diffuse. But that's not the case anymore.
So because they're largely unregulated, they can, with impunity, just
spread this stuff on landscapes. And you know, oftentimes the
landscape doesn't need more phosphorus and it ends up in
the water. And so I think one thing that we
(31:45):
need to think about is reworking the Clean Water Act
and designating farm waste as you know, a point source
pollution because if you go to a modern farm and
you see the size of those souge lagoons, you can't
help I think that that's a big source and contained
source of pollution. It is time to, I think, rein
(32:08):
in the agriculture industry and require that they treat their
waste like any other industry. And you know, we've got
a history showing that this works, and it's going to
cost money, but you know, we're already paying a price
for the system. For example, you know, milk is relatively cheap,
but the price that the cash register doesn't reflect the
(32:30):
true cost. The price true cost is reflected when you
go to your beach, like in Lake Michigan. I'm picking
Lake Mendoto over at the University of Wisconsin. I did
a fair amount of research over there. They've got this
gorgeous lake right on the edge of the campus, and
you know, the kids who go to school there now
(32:50):
don't expect to be able to swim in it because
it's so polluted with manure from nearby farms, and that
leads to these toxic algae outbreaks. So we're paying a
price for failing to regulate adequately right now, whether we
know it or not. And the thing about proper regulations
is that regulate, you know, it levels the playing field
for everybody. So if we do have to pay a
(33:11):
little bit more for milk, what's the price of having
a safe water supply worth? And it does jeopardize water supplies.
Toledo had a toxic algae outbreak in twenty fourteen, driven
by maneuver overloading that knocked out the drinking water supply
for half a million people for several days. And it
was a really scary situation because it wasn't like bacteria
(33:34):
where you could issue a boil order and everybody would
be safe if you boiled the water. It just concentrated
the toxin, so they had to call in the National
Guard to bring in you know, tankers of water and
pallettes of baby formula. It was it was bizarre because
you know, that city of Toledo is on the edge
of the Great Lakes, which hold twenty percent of the
world's surface fresh water, and they couldn't safely you know,
(33:56):
brush their teeth, even with treatment. So that's one thing
in one industry that we need to think about. Another
thing I would argue that we need to rethink is
the whole ethanol enterprise. I just mentioned that about forty
percent of the corn we produce in the United States
now ends up in our gas tank. And you know,
everybody who's looked at this issue who isn't a politician
(34:20):
or a corn farmer knows that ethanol is just it
isn't the environmental you know savior that many people pitched
it and pitched it as it requires huge energy inputs
and also fertilizer inputs.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
It was a real moment for me when I in
your book, when you talked about like how presidential you know,
campaigns are basically started in this place where there's so
much corn growing, and so it's like a real political
career killer or just like you know.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I mean al Gore. Al Gore when he ran for president,
he pledged the legion staff and all, and you know
he rules that now and he'll he'll say as much,
but he said, you know, if you want to if
you want to be president of the United States, you
got to do well in Iowa. Because you know, at
the time it's changed for the Democrats, but that was
at the front end of the primary season. It still
(35:11):
is for the Republicans. So if you don't show well
in Iowa, you don't have a very good shot of
becoming president. And if you don't, you know, really support
the ethanol industry, you're not going to show well in Iowa.
So you know, there are there are some things that
are relatively simple that we could do to just start
addressing the problem. And I don't know what it's going
(35:32):
to take. It just it blows my mind that this
is just like academics know about this, it's just kind
of complicated and it's hard to paint the picture for
people to connect the dots, you know, to show how
why ore beaches are closed, and why are drinking supplies
are threatened and why from time to time fertilizer and
therefore food prices just spike, not just the United States
(35:55):
but around the world. I mentioned in two thousand and
eight there were food riots, and that, to me, it's
kind of a glimpse of what could be. We could
be headed When I say food riots were they were
not in the United States, but they were in India
and Haiti and a number of other places. When so,
as long as food is relatively cheap, I guess they're
not going to worry about it. But that's not going
(36:15):
to be the case forever.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
No, And you know, speaking of like connecting the dots
and closed beaches, one of the points in your book
that you talk about is how these algal blooms in
the Gulf of Mexico that were previously kind of like
couldn't even imagine that this would happen, and then they
have started to happen, and sort of tracing the roots
of those blooms back to the Midwest, can you kind
(36:40):
of like take us through this downstream how this all
happened and how these algal blooms really have their roots
in the Midwest.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Yeah, and and and in climate change. So it was
really interesting. I went to Iowa to the state Fair
where they have a thing called the Soapbox where all
the presidential candidates get on the soapbox and tell, you know,
the people of Iowa what they want to hear. And
that's both sides, Democrats and Republicans. When I was there
(37:11):
in twenty nineteen, you know Joe Biden, you know, I
followed him into a bathroom in security that he has
today and he, you know, told me he supports ethanol,
and so did you know the Republicans as well. And
so that was in August. And after that I went
(37:34):
down the Mississippi River because you know, Iowa was this
big corn country and at the same time that people
were campaigning up there in support of ethanol and corn
growth corn crops, people down in the Gulf of Mexico
were suffering hugely. And that's because this is where climate
change comes into the picture. There was I can't remember,
it wasn't a calendar year, but it was a twelve
(37:56):
month period that was the wettest twelve months on record
in the Mississippi River base, which is huge. It spans
across like forty percent of the United States, but it
all funnels into you know, basically a narrow channel down
by New Orleans, and so much fresh water came down
that system and went out into the Gulf that it
basically turned the near shore area of the Gulf during
(38:18):
the summer into fresh water. And that so this toxic
alga that I've been talking about is primarily a fresh
water phenomenon, and phosphorus drives fresh water algae blooms. Nitrogen
is a bigger factor in saltwater when they have different
types of algae blooms. In that summer, even as the
(38:38):
presidential candidates were all, you know, loving corn up in Iowa,
the people down in Mississippi were going out of business
because so much freshwater hit their coast that it allowed
for these freshwater algae blooms to take off. And so
the beaches of Mississippi closed in late June of twenty
nineteen and stayed closed closed for the whole summer because
(39:01):
of what was coming down the Mississippi River. It wasn't
just water, it was excess phosphorus coming off of crop lands,
so it flowed down. I mean they were getting salinity readings,
you know, all along Mississippi like it's supposed to be
at think thirty parts per thousand. I'll probably get the
order of magnitude off, but they were just like five
(39:24):
and they should be thirty. And you know it's bordering
on just you know what you'd expect to not fine. Well,
it just wasn't typical ocean water, and so they had
a typical toxic algae outbreaks and that just ruined the
tourist season. I don't know if you've ever been to
Mississippi in the summer, but you want to go swimming
if you're down there, because it's hot. And you know,
(39:45):
there was forty miles of beach I think twenty seven
different beaches posted, you know, no swimming, and it was
because of the pollution coming off the farm fields in
the Upper Midwest. And I talked to one guy who
had bought a fleet of jet skis for that summer,
and by a fleet, I think it was like twenty
of them or something, and those things are expensive. He
(40:06):
took out a substantial loan and he couldn't rent them
out and he was prohibited from doing that, so he
was when I talked to him, he was just packaging
him up and sending him to Georgia. It's like a
fire sales. So he could pay the bank, and he
said something that really resonated with me. And he's like, look,
I'm being regulated out of business down here because of
what's going on up where you live. I said, I
(40:26):
live in Wisconsin. He said, why aren't you guys regulated?
You know, why am I paying the price? And these
are the dots that we got to connect. There's a
great question and the answer is because we don't have
the political will. And I think we don't have the
political will because we don't have an educated public. Now
I'm realizing what's going on here.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
We've talked about this algae is toxic. What makes it toxic?
Like what are the health effects on humans? And then
sort of, you know, part two is what are the
cascading impacts on ecosystems that these algo blooms have.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, so, I mean, the phosphorus will grow lots of
aquatic life. But there's a bunch of things that just
kind of come together here talking about connecting dots. But yeah,
I don't know if you're familiar with the zebra and
quagga muscle infestation of both America's fresh waters, but you know,
these these little drycenids, these little clam like things came
(41:24):
from the Caspian Sea basin and the region around that
via ocean freighters sailing up into the Midwest on the
Saint Lawrence Seaway. They had all these hitchhikers. And this
is in the sixties and seventies, and today, you know,
waters across the country are just you know, infested with
these tiny little muscles. You don't really see them very often.
(41:45):
I mean, most times people have any encounter with them,
it's when they cut their feet on them. But they've
they've they're just incredibly efficient at filter feeder feeding, and
they don't have brains, but they're smart enough not to
eat certain types of algae, toxic algae specifically. So now
today when we have like in the sixties, Lake Erie
(42:07):
was green, but it wasn't toxic green because there was
just a whole assemblage of species that were enhanced by
the phosphorus coming from detergent. Today, because the muscles have
just outcompeted everything, when you get an algae bloom, it's
going to be toxic because that's the one thing they
don't eat. And so the health effects of this are severe.
(42:31):
I mean, moderate exposure will just give you a cough,
and a headache. Significant exposure can cause liver failure. It's
been implicated in the kid who when swimming on a
golf course pond here in Wisconsin some years back, and
he died. And he died because of cute exposure to
(42:53):
the algae is called microsystis, and the toxin is called
microsystem and it's a liver toxin. And there's also increasing
evidence that it's a neurotoxin related to you some pretty
nasty stuff, including als. So yeah, it's not just a
matter of icky, unpleasant odors. It's a matter of public health.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
And some people you know, have, as you mentioned in
your book, started to think about these things in an
aspect of Okay, how can we come up with innovative
solutions to try to recapture the phosphorus that we're depositing
on farms. Can you talk about some of these promising
areas and especially manure and what we can mine from manure.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
The most promising thing on the horizon is people just
waking up to the idea that manure is nutritional gold.
You know, you think about what we were talking earlier
about the links the British were going to to, you know,
grow a crop. They would not look at these sewage
lagoons as a bunch of yuck. They would see it
as yum. You know, it's like, oh my god, we're
going to have turnips and wheat, you know, galore. We
(44:06):
don't see it as that. We see it as a
waste that has to be spread on the landscape. And
you know, we all recognize that there's a nutritional value
to that, but often that that action isn't done to
you know, neutrify a crops. It's done just to get
rid of the stuff that's in your limited capacity manure lagoon.
One of the obstacles right now to getting that manure
(44:27):
on lands where it's needed rather on lands where it's
just convenient is figuring out how to concentrate the phosphorus
in it. And there are technologies to do that where
you could pelletize it. Right now, most manure is liquefied
so it can be easily spread. And the rule of
comb is if a farmer has to move that manure
more than ten miles, he's losing big money and he's
(44:48):
not going to do it. But if you develop wastewater
treatment systems that can pelletize it, now you can put
it in bags or bins or whatever and move it
anywhere we're in the country or the world where it's needed.
It becomes almost the same kind of it is essentially
the same product coming from a fertilizer factory that's you know,
(45:08):
using rock based phosphate. So we can do that. It's
going to cost some money, but you know, it's going
to cost us a lot if we don't start doing this.
That's one thing that we need to look at. And
then I was talking about Hamburg earlier. You know, it's
where phosphorus was discovered. It was burned to the ground
and coincidentally, double coincidentally, Hamburg's kind of like putting on
(45:33):
a clinic for the rest of the world right now.
And how to deal with phosphorus. Germany's got a law
that's going to require its major wastewater treatment plants to
just virtually eliminate any kind of phosphorus discharges. And they're
significant because phosphorus is in human waste as well as
animal waste. And they've built a state of the art
wetewater treatment plant on the banks of the Eld River
(45:56):
that basically strips all the phosphorus out. And this is
going to do two things for Germany. It's going to
help protect their water quality and it's going to give
them a source of fertilizer that they don't have organically.
If you will, they don't. You know, Western Europe really
doesn't have many, if any available phosphorus deposits at the moment.
(46:17):
So it's a far sighted thing that they're doing, and
it's something that the rest of the world can learn from.
We've just got to think of the think of, you know,
restoring the circle of life. It's really that simple. It's complicated,
but when it comes down to it, it's that simple
that you know, stuff that decays is not you know,
something that's bad, and something that's going to provide life
(46:38):
for the next the next crop, the next generation of humans.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to
chat with me. I definitely have a newfound appreciation and
respect for phosphorus, and I still can't believe that this
isn't a topic that's covered on every news channel, every day,
all the time. If you enjoyed this and would like
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
(47:21):
Kill You dot com, or I'll post a link to
where you can find the Devil's Element Phosphorus and a
World out of Balance, as well as a link to
Dan's website, and don't forget you can check out our
website for all sorts of other cool things, including but
not limited to, transcripts, Quarantini and Plaicyberrita, recipes, show notes
(47:42):
and references for all of our episodes, links to merch
our bookshop dot Org, affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a
first hand account form hand music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which,
thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this
episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Leonasquod
and Tom Bryfogel for our audio mixing, and thanks to
(48:03):
you listeners for listening. I hope you liked this bonus
episode and our loving being part of the tpwk Y
book Club. A special thank you, as always to our
fantastic patrons. We truly appreciate your support so much. Well,
until next time, keep washing those hands
Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast Will
Kill You. You are listening to the latest episode in our
tp w k Y book Club series. In this series,
which is one of my favorite things about making the podcast,
(00:59):
we interview authors of popular science and medicine books, asking
them all sorts of questions, from how did you get
the idea to write this book? To what are your
thoughts on the show? The last of us like how
accurate is it? And a whole lot in between. If
you'd like to check out the full list of TPWKY
book Club books, those we covered last season, the ones
(01:22):
we've covered this season so far, and the books that
we'll be featuring later on this year, check out our
website This Podcast will Kill You dot com, where you
can find a link to our bookshop dot Org affiliate
account under the extras tab. Once you click through to bookshop,
you can find a bunch of TPWKY booklists, including of
(01:42):
course our book club books, nonfiction books and memoirs we
use in our regular season episodes, and disease and epidemic
themed fiction books, which, by the way, if anyone has
any suggestions for more of those, please send them along
and along also any thoughts you have about this book
club series so far? Which book has been your favorite?
(02:05):
Any questions you wish I had asked, any recommendations for
other books to feature in future episodes. Whatever your thoughts are,
we'd love to hear them. And one last thing before
I introduce this week's book, and that is if you're
enjoying the podcast, please take a moment to rate, review,
and subscribe. It really helps us out. Okay, now on
(02:28):
to the book of the week. Environmental journalist and award
winning author Dan Egan joins me to chat about his
recent book, The Devil's Element, Phosphorus and a World out
of Balance. I'd wager that for most of us, phosphorus
doesn't factor into our everyday thoughts or vocabulary. But this
(02:48):
element holds in it the key to life as we
know it and thus the power to ensure our continued
survival or map the path of our ultimate col lapse.
And that fork in the road is rapidly approaching where
we either decide to deal with the massive phosphorus imbalance
(03:09):
we have or just let the clock run out and
see what happens. Not to be dramatic or anything, but seriously,
this is not a problem that's just going to go
away without intervention. But what is this problem? Like, what
do I mean by phosphorus imbalance? Great question. Phosphorus is
an element found in all living things. It helps to
(03:32):
make up our DNA, our bones atp and without it
life would not be possible. As a resource, phosphorus is
hugely important as a fertilizer and is widely used around
the globe in agricultural settings, helping us maintain the enormous
global food supply we need. Over use of the element
(03:54):
has led to this paradox where over exploitation of phosphorus
for use as a fertilizer is leading to a global
shortage at the same time that too much phosphorus an
agricultural runoff, is polluting waterways, promoting toxic algal blooms that
have tremendous implications for ecosystem and human health. When we
(04:16):
think of wars fought over natural resources past and potential,
oil or water probably springs to mind before phosphorus would,
But that might just be the future we're facing. In
The Devil's Element, Egan takes readers through the past, present,
and possible future of phosphorus. He shares the fascinating story
(04:37):
of when phosphorus was first discovered and how it earned
its devilish nickname. He tells the tale of Peru's quote
unquote inexhaustible guano islands and the lessons we should have
learned from them. He explores the impacts phosphorus has had
on the Great Lakes and traces the increasingly frequent algal
blooms in fresh water across North America to ethanol production
(05:01):
in the Midwest, and he ends the book by turning
to possible futures determined by our relationship with phosphorus. What
might happen if we fail to correct this phosphorus imbalance
and permit its continued over use. How can we begin
to bring the scales back into balance and give ourselves
(05:21):
more time to recapture phosphorus from the most polluted areas.
The Devil's Element is an eye opening and gripping read
that will have you wondering how on earth we're not
all talking about phosphorus all the time. So let's get
to talking about phosphorus right after this break. Dan, thank
(06:09):
you so much for being here today. The Devil's Element
was such a fantastic and eye opening read and I
am so excited to dig into this overlooked but incredibly important, essential,
really element, phosphorus.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I'm happy to be here. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
So, starting right at the beginning, what is phosphorus, Where
is it found? What do we use it for?
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Well, phosphorus is an element, but it's not really found
as as an isolated element in nature. It's always bound
with oxygen atoms to create phosphates, and phosphates are really
the backbone of our whole food system. It is a
critical fertilizer that humans have become addicted to over the
(06:54):
past two hundred years, and it's worked miracles on the
crop lands. But the problem is we only have so
much of it, and we're burning through it at an
unsustainable pace, and that's having that's gonna have consequences on
our food supply in the coming years and decades, decades,
I would say, but it has immedia consequences right now
because we're using it over using it to such an
(07:17):
extent that we're following our waters. Because it's not good
at just growing you know, soybeans and kernels of corn.
It also when it hits water, grows algae and increasingly
it's it's spawning outbreaks of toxic algae. It's like we
turned on a gusher and we can't really turn it
off now without you know, causing a lot of pain
(07:38):
and suffering across the planet. At the same time, we
should be able to control the flow much better to
eliminate the downside of phosphorus and enhance the upside. And
the upside is it puts food on our tables.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
How did you first become interested in phosphorus and these
like this phosphorus paradox and the monumental problems that the
world is facing with this element.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You know, I was like everybody else, they didn't know
how to spell it. I didn't know what it was.
But it was doing some research for a book that
came out in twenty seventeen called Death in Life for
the Great Lakes, and one of the chapters in that
book dealt with Lake Erie and its history, how it
was declared America's dead seed back in the nineteen sixties,
and how we resuscitated it with basically the Clean Water Act.
(08:26):
And what the Clean Water Act did was it put
the screws to industries that were polluting the lake. And
the big problem at the time was detergent synthetic soap.
It was largely in the fifties and sixties. When you
buy a box of tide or whatnot, it was almost
a box of phosphorus. And once they figured out that
(08:47):
that was causing Lake Erie to turn, you know, distressingly
green and killing much of the aquatic life, they decided
to do something about it. And so when I was
doing this research, I was like, WHOA. The Great Lakes
book was largely a product of like ten or twelve
years of reporting that I did at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
(09:10):
and I enjoyed doing that book, but I kept thinking, boy,
it'd be fun to write a book from scratch, And
when I came across phosphorus, I thought I'd love to
do a book on it. I ended up doing that
and it was quite a challenge, but it was enjoyable
as well.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
So you mentioned the Clean Water Act and how powerful
it was in that it really did kind of slow
the progress of pollution in some areas. But as you
point out in your book, this Act included a giant
loophole for agriculture. Why was that loophole left in and
what consequences did or does it continue to have?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, it made sense at the time because once they
figured out that, you know, our waters from coast to
coast and really around the world were turning green because
of what we were overdosing them with phosphorus detergents which
would just flow right through the wastewater whatever wastewater treatment
plants existed at the time and into the water.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
So so once we realized that what was going on,
that really spurned the Clean Water Act, and they came
down heavy on industry because that was the major.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Polluter of phosphorus at the time. With the detergents. Agriculture
was largely largely left alone because in regulatory parlance, you know,
they refer to it as point source and non point source,
and point source is basically anything that comes out of
a pipe or a smoke stack. And the Clean Water
actilated the Clean Clean Air Act, it really required that
(10:39):
we stopped polluting wantonly from these pipes and smoke stacks,
and if not eliminated completely, then you know, severely limit
the amounts that we were discharging, and that worked, and
it worked really well for a couple of decades. Agriculture
was left alone because they thought this non point pollution,
which is basically you know, stuff just coming off the
(11:01):
landscape was too diffuse and not significant enough to really,
you know, warrant some heavy regulating. But that was in
nineteen seventy two, and you know, fifty years later we
farm a lot differently than we did at that time.
And I'm going to talk specifically here about you know,
the capos, the concentrated animal feeding operations or factory farms.
(11:24):
You know, it used to be that a herd of
one hundred cows was a big deal. Well, now I
live in Wisconsin, America's dairyland. It's not uncommon to have
eight thousand or ten thousand head of cattle. And you know,
they do more than produce milk. They make manure and
they do it just like milk every day, and it's
got to go somewhere. And historically, you know, the rule
(11:45):
of thumb is it takes an acre to sustain a cow.
And this is the beauty of the phosphorus molecule. It
doesn't go away. So in simple terms, a cow in
a pasture would eat grass. The cow would poop that
would have the phosphorus from the grass in it, and
it would replenish the crop land. So it was like
(12:07):
a virtuous cycle, a never ending loop. Cow poops, grass grows,
cow eats grass, cow poops, and on and on and
on and on. Well, we don't have the acreage to
sustain you know, these these that's why they call them
concentrated feeding operations. They're basically today the cows aren't typically
out in past year. They're they're in a barn being
(12:29):
fed grains from you know, wherever, and and the amount
of manure that they create is substantial. It's bogglingly huge.
A rule of thumb is one cow produces about as
much waste as eighteen times as much waste as a human.
The difference is human waste goes through treatment and you know, largely,
(12:52):
and cow manure just goes on the land, whether the
land needs that nutrient infusion or not. And if it's overdosed,
it does what everything else does, is it flows downstream
when it rains, and it ends up in our water.
As they said before, then it's not growing crops we want,
but it's growing toxicolgy.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
And I want to circle back to some of these
downstream effects and the consequences of these algal blooms and
so on. But I kind of want to talk about
the title of your book as well, the Devil's Element.
Where does that name come from? And you know, does
it relate to when people first recognize the significance of
the substance. There are so many good little stories that
(13:31):
you share in your book about this name and sort
of the magic of phosphorus.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, it's been called the Devil's element for centuries, and
you know, more recently people think of it because it
was the thirteenth element discovered back in I think it
was sixteen seventy nine in Hamburg, Germany, and it was
discovered by alchemist who was trying to isolate the Philosopher's Stone,
this mythical material that they believed at the time could
(14:01):
transmute base metals into silver and gold platinum. And the
idea at the time was that all metals are slowly
evolving to a more precious state, and what we need
to do is just find out what's causing that evolution
and speed it up so you could turn lead into
gold and get rich. So this guy, his name was
(14:22):
hennig Brand, operating out of Hamburg, Germany in the late
sixteen hundreds. He thought it could be derived from the
human waste stream. So he did a lot of tinkering.
And these guys were serious laboratory operators at the time.
I mean, they had equipment that we can't even replicate
today in terms of how high they could keep heat
(14:45):
for weeks on end. We can do it on an
industrial scale, but we don't have the earthenware today that
they did. And so, through a bunch of urine and
a bunch of hocus pocus, he eventually baked out of
these of the human waste stream these waxy, glowing nuggets.
And this was phosphorus. It had been cleaved from its
(15:05):
oxygen atoms and it was in its elemental form, and
it was a real bewitching substance at the time because
it glowed in the dark and if you like smudged
it on a wall, you would leave a streak that
glowed in the dark. But unfortunately, if these little nuggets,
you know, not much bigger than like a marble, heated
(15:27):
to just above room temperature, maybe eighty fahrenheit, they combusted
and burned it, you know, ferociously hot. And that's really
where it got its name, the Devil's element. And there
was really no practical application in the late sixteen hundreds
or early seventeen hundreds for this other than it was
just a curiosity. You know, it didn't turn anything gold,
(15:47):
you know, turned out urine can't turn anything gold. Maybe
a snowbank, but that's about it. So it was it
just became a curiosity for a while. And then you know,
as is you know, as how it goes with humanity.
We eventually figured out how to weaponize it, and at
first we were using it as match tips, Lucifer match tips.
(16:10):
That may be another reason for the term devil's element,
but eventually we made bombs with it, firebombs and cndiary bombs.
And coincidentally, Hamburg, which is phosphorus hometown, was basically burned
to the ground in nineteen fifty three by the Allies
dropping incendiary bombs that were largely made of phosphorus, and
(16:32):
so the name persists today because the stuff is dastardly.
When those bombs dropped in the nineteen forties, you know,
they would burn through anything that they hit, you know,
whether it was a roof of a home or somebody's skull.
I mean, it was really really bad stuff. But if
it hit water, it stabilized immediately, and so it looked
(16:53):
like it looked like fireworks when you just see those
globules just kind of coasting from the clouds down into
you know, I had a Fourth of July celebration. That's
what it looked like. But when it hit the water,
it wasn't like ash that just disappeared. It solidifies and stabilizes,
and so unfortunately today it looks a lot like amber.
(17:15):
And the region around Hamburg is rich with amber because
it used to be, you know, a conifer forest and
all the resin you know, over time it became amber.
So there's there's long been amber hunters on the shore
of the Baltic Sea or the Elbe River. And sometimes
when people grab and think is amber is not it's
(17:36):
one of these unburned chunks of phosphorus and they put
it in their pocket and boom. I opened the book
with a guy who was beach combing on the Baltic
Sea and he picked up what he thought was a
fossilized oyster shell and put it in his pocket, and
his pant leg just exploded and or his pocket just
(17:59):
burst into flavor. Since he had to go into the
sea and this was December to put the flames out
and every time he came back out, it would flare
up again. And they were going to take him away
in a helicopter, but they thought he'd take the helicopter down.
They didn't know what was going on, and they finally
took him away in an ambulance packed with wet towels,
and he survived, but he sustained about burns to about
(18:21):
forty percent of his body. And that's not It doesn't
happen every day, but it's not uncommon. You can google it,
and there's warning signs on the beaches and on the
river banks in that region of Germany to stay away
from things that look like amber. You know they're using it.
They use it today too. It's not supposed to be
used as ancendiary bomb. It burns so hot and so
(18:46):
brightly that it's used to eliminate the night sky or
to create smoke screens. It's not supposed to be dropped
on people, but it is, and the consequences of that
are and it'll burn to the femur and then some
so and through a skull, and yeah, the devil's element.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just
a few Welcome back, everyone, I've been chatting with Dan
(19:31):
Egan about his book The Devil's Element, Phosphorus and a
World out of Balance. Let's get back into things. As
you mentioned, we talked a little bit about this this
phosphorus paradox where there's both a shortage and an over
use or pollution issue. And in your book you discuss
some of the issues with the shortage, and you know,
(19:52):
what will happen as the world runs out of its
phosphorus supply. What are some of the estimates for when
that might happen, either within the US or you know,
just the globe.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Well, let me rewind just a little bit to just
explain that. You know, ever since we've discovered it, we've
craved it, and we've found new sources, and we've inevitably
run out of those sources. I mean, it started in antiquity,
when you know, farmers just intuited that, you know, you
put certain stuff on crops and it makes them grow better.
And you know, commonly that was manure, animal and otherwise
(20:28):
humans included. But there was only so much manure in
you know, sixteen in the sixteen hundreds, So the British
were really were they were really under the gun to
keep their crops productive, because you know, it's an island
nation with limited crop lands. And they eventually figured out
that bones, and they didn't know why, but bones worked
(20:50):
really well and that set them propelled them into some
really weird places, including so the Battle of Waterloo was
in eighteen fifteen, I believe, and in the five ten
years after that the British went over and looted that
whole battlefield. They haven't found any bones. They found one
set of remains. It was like a curiosity a few
(21:10):
years ago, but it's just been widely held that there
are no bones at Waterloo because the British took us
back to England, ground them and especially built mills and
spread them on the crops to grow turnips and wheat.
But there was only so many bones to go around.
So then we chased after new substances and turned out
(21:31):
bird poop is a spectacular source of phosphorus, and that
sent the British and later the United States to the
western coast of South America, to these desert islands off
of Peru that are just basically mountains of dried bird poop.
And at the time they thought that their mountains were
there were so many of these islands and mountains of
(21:51):
bird poop that it was an inexhaustible resource. And this
is talking. We're talking like the eighteen forties to the
eighteen eighties. By the eighteen eighties and nineties, we'd run
out of it, and that sent us on the hunt
for more. And now chemists were involved, and they had
figured out that it was phosphorus, so they could just
find phosphorus rich material use it as crops, and that
led us to sedimentary rock deposits. They're relatively scared scarce,
(22:15):
and they're scattered around the globe, and that's what we've
been relying on ever since, like say the eighteen eighties
eighteen nineties, and in the United States, our main deposits
are in Florida, and we are, you know, on course,
we're burning through them at such a pace that we're
not going to we could run out in three decades
or four decades. At that point, we're going to be
(22:36):
dependent on other countries for our nutritional security, which is
a big deal. It's probably a bigger deal than energy
security because there's workarounds to oil, but there is no
workarounds to phosphorus. It's in every living cell on the planet,
no phosphorus, no life, no crops, And it just so
happens that seventy to eighty percent of the known reserves
(22:57):
left are in and the occupied territory of Western Sahara.
And that's a pretty volatile place right now and could
become more so as countries like the United States and others,
you know, start scraping for phosphorus to put on their
crops to feed they're.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Citizens, in addition to these Peruvian guano deposits. And it
does seem like, at least in recent decades, there's been
like restoration of some of those areas where hopefully there
can be a more sustainable cycle of this, but there's
also been exploitation, not just of phosphorus as a natural resource,
(23:34):
but of people that live in these areas where phosphorus
is located. And you shared one of these stories in
your book. Would you mind taking us through that again.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, Well, the indigenous people of the Western Sahara, you know,
they are nomadic people, and you know, I had been
for a long time, and we're all the way up
until the nineteen seventies when Spain opened up a phosphorus mine,
a phosphate rock mine on their land, and then Spain
(24:09):
pulled out real soon thereafter, and Morocco occupied it and
has controlled the mind ever since, and much of the
native population of the area has been, you know, basically
warehoused in these tent camps. They were supposed to be,
you know, they were talking over one hundred thousand people.
(24:31):
It was supposed to be a temporary situation when Morocco
came down and occupied the territory in the nineteen seventies,
right mid nineteen seventies, and the native people sought refuge
in nearby Algeria, and it was just at the time,
the thinking was just let's hold tight and we can
go back home in a matter of months. And I
(24:54):
talked to a young woman whose mom was born in
the camp and whose grandmother was put in the camp
when she was in her teens, I believe. And so
you've got generations and generations of these people growing up,
you know, exiled from their land, and nobody really had
an interest in that land until they found the Phosphorus.
And so there was a low grade war that went
(25:17):
on from the mid nineteen seventies to the late nineteen nineties.
And it's the UN broker a very fragile peace that
is kind of fraying. Now there's been guerrilla attacks on
the mine, more specifically on They built the world's largest
conveyor belt. It's about one hundred kilometers long to take
the product from the mine across North Africa and out
(25:40):
to the Atlantic where it could be put on boats
and shipped around the world. So this stuff is, you know,
incredibly valuable, and it forces people to do things to
each other that they otherwise wouldn't. And you know, it's
an old story for humanity, but this is one that
(26:00):
not enough people know about. They don't they think about
climate change, they think about oil deposits, but they don't
think about rocks, special rocks in the ground that really
sustain the modern agriculture system.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, it's funny to think of when phosphorus first being discovered,
people had hopes that it would turn substances into gold.
But it seems like as valuable as gold in some situations,
are even more so.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Absolutely absolutely, But you know it has its downside, which
we've talked a little bit about. I mean, it's it's
a life accelerant and not all that that's not we
don't want all of that life. Specifically, we don't want
these blobs of toxic blue green algae that are you know,
(26:48):
they're they're getting worse almost by the year because climate
change is warming up the waters, and this stuff loves
phosphorus and loves loves warmer weather, and they're getting both.
And they also feast on the extra carbon in the atmosphere.
So this isn't a problem that's going to go away
on it's own by any stretch to the imagination.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Reading about these inexhaustible quote unquote inexhaustible supplies of phosphorus
in certain areas and then just how rapidly we burned
through them, it seems like we're not learning that lesson,
Like over and over again, the same things are happening.
And maybe this is more of like a philosophical question
that can't be answered, or the answer is just this
(27:31):
is what humans do. But why do you think we
haven't learned the lesson that inexhaustible doesn't really exist.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Well, because it's been relatively like these deposits, like like
the bird boop and like the bones and like the manure.
It just seems like you have an inexhaustible supply, but
you don't. You know, we're hitting a cap every time
we think we find something new. I don't know. I
think it's been because it's been relatively accessible. But those days,
(28:01):
at least, you know, on our side of the planet,
are coming to an end. And it's not doom and gloom.
We're not going to starve to death. The beauty of
phosphorus is it doesn't go away. It's just like I
was talking about the cow and the grass and the poop.
It's just it cycles over and over and over. But
we're overdosing crop lands to such an extent that it
(28:23):
just gets flushed off, it doesn't get taken up by
the crop for which it's intended, and it goes into
our water. And this is the water problem. I mean,
I think they're both coming to a head. In two
thousand and eight, I think it was driven largely by
the ethanol rush, because you know, we started everybody started
growing corn for fuel. Today forty of the corn we
(28:44):
grow in the United States goes towards ethanol, and that's
that's that's a huge demand of phosphorus. But we're coming
to the point where we're going to have to start
recognizing the virtuous circle of life that phosphorus stitches together.
What we did was we took that circle and we
turned it into a straight line where it runs from
(29:04):
mind to crop lands to water and along the way.
You know, it does a lot of damage. We can
be a lot more intelligent and measured in our application
of not just uh phosphorus coming from rocks out of
the ground, but also the phosphorus in the manure of
you know, the waste stream of the American agriculture system.
(29:26):
We can engineer. You know, we'll never get to repair
the true circle of life, but we can we can
stitch it pretty close together. And doing that, we'll do
two things. We'll preserve the resources the phosphorus rock deposits
that we have today, and we'll also protect protect our water.
You know, you can just google toxic algae and you'll
(29:51):
see it's it's just ravaging water from Florida to Washington State,
the Great Lakes and around the world. And that's it's.
It's a phosphorus problem. We need to keep that phosphorus
on crop lands and out of the water. And by
doing that, we won't be burning through it at such
a reckless and unsustainable pace. We'll also be protecting the
(30:15):
water that you know, we don't want just to swim in,
but we want to drink it. Safe water and safe
abundant food should not be mutually exclusive enterprises. And when
you start peeling away, you know the situation they are
and it's because of the misuse of phosphors.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And I want to get into some of these, like
the interesting technologies or ideas on the horizon in terms
of how we can repair this cycle. But I want
to kind of get back into like where the sources
of phosphorus pollution are coming from. So I know we've
talked about agriculture. Are there certain crops or certain farms
that are that are the biggest defenders when it comes
(30:55):
to phosphorus pollution or is it just certain areas within
the US where are the biggest defenders.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
First of all, I don't want to disparage the agriculture
industry or farmers. You know, there's nothing more noble than
trying to put food on the table. But they're operating
in a system that increasingly isn't working for them, and
it's not working for society in general because they're not
regulated appropriately. We talked a little bit about this before,
but when the clean water Act was passed, the farms
(31:23):
were small, and the manure and the phosphorus that that
contained was pretty diffuse. But that's not the case anymore.
So because they're largely unregulated, they can, with impunity, just
spread this stuff on landscapes. And you know, oftentimes the
landscape doesn't need more phosphorus and it ends up in
the water. And so I think one thing that we
(31:45):
need to think about is reworking the Clean Water Act
and designating farm waste as you know, a point source
pollution because if you go to a modern farm and
you see the size of those souge lagoons, you can't
help I think that that's a big source and contained
source of pollution. It is time to, I think, rein
(32:08):
in the agriculture industry and require that they treat their
waste like any other industry. And you know, we've got
a history showing that this works, and it's going to
cost money, but you know, we're already paying a price
for the system. For example, you know, milk is relatively cheap,
but the price that the cash register doesn't reflect the
(32:30):
true cost. The price true cost is reflected when you
go to your beach, like in Lake Michigan. I'm picking
Lake Mendoto over at the University of Wisconsin. I did
a fair amount of research over there. They've got this
gorgeous lake right on the edge of the campus, and
you know, the kids who go to school there now
(32:50):
don't expect to be able to swim in it because
it's so polluted with manure from nearby farms, and that
leads to these toxic algae outbreaks. So we're paying a
price for failing to regulate adequately right now, whether we
know it or not. And the thing about proper regulations
is that regulate, you know, it levels the playing field
for everybody. So if we do have to pay a
(33:11):
little bit more for milk, what's the price of having
a safe water supply worth? And it does jeopardize water supplies.
Toledo had a toxic algae outbreak in twenty fourteen, driven
by maneuver overloading that knocked out the drinking water supply
for half a million people for several days. And it
was a really scary situation because it wasn't like bacteria
(33:34):
where you could issue a boil order and everybody would
be safe if you boiled the water. It just concentrated
the toxin, so they had to call in the National
Guard to bring in you know, tankers of water and
pallettes of baby formula. It was it was bizarre because
you know, that city of Toledo is on the edge
of the Great Lakes, which hold twenty percent of the
world's surface fresh water, and they couldn't safely you know,
(33:56):
brush their teeth, even with treatment. So that's one thing
in one industry that we need to think about. Another
thing I would argue that we need to rethink is
the whole ethanol enterprise. I just mentioned that about forty
percent of the corn we produce in the United States
now ends up in our gas tank. And you know,
everybody who's looked at this issue who isn't a politician
(34:20):
or a corn farmer knows that ethanol is just it
isn't the environmental you know savior that many people pitched
it and pitched it as it requires huge energy inputs
and also fertilizer inputs.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
It was a real moment for me when I in
your book, when you talked about like how presidential you know,
campaigns are basically started in this place where there's so
much corn growing, and so it's like a real political
career killer or just like you know.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
I mean al Gore. Al Gore when he ran for president,
he pledged the legion staff and all, and you know
he rules that now and he'll he'll say as much,
but he said, you know, if you want to if
you want to be president of the United States, you
got to do well in Iowa. Because you know, at
the time it's changed for the Democrats, but that was
at the front end of the primary season. It still
(35:11):
is for the Republicans. So if you don't show well
in Iowa, you don't have a very good shot of
becoming president. And if you don't, you know, really support
the ethanol industry, you're not going to show well in Iowa.
So you know, there are there are some things that
are relatively simple that we could do to just start
addressing the problem. And I don't know what it's going
(35:32):
to take. It just it blows my mind that this
is just like academics know about this, it's just kind
of complicated and it's hard to paint the picture for
people to connect the dots, you know, to show how
why ore beaches are closed, and why are drinking supplies
are threatened and why from time to time fertilizer and
therefore food prices just spike, not just the United States
(35:55):
but around the world. I mentioned in two thousand and
eight there were food riots, and that, to me, it's
kind of a glimpse of what could be. We could
be headed When I say food riots were they were
not in the United States, but they were in India
and Haiti and a number of other places. When so,
as long as food is relatively cheap, I guess they're
not going to worry about it. But that's not going
(36:15):
to be the case forever.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
No, And you know, speaking of like connecting the dots
and closed beaches, one of the points in your book
that you talk about is how these algal blooms in
the Gulf of Mexico that were previously kind of like
couldn't even imagine that this would happen, and then they
have started to happen, and sort of tracing the roots
of those blooms back to the Midwest, can you kind
(36:40):
of like take us through this downstream how this all
happened and how these algal blooms really have their roots
in the Midwest.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Yeah, and and and in climate change. So it was
really interesting. I went to Iowa to the state Fair
where they have a thing called the Soapbox where all
the presidential candidates get on the soapbox and tell, you know,
the people of Iowa what they want to hear. And
that's both sides, Democrats and Republicans. When I was there
(37:11):
in twenty nineteen, you know Joe Biden, you know, I
followed him into a bathroom in security that he has
today and he, you know, told me he supports ethanol,
and so did you know the Republicans as well. And
so that was in August. And after that I went
(37:34):
down the Mississippi River because you know, Iowa was this
big corn country and at the same time that people
were campaigning up there in support of ethanol and corn
growth corn crops, people down in the Gulf of Mexico
were suffering hugely. And that's because this is where climate
change comes into the picture. There was I can't remember,
it wasn't a calendar year, but it was a twelve
(37:56):
month period that was the wettest twelve months on record
in the Mississippi River base, which is huge. It spans
across like forty percent of the United States, but it
all funnels into you know, basically a narrow channel down
by New Orleans, and so much fresh water came down
that system and went out into the Gulf that it
basically turned the near shore area of the Gulf during
(38:18):
the summer into fresh water. And that so this toxic
alga that I've been talking about is primarily a fresh
water phenomenon, and phosphorus drives fresh water algae blooms. Nitrogen
is a bigger factor in saltwater when they have different
types of algae blooms. In that summer, even as the
(38:38):
presidential candidates were all, you know, loving corn up in Iowa,
the people down in Mississippi were going out of business
because so much freshwater hit their coast that it allowed
for these freshwater algae blooms to take off. And so
the beaches of Mississippi closed in late June of twenty
nineteen and stayed closed closed for the whole summer because
(39:01):
of what was coming down the Mississippi River. It wasn't
just water, it was excess phosphorus coming off of crop lands,
so it flowed down. I mean they were getting salinity readings,
you know, all along Mississippi like it's supposed to be
at think thirty parts per thousand. I'll probably get the
order of magnitude off, but they were just like five
(39:24):
and they should be thirty. And you know it's bordering
on just you know what you'd expect to not fine. Well,
it just wasn't typical ocean water, and so they had
a typical toxic algae outbreaks and that just ruined the
tourist season. I don't know if you've ever been to
Mississippi in the summer, but you want to go swimming
if you're down there, because it's hot. And you know,
(39:45):
there was forty miles of beach I think twenty seven
different beaches posted, you know, no swimming, and it was
because of the pollution coming off the farm fields in
the Upper Midwest. And I talked to one guy who
had bought a fleet of jet skis for that summer,
and by a fleet, I think it was like twenty
of them or something, and those things are expensive. He
(40:06):
took out a substantial loan and he couldn't rent them
out and he was prohibited from doing that, so he
was when I talked to him, he was just packaging
him up and sending him to Georgia. It's like a
fire sales. So he could pay the bank, and he
said something that really resonated with me. And he's like, look,
I'm being regulated out of business down here because of
what's going on up where you live. I said, I
(40:26):
live in Wisconsin. He said, why aren't you guys regulated?
You know, why am I paying the price? And these
are the dots that we got to connect. There's a
great question and the answer is because we don't have
the political will. And I think we don't have the
political will because we don't have an educated public. Now
I'm realizing what's going on here.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
We've talked about this algae is toxic. What makes it toxic?
Like what are the health effects on humans? And then
sort of, you know, part two is what are the
cascading impacts on ecosystems that these algo blooms have.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, so, I mean, the phosphorus will grow lots of
aquatic life. But there's a bunch of things that just
kind of come together here talking about connecting dots. But yeah,
I don't know if you're familiar with the zebra and
quagga muscle infestation of both America's fresh waters, but you know,
these these little drycenids, these little clam like things came
(41:24):
from the Caspian Sea basin and the region around that
via ocean freighters sailing up into the Midwest on the
Saint Lawrence Seaway. They had all these hitchhikers. And this
is in the sixties and seventies, and today, you know,
waters across the country are just you know, infested with
these tiny little muscles. You don't really see them very often.
(41:45):
I mean, most times people have any encounter with them,
it's when they cut their feet on them. But they've
they've they're just incredibly efficient at filter feeder feeding, and
they don't have brains, but they're smart enough not to
eat certain types of algae, toxic algae specifically. So now
today when we have like in the sixties, Lake Erie
(42:07):
was green, but it wasn't toxic green because there was
just a whole assemblage of species that were enhanced by
the phosphorus coming from detergent. Today, because the muscles have
just outcompeted everything, when you get an algae bloom, it's
going to be toxic because that's the one thing they
don't eat. And so the health effects of this are severe.
(42:31):
I mean, moderate exposure will just give you a cough,
and a headache. Significant exposure can cause liver failure. It's
been implicated in the kid who when swimming on a
golf course pond here in Wisconsin some years back, and
he died. And he died because of cute exposure to
(42:53):
the algae is called microsystis, and the toxin is called
microsystem and it's a liver toxin. And there's also increasing
evidence that it's a neurotoxin related to you some pretty
nasty stuff, including als. So yeah, it's not just a
matter of icky, unpleasant odors. It's a matter of public health.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
And some people you know, have, as you mentioned in
your book, started to think about these things in an
aspect of Okay, how can we come up with innovative
solutions to try to recapture the phosphorus that we're depositing
on farms. Can you talk about some of these promising
areas and especially manure and what we can mine from manure.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
The most promising thing on the horizon is people just
waking up to the idea that manure is nutritional gold.
You know, you think about what we were talking earlier
about the links the British were going to to, you know,
grow a crop. They would not look at these sewage
lagoons as a bunch of yuck. They would see it
as yum. You know, it's like, oh my god, we're
going to have turnips and wheat, you know, galore. We
(44:06):
don't see it as that. We see it as a
waste that has to be spread on the landscape. And
you know, we all recognize that there's a nutritional value
to that, but often that that action isn't done to
you know, neutrify a crops. It's done just to get
rid of the stuff that's in your limited capacity manure lagoon.
One of the obstacles right now to getting that manure
(44:27):
on lands where it's needed rather on lands where it's
just convenient is figuring out how to concentrate the phosphorus
in it. And there are technologies to do that where
you could pelletize it. Right now, most manure is liquefied
so it can be easily spread. And the rule of
comb is if a farmer has to move that manure
more than ten miles, he's losing big money and he's
(44:48):
not going to do it. But if you develop wastewater
treatment systems that can pelletize it, now you can put
it in bags or bins or whatever and move it
anywhere we're in the country or the world where it's needed.
It becomes almost the same kind of it is essentially
the same product coming from a fertilizer factory that's you know,
(45:08):
using rock based phosphate. So we can do that. It's
going to cost some money, but you know, it's going
to cost us a lot if we don't start doing this.
That's one thing that we need to look at. And
then I was talking about Hamburg earlier. You know, it's
where phosphorus was discovered. It was burned to the ground
and coincidentally, double coincidentally, Hamburg's kind of like putting on
(45:33):
a clinic for the rest of the world right now.
And how to deal with phosphorus. Germany's got a law
that's going to require its major wastewater treatment plants to
just virtually eliminate any kind of phosphorus discharges. And they're
significant because phosphorus is in human waste as well as
animal waste. And they've built a state of the art
wetewater treatment plant on the banks of the Eld River
(45:56):
that basically strips all the phosphorus out. And this is
going to do two things for Germany. It's going to
help protect their water quality and it's going to give
them a source of fertilizer that they don't have organically.
If you will, they don't. You know, Western Europe really
doesn't have many, if any available phosphorus deposits at the moment.
(46:17):
So it's a far sighted thing that they're doing, and
it's something that the rest of the world can learn from.
We've just got to think of the think of, you know,
restoring the circle of life. It's really that simple. It's complicated,
but when it comes down to it, it's that simple
that you know, stuff that decays is not you know,
something that's bad, and something that's going to provide life
(46:38):
for the next the next crop, the next generation of humans.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to
chat with me. I definitely have a newfound appreciation and
respect for phosphorus, and I still can't believe that this
isn't a topic that's covered on every news channel, every day,
all the time. If you enjoyed this and would like
to learn more, check out our website this podcast will
(47:21):
Kill You dot com, or I'll post a link to
where you can find the Devil's Element Phosphorus and a
World out of Balance, as well as a link to
Dan's website, and don't forget you can check out our
website for all sorts of other cool things, including but
not limited to, transcripts, Quarantini and Plaicyberrita, recipes, show notes
(47:42):
and references for all of our episodes, links to merch
our bookshop dot Org, affiliate account, our Goodreads list, a
first hand account form hand music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which,
thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this
episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Leonasquod
and Tom Bryfogel for our audio mixing, and thanks to
(48:03):
you listeners for listening. I hope you liked this bonus
episode and our loving being part of the tpwk Y
book Club. A special thank you, as always to our
fantastic patrons. We truly appreciate your support so much. Well,
until next time, keep washing those hands
Hosts And Creators
Erin Welsh
Erin Allmann Updyke