The Devil's Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance - Softcover

Egan, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1324074728 ISBN 13: 9781324074724

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024

Synopsis

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

"Lively…and thought-provoking.” ―Robert W. Howarth, Science

The New York Times best-selling author on the source of great bounty―and now great peril―all over the world.

Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it’s also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called “the oil of our time.”

The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. First discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy lab in Hamburg, it soon became a highly sought-after resource. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide―which risks rising conflict and even war.

With The Devil’s Element, Egan has written an essential and eye-opening account that urges us to pay attention to one of the most perilous but little-known environmental issues of our time.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Egan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, he lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and children.

From the Back Cover

"[Phosphorus] today is precious and finite in the same way fossil fuels are. Yet we are blowing through Earth's accessible deposits at such a pace that, just like oil production, some scientists now fear we could hit 'peak phosphorus' in just a matter of decades, at which point we risk declining mining yields-- and chronic food scarcity.... Call it the phosphorus paradox--at the same time as we are drawing down our increasingly precious caches of mineable phosphorus rock we are overdosing our waters with it." --from the introduction

Praise for Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

"Suspenseful, superbly informative, crucial."
-- Louise Erdrich

"Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.... Egan's book is bursting with life (and yes, death)."
-- Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating and brilliant... Egan's narrative often moves like a thriller."
-- Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Los Angeles Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1324074728
• ISBN 13: 9781324074724
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256