The Devil’s Element

Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance

by Dan Egan

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. (via Amazon)

Dan Egan is the Brico Fund Journalist in Residence at the Center for Water Policy in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences whose work appears in media outlets across the country. Egan is an environmental journalist and author of the “Death and Life of the Great Lakes.” Egan was a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering the Great Lakes from 2002 until 2021. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and he has won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, John B. Oakes Award, AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Egan is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Columbia School of Journalism. A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, he grew to love Lake Michigan by spending summer weekends and vacations on the Door Peninsula, where both sets of his grandparents had summer homes. After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in history in 1989, Egan moved out West and worked as an assistant park historian at Yellowstone National Park. In 1992 he began his newspaper career at the Idaho Mountain Express in Sun Valley Idaho. From there he moved on to newspapers in Idaho Falls, Idaho and Salt Lake City, Utah. During his decade out West, Egan covered a range of environmental issues, including efforts to restore threatened and endangered species like wolves, salmon and grizzly bears. He also covered Alpine skiing for the Salt Lake Tribune during the 2002 Winter Games. Egan moved back to Wisconsin in 2002, and lives with his wife and four children in the Milwaukee suburb of Whitefish Bay. (via daneganauthor.com)

Learn more about Dan Egan and The Devil’s Element at: https://www.daneganauthor.com/