We waste about 80% of agricultural phosphate, so there is room for improvement. After recounting the havoc phosphate wreaks elsewhere, the author turns to possible solutions. Massive phosphate-rich fertilizer from farms and manure from titanic feed lots poured into rivers that emptied into the lake. However, by the turn of this century, it died again, the result of the act’s one yawning exemption: agriculture. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was a significant milestone, and by the 1980s, Lake Erie was clean. For most of the 20th century, detergents, sewage, and industrial waste produced a widely publicized dead body of water. Egan tells the tragic story of Lake Erie. They often cover bodies of water with “guacamole-thick,” toxic mats, and as they die, they suck out the oxygen, producing dead zones. Thriving on a massive inflow of phosphate, they are destroying America’s rivers and lakes. All life requires phosphorus, including ancient blue-green algae. After a short history of its production, Egan devotes most of the book to phosphate poisoning.

Morocco and the Western Sahara hold 70% to 80% of the world’s phosphate reserves, which may or may not run out in this century. When phosphorus runs out, plant growth stops, and feeding 8 billion humans requires massive amounts of fertilizer. Two of three essential elements in fertilizer-nitrogen and potassium-are nearly inexhaustible. Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by a German alchemist who observed a white, waxy solid that glowed in the dark and burst into flame “just a little above room temperature.” Egan, who won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, explains its most vital role: producing food. A disquieting study of what Foreign Policy called “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”

The Devil's Element by Dan Egan