This Podcast Will Kill You - Special Episode: Dan Egan & The Devil’s Element

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

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. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Send real help, real comfort, and maybe even a laugh. Visit the balmbox.com. That's T-H-E-B-A-L-M-B-O-X.com. Balm, like healing and care. The balm box, because cancer patients don't need bouquets and brownies. They need balm. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in

23. But what if we didn't get the whole story? Ableed this has been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And this is this podcast will kill you. You are listening to the latest episode in our TPWKY Book Club series. In this series, which is one of my favorite things about making the podcast, 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 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.com, where you can find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate account under the extras tab. Once you click through to Bookshop, you can find a bunch of TPWKY book lists, including, of course, are book club books, non-fiction 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. Send along also any thoughts you have about this book club series so far, which book has been your favorite, 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 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 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 collapse. And that fork in the road is rapidly approaching, where we either decide to deal with the massive phosphorus imbalance 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 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. Overuse of the element 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 and agricultural runoff is polluting waterways.

promoting toxic algal blooms that have tremendous implications for ecosystem and human health. When we think of wars fought over natural resources, past and potential, oil or water probably springs to mine 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 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

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 overuse? How can we begin to bring the scales back into balance and give ourselves more time to recapture phosphorus from the most polluted areas? The devil's element is an eye-opening and gripping reed

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. Dinner shows up every night, whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals take about five minutes of hands-on prep.

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That's T-H-E-B-A-L-M-B-O-X.com. Balm, like healing and care. The balm box, because cancer patients don't need bouquets and brownies. They need balm. Dan, thank 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. I'm happy to be here, yeah. So starting right at the beginning, what is phosphorus? Where is it found? What do we use it for? Well, phosphorus is an element,

But it's not really found 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 past 200 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 going to have consequences on our food supply in the coming years and decades,

decades, I would say. But it has immediate consequences right now because we're using it, overusing it, to such an extent that we're following our waters because it's not good at just growing soybeans and kernels of corn. It also, when it hits water, grows algae. And increasingly, 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 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. 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? You know, I was like everybody else. I didn't know how to spell it. I didn't know what it was. But I was doing some research for a book that came out in 2017 called Death and Life of 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 Sea back in the 1960s and how we resuscitated it with basically the Clean Water Act. And what the Clean Water Act did was it put the screws to industries that were polluted. the lake and the big problem at the time was detergent, synthetic soap. It was largely in the 50s and 60s when you buy a box of tide or whatnot. It was almost a box of phosphorus. And once they figured out that 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 10 or 12 years of reporting that I did at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 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, well, 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. So you mentioned the Clean Water Act and how powerful it was in that it really did sort 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?

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. 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 polluter of phosphorus at the time with the detergents. Agriculture was largely left alone because in regulatory parlance, 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 smokestack.

And the Clean Water Act, and later the Clean Air Act, really required that we stop polluting wantonly from these pipes and smokestacks. And if not eliminate it completely, then 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 landscape was too diffuse and not significant enough to really, you know, warrant some heavy regulating. But that was in 1972, and, you know, 50 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 CAFOs, the concentrated animal feeding operations or factory farms.

You know, it used to be that a herd of a hundred cows was a big deal. Well, now I live in Wisconsin, America's dairyland. It's not uncommon to have 8,000 or 10,000 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 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. in simple terms, a cow in a pasture would eat grass. The cow would poop. That poop would have the phosphorus from the grass in it, and it would replenish the crop land. So it was like a virtuous cycle, a never-ending loop. Cow poops, grass grows, cow eats grass, cow poops, and on and on and on. Well, we don't have the acreage to sustain, you know, these, that's why they call them concentrated feeding operations.

They're basically, today, the cows aren't typically out in pasture. They're in a barn being fed grains from, you know, wherever. 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 18 times as much waste as a human. The difference is it's human waste goes through treatment and, you know, largely, 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 I said before, then it's not growing crops we want, but it's growing toxic algae. 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 you share in your book about this name and sort of the magic of phosphorus. Yeah, it's been called the devil's element for centuries.

And, you know, more recently people think of it because it was the 13th element discovered back in, I think it was 1679 in Hamburg, Germany. And it was discovered by an alchemist who was trying to isolate the philosopher's stone, this mythical material that they believed at the time could 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 Hennege Brand, operating out of Hamburg, Germany in the late 1600s.

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 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 the human waste stream, these waxy glowing nuggets. And this was phosphorus.

It had been cleaved from its 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 street. that glowed in the dark. But unfortunately, if it, if it, if it, these little nuggets, you know, not much bigger than like a marble, heated to just above room temperature, maybe 80 Fahrenheit, they combust it 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 1600s or early 1700s for this other than it was just a curiosity. You know, it didn't turn anything gold.

It turned out urine can't turn anything gold. Maybe a snowbank, but that's about it. So 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. That may be another reason for the term devil's element. But eventually we made bombs with it, fire bombs, incendiary bombs.

And coincidentally, Hamburg, which is phosphorus's hometown, was basically burned to the ground in 1953 by the Allies dropping incendiary bombs that were largely made of phosphorus. And so the name persists today because the stuff is dastardly. When those bombs dropped in the 1940s, 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 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. And the region around Hamburg is rich with amber because it used to be, you know, conifer forest and all the resin, you know, over time, it became amber. So there's long been amber hunters on the shore of the Baltic Sea or the Elbe River. And sometimes what people grab and think is amber is not.

It's 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 beachcombing 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. Or his pocket just burst into flames. 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 40% 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 riverbanks 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 an incendiary bomb. It burns so hot and so brightly that it's used to illuminate 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 horrific.

It'll burn to the femur and then some. So, and through a skull. And, yeah, the devil's on with it. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just a few. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant handwashing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture.

It's non-greasy, unscented, and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moisturization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating at work, from health care and food service to salon, lab, and caregiving environments. It's been relied on for decades by people who wash their hands constantly or work in harsh conditions because it actually works. O'Keefs is my hand cream of choice in these dry Colorado winters

when it feels like my skin is always on the verge of cracking. It keeps them soft and smooth, no matter how harsh it is outside. We're offering our listeners 15% off their first order of O'Keefs. Just visit O'Keefscompan.com slash this podcast and code this podcast at checkout. When someone you love is facing cancer, you want to do more than send a card or flowers that will wilt in a week. You want to actually help. That's where the balm box comes in. Our care packages are built from research with over 500 cancer patients and caregivers.

packed with items people actually use during treatment. Think soothing, practical, thank goodness I have this kind of relief. For you, it's not just a gift. It's a way to show up in a moment where words fall short. For them, it's comfort, calm, and a reminder they're not alone. From chemo-friendly boxes to mastectomy recovery kits, even options for men, we've made it simple to give something that's elegant, premium, and genuinely useful. And yes, domestic shipping's always free on orders over $50, because making someone feel cared for shouldn't be complicated.

So skip the empty get well soon. Send real help, real comfort, and maybe even a laugh. Visit the balmbox.com. That's t-h-e-b-l-m-b-O-X.com. Balm, like healing and care. The balm box, because cancer patients don't need bouquets and brownies. They need balm. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived in, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was.

No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back, everyone. I've been chatting with Dan 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 phosphorus paradox where there's both a shortage and an overuse or pollution issue. And in your book, you discuss some of the issues

with the shortage and 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 U.S. or, you know, just the globe? 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 intuitive 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, humans included. But there was only so much manure in, you know, 16- in the 1600s. So the British were really, 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 really well. And that set them, propelled them into some really weird places. including so the Battle of Waterloo was in 1815, I believe. And in the five and 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 years ago,

but it's just been widely held that there are no bones at Waterloo because the British took them back to England, ground them in these specially built mills, and spread them on the crops to grow turnips and wheat. But there was only some. many bones to go around. So then we chased after new substances and turned out 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 bird poop that it was an inexhaustible resource And this is talking, we're talking like the 1840s to the 1880s. By the 1880s and 90s, 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 scarce, and they're scattered around the globe.

And that's what we've been relying on ever since, say, the 1880s, 1890s. And in the United States, our main deposits are in Florida, and we are on course. We're burning through them at such a pace that we could run out in three decades or four decades. At that point, we're going to be 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. There's no phosphorus, no life, no crops. And it just so happens that 70 to 80% of the known reserves left are in Morocco in 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 start scraping for phosphorus to put on their crops to feed their 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, 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?

Yeah, well, the indigenous people of the Western Sahara, they are a nomadic. people and, you know, had been for a long time and were all the way up until the 1970s when Spain opened up a phosphorus mine, a phosphate rock mine, on their land. And then Spain pulled out real, real soon thereafter, and Morocco occupied it and has controlled the mine 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, we're talking over 100,000 people. It was supposed to be a temporary situation when Morocco came down and occupied the territory

in the 1970s, right, in mid-1970s. 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 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 on from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s,

and it's the UN brokered a very fragile piece 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 100 kilometers long to take the product from the mine across North Africa and out to the Atlantic where it can 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 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. 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 or even more so. Absolutely. Absolutely. But, you know, it has its downside, which we've talked a little bit about.

I mean, 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, they're getting worse almost by the year because climate change is warming up the waters, and this stuff loves phosphorus and 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 its own way, by any stretch of imagination. 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 is what humans do. But why do you think we haven't learned the lesson that inexhaustible doesn't really exist? Well, because it's been relatively like these deposits, It's like the bird poop 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, 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 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 the water problem, I mean, I think they're both coming to a head. In 2008, I think it was driven largely by the ethanol rush because, you know, we started, everybody started growing corn for fuel. Today, 40% of the corn we grow in the United States goes towards ethanol, and 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 mine to crop lands to water. And along the way, you know, it does a lot of, of damage, we can be a lot more intelligent and measured in our application of not just 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. We can engineer, you know, we'll never get to repair the true circle of life, but 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 our water. You can just Google toxic algae, and you'll see it's just ravaging water from Florida to Washington State, the Great Lakes, and around the world, and that's, it's a phosphorus problem. We need to keep that phosphorus on croplands 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 water that 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 the situation, they are. And it's because of misuse of phosphorus. And I want to get into some of this, like the interesting technology. 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 the biggest offenders when it comes to phosphorus pollution? Or is it just certain areas within the U.S. that are the biggest offenders?

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. 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 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 oftentimes the landscape doesn't need more phosphorus and it ends up in the water. And so I think one thing that we 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 sewage lagoons, you can't help but think that that's a big source and contained source of pollution. it is time to, I think, rein 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 at the cash register doesn't reflect the true cost. The price, true cost is reflected when you go to your beach, like,

In Lake Michigan, I'm thinking Lake Mendota 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 the kids who go to school there now don't expect to be able to swim in it because it's so polluted with manure from New Bride 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 it levels the playing field for everybody.

So if we do have to pay a 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 2014 driven by manure 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 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 pallets of baby formula. It was bizarre because, you know, that city of Toledo is on the edge of the Great Lakes, which hold 20% of the world's surface freshwater, and they couldn't safely,

you know, 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 40% of the corn we produce in the United States now ends up in our gas tank. And everybody who's looked at this issue, who isn't a politician or a corn farmer, knows that ethanol is just, it isn't the environmental, you know, savior that many people pitched it as it requires huge energy inputs. and also fertilizer inputs. It was a real moment for me 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, bad move. I mean, Al Gore, when he ran for president, he pledged allegiance to ethanol. And, you know, he ruse that now and he'll say as much. But he said, you know, if you want to be president of the United States, you've 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 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 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 to take. It just 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 why our beaches are closed and why our drinking supplies are threatened. And why from time to time fertilizer and therefore food prices just spike, not just in the United States but around the world. I mentioned in 2008 there were food riots. And that, to me, is kind of a glimpse of what we could be headed. When I say food riots, they were not in the United States, but they were in India and Haiti and a number of other places. So as long as food is relatively cheap, I guess they're not going to worry about it.

But that's not going to be the case forever. 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 algalienable. 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 of like take us through this downstream, how this all happened and how these algal blooms really have their roots in the Midwest? Yeah, 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 in 2019, you know, Joe Biden, you know, I followed him into a bathroom. He didn't have the security that he has today. And he, you know, told me he supports ethanol. and so did all the Republicans as well. And so that was in August. And after that, I went down the Mississippi River because, you know, Iowa is a big corn country.

And at the same time that people were campaigning up there in support of ethanol and 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 12-month period that was the wetest 12 months on record in the Mississippi River basin, which is huge. It spans across like 40% 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 the summer into fresh water. And that, so this toxic algae that I've been talking about is primarily a freshwater phenomenon. And phosphorus drives freshwater algae blooms.

Nitrogen is a bigger factor in saltwater when they have different types of algae blooms. In that summer, even as the 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 2019 and stayed closed for the whole summer because of what was coming down the Mississippi River. It wasn't just water.

It was excess phosphorus coming off of croplands. So it flowed down. I mean, they were getting salinity readings all along Mississippi. Like it's supposed to be, I think, 30 parts per thousand. I get the order of magnitude off, but they were just like five, and they should be 30. And, you know, it's bordering on just, you know, what you'd expect to not find. Well, it just wasn't typical ocean water.

And so they had atypical 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, there was 40 miles of beach, I think 27 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 20 of them or something. And those things are expensive.

He took out a substantial loan. And he couldn't rent him out. He was prohibited from doing that. So he was, when I talked to him, he was just packaging them up and sending him to Georgia. It was like a fire sale so he could pay the bank. And he said something that really was. 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 live in Wisconsin.

He said, why aren't you guys regulated? 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 knowing, realizing what's going on here. We've talked about the, the, 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 algal blooms have? 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 mussel infestation of North America's fresh waters. But, you know, these little drycinids, these little clam-like things came from the Caspian Sea Basin in the region around that via ocean freighters sailing up into the Midwest on the St. Lawrence Seaway. They had all these hitchhikers, and this is in the 60s and 70s. 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. I mean, most times people have any encounter with them. it's when they cut their feet on them. But they're just incredibly efficient at filter 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 60s, Lake Erie 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 out-competed 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. I mean, moderate exposure will just give you a cough and a headache. Significant exposure can cause liver failure.

It's been implicated in a kid who went swimming on a golf course pond here in Wisconsin. some years back, and he died. He died because of acute exposure to the algae is called microcistus, and the toxin is called microcystin. And it's a liver toxin. And there's also increasing evidence that it's a neurotoxin related to 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. And some people 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?

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, we were talking earlier, about the lengths the British were going to, to 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 gosh, we are going to have turnips and wheat, you know, galore. We 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 action isn't done to, you know, neutrify a crop. 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 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 thumb is if a farmer has to move that manure more than 10 miles, he's losing big money and he's 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 in the country or the world where it's needed. It becomes almost the same kind of product. It is essentially the same product coming from a fertilizer factory that's using rock-based phosphate. So we can do that. It's going to cost some money, but 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, doubly coincidentally, Hamburg's kind of like putting on 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 wastewater treatment plant on the banks of the Elb River 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. 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. 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, 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. It's something that's going to provide life for the next crop, the next generation of humans. 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 kill you.com where 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 placebo-rida recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate account, our goodreads list, a firsthand account form, and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for

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