The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus And A World Out Of Balance, by Dan Egan

This book hit surprisingly close to home for me. As a child, I grew up in the area very close where Florida’s phosphorus business goes on, and I would see long trains bringing the phosphate from the mines in Bone Valley (as it is referred to in this book) in hundreds of train cars from the area through Plant City and on to the Port of Tampa to be shipped to other areas. I had no sense as a small child of being on the front lines of a war against nature and a desire to exploit the earth’s chemical potential, but there it was, even as I have gone digging for (relatively recent) fossils in the area myself. Nor have I always been aware that it is phosphate that keeps Morocco so tightly grasping onto the otherwise barren Western Sahara rather than letting its residents govern themselves and profit as they may from their desert nation’s immense phosphate reserves. Youth, issues of justice, and a desire to profit from the scarcity of an element needed to keep starvation at bay are all complicated motives, and they include quite a few of the more interesting incidents in history, ranging from an American law passed in the 19th century that allows the United States to annex any guano island it finds unoccupied, to wars like the War of the Pacific that left Bolivia without a seacoast. Phosphorus is indeed the devil’s element for all of the havoc that its lure has possessed for nations over the past 150 years or so.

This book is about 200 pages long and is divided into three parts and nine chapters. The book begins wit ha note to the reader as well as an introduction that explores the author’s own interest in Phosphorus and its results while also explaining his use of the element name for the various phosphates that serve as how Phosphorus usually appears in the world. The first part of the book discusses the race for Phosphorus around the world, with a look at its beginnings in alchemy (1), the broken circle of life that led to the first use of phosphorus from the bones of dead soldiers as well as guano (2), the exploitation of Central Florida for phosphorus from fossil sources (3), and the fighting over Phosphorus in Western Sahara (4). The second part of the book then examines the cost of Phosphorus in looking at laundry detergent (5), the toxic water that comes from farms (6), empty beaches and their effects (7), and the diseased heart of central Florida in the Everglades and what it bodes (8). The book then ends with a plea to overcome the destructive waste of Phosphorus (9) in the third part of the book, after which the book ends with acknowledgements, notes, a partial bibliography, and an index.

This book comes close to recognizing the full scope of the horrors of Phosphorus’ role in the modern world, but strangely enough it stops just shy of telling the whole story. I am not sure why that is the case, as the author has no hesitation nagging about the role of farming subsidies in American politics and in complaining about the lack of regulation of American farms in the Midwest whose phosphorus-rich (and nitrogen-rich) runoff has caused environmental havoc from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, or in describing our use of phosphorus in terms of apocalyptic panic. Still, the author seems unwilling (or simply lacks the knowledge) of tying the chemical fertilizer industry to the chemical weapons industry, even if it is hinted at in his discussion of a Nobel-prize winning German war criminal in World War I who the author considers strange in being both a hero and a villain of world history for his twin roles in exploiting the potential of Phosphorus. He was not strange at all in so doing, as a great many figures in the early 1900’s found that they could profit from both war and peace by selling nations on the lure of NPK for both weapons and fertilizer. And indeed, as we have seen, chemical fertilizer itself has been a useful fuel for chemical weapons in the wrong hands, and not by accident either. It is strange that the author does not make more of this.