Special Episode: Dan Egan & The Devil’s Element

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I'd wager that for most of us, phosphorus doesn't factor into our everyday thoughts or vocabulary.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that fork in the road is rapidly approaching, where we either decide to deal with the massive phosphorus imbalance we have,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, what do I mean by phosphorus imbalance?

Speaker 7 Great question.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Overuse of the element has led to this paradox, where overexploitation 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.

Speaker 1 When we think of wars fought over natural resources, past and potential, oil or water probably springs to mind before phosphorus would, but that might just be the future we're facing.

Speaker 1 In The Devil's Element, Egan takes readers through the past, present, and possible future of phosphorus.

Speaker 1 He shares the fascinating story of when phosphorus was first discovered and how it earned its devilish nickname.

Speaker 1 He tells the tale of Peru's quote-unquote inexhaustible guano islands and the lessons we should have learned from them.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 How can we begin to bring the scales back into balance and give ourselves more time to recapture phosphorus from the most polluted areas.

Speaker 1 The Devil's Element is an eye-opening and gripping read that will have you wondering how on earth we're not all talking about phosphorus all the time.

Speaker 1 So let's get to talking about phosphorus right after this break.

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Speaker 1 Dan, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 25 I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1 So starting right at the beginning, what is phosphorus? Where is it found? What do we use it for?

Speaker 25 Well, phosphorus is an element, but it's not really found as a...

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It is a critical fertilizer that humans have become addicted to over the past 200 years. And it's worked miracles on the croplands.
But the problem is

Speaker 25 we only have so much of it and we're burning through it at an unsustainable pace. And

Speaker 25 that's going to have consequences on our food supply in the coming years and decades, decades, I would say.

Speaker 25 But it has immediate consequences right now because we're using it, overusing it, to such an extent that we're we're fouling our waters because it's not good at just growing soybeans and kernels of corn.

Speaker 25 It also, when it hits water, grows algae and increasingly

Speaker 25 it's spawning outbreaks of toxic algae. It's like we turned on a gusher and

Speaker 25 we can't really turn it off now without causing a lot of pain and suffering across the planet.

Speaker 25 At the same time, w 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 25 You know, I was like everybody else. I didn't know how to spell it.
I didn't know what it was.

Speaker 25 But I was doing some research for a book that came out in 2017 called Death and Life of the Great Lakes.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And what the Clean Water Act did was it put the screws to industries that were polluting the lake. And

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And once once they figured out that that was causing Lake Erie to turn you know distressingly green and 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

Speaker 25 the the Great Lakes book was largely a

Speaker 25 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 I'd love to do a book on it.

Speaker 25 I ended up doing that, and it was quite a challenge, but it was enjoyable as well.

Speaker 1 So you mentioned the Clean Water Act and how powerful it was in that it really did kind of slow the progress of pollution in some areas.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 So once we realized that what was going on, that really spurned the Clean Water Act and

Speaker 25 they came down heavy on industry because that was the major polluter of phosphorus at the time with the detergents.

Speaker 25 Agriculture was largely left alone because in regulatory parlance,

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And the Clean Water Act and later the Clean Air Act really required that we stop

Speaker 25 polluting wantonly from these pipes and smokestacks. And if not eliminated completely, then severely limit the amounts that we were discharging.

Speaker 25 And that worked, and it worked really well for a couple of decades.

Speaker 25 Agriculture was left alone because they thought this non-point pollution, which is basically, you know, stuff just coming off the landscape,

Speaker 25 was too diffuse and not significant enough to really

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 the CAFOs, the concentrated animal feeding operations or factory farms.

Speaker 25 It used to be that a herd of 100 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 they do more than produce milk.

Speaker 25 They make manure and they do it just like milk every day. And it's got to go somewhere.
And historically,

Speaker 25 the rule of thumb is it it takes an acre to sustain a cow and this is the beauty of of the phosphorus molecule is it doesn't go away so 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 uh the cropland so it was like a virtuous cycle a never-ending loop cow poops

Speaker 25 grass grows, cow eats grass, cow poops, and on 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It's bogglingly huge.

Speaker 25 A rule of thumb is one cow produces about as much waste as a human, 18 times as much waste as a human. The difference is human waste goes through treatment, and

Speaker 25 largely

Speaker 25 cow manure just goes on the land, whether the land needs that nutrient infusion or not.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 As I said before, then it's not growing crops we want, but it's growing toxic algae.

Speaker 1 And I want to circle back to some of these downstream effects and the consequences of these algal blooms and so on.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And, you know, does it relate to when people first recognize the significance of the substance?

Speaker 1 There are so many good little stories that you share in your book about this name and sort of the magic of phosphorus.

Speaker 25 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 was 1679

Speaker 25 in Hamburg, Germany. And it was discovered by an alchemist who was

Speaker 25 trying to isolate the Philosopher's Stone, this mythical material that they believed at the time could

Speaker 25 transmute base metals into silver and gold. platinum.
And

Speaker 25 the idea at the time was that all metals are slowly evolving to a more precious state.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 So this guy, his name was Hennig 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.

Speaker 25 And these guys were serious laboratory operators at the time. I mean they had

Speaker 25 equipment that we can't even replicate today in terms of how high they could keep you know heat for weeks on end, we can do it on an industrial scale, but

Speaker 25 we don't have the earthenware today that they did.

Speaker 25 And so, through a bunch of urine and a bunch of hocus pocus, he eventually baked out of these out of the human waste stream these waxy glowing nuggets. And this was phosphorus.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And if you like smudged it on a wall, you would leave a streak that glowed in the dark.

Speaker 25 But unfortunately, if it if it these little nuggets, you know, not much bigger than like a marble,

Speaker 25 heated to just above room temperature, maybe 80 Fahrenheit, they combusted and burned, you know, ferociously hot. And that's really where it got its name, the devil's element.

Speaker 25 And there was really no practical application in the late 1600s or early 1700s for this, other than it was just a curiosity.

Speaker 25 You know, it didn't turn anything gold you know urine turned out urine can't turn anything gold and maybe a snowbank but that's about it um

Speaker 25 so it was it just became a curiosity for a while and then you know as is you know

Speaker 25 as is as how it goes with humanity we 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 um but eventually we made bombs with it firebombs, incendiary bombs.

Speaker 25 And coincidentally, Hamburg, which is Phosphorus' hometown, was basically burned to the ground in 1953 by the Allies dropping incendiary bombs that were largely made of phosphorus.

Speaker 25 And so the name persists today because the stuff is dastardly.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 But if it hit water, it stabilized immediately.

Speaker 25 And so it looked like it looked like fireworks when you just see those globules just kind of coasting from the clouds down into, you know, at a Fourth of July celebration. That's what it looked like.

Speaker 25 But when it hit the water,

Speaker 25 it wasn't like ash that just disappeared. It solidifies and stabilizes.
And so unfortunately, today, it looks a lot like amber.

Speaker 25 And the region around Hamburg is rich with amber because it used to be, you know, a conifer forest and all the resin, you know, over time became amber.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 is amber is not. It's one of these unburned chunks of phosphorus.
And they put it in their pocket. and boom.

Speaker 25 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 and

Speaker 25 or his pocket just burst into flames and he had to go into the sea and this was December to put the flames out

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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,

Speaker 25 it doesn't happen every day, but it's not uncommon. You can Google it.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It'll burn to the femur and then some, so, and through a skull. And yeah, the devil's hell with it.

Speaker 1 Let's take a quick break. We'll be back in just a few.

Speaker 4 Hi, I'm Morgan Sung, host of Close All Tabs from KQED, where every week we reveal how the online world collides with everyday life.

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Speaker 8 It actually really matters that driverless cars are going to mess up in ways that humans wouldn't.

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 As you mentioned, we talked a little bit about this phosphorus paradox where there's both a shortage and an overuse or pollution issue.

Speaker 1 And in your book, you discuss some of the issues with the shortage and

Speaker 1 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 just the globe?

Speaker 25 Well, let me rewind just a little bit to just explain that 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.

Speaker 25 I mean, it started in antiquity when, you know, farmers just intuited that, you know,

Speaker 25 you put certain stuff on crops and it makes them grow better. And, you know, commonly that was manure, animal and otherwise, humans included.

Speaker 25 But there was only so much manure in

Speaker 25 the 1600s. So the British were really,

Speaker 25 they were really under the gun to keep their crops productive because, it's an island nation with limited croplands.

Speaker 25 And they eventually figured out that bones, and they didn't know why, but bones worked really well.

Speaker 25 And that set them, propelled them into some really weird places, including, so the Battle of Waterloo was in 1815, I believe.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 But there was only so many bones to go around, so then we chased after new substances, and

Speaker 25 turned out bird poop is a spectacular source of phosphorus.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And at the time, they thought that

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 By the 1880s and 90s, we had run out of it, and that sent us on the hunt for more.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 They're relatively

Speaker 25 scarce, and they're scattered around the globe. And that's what we've been relying on ever since, like, say, the 1880s, 1890s.
And in the United States, our main deposits are in Florida, and we are

Speaker 25 on course. We're burning through them at such a pace that

Speaker 25 we're not going to,

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 There's no phosphorus, no life, no crops.

Speaker 25 And it just so happens that 70 to 80 percent of the known reserves left

Speaker 25 are in Morocco and 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

Speaker 25 start scraping for phosphorus to put on their crops to feed their citizens.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Would you mind taking us through that again?

Speaker 25 Yeah, well, the indigenous people of the Western Sahara,

Speaker 25 they are a nomadic people and had been for a long time and were all the way up until the 1970s when Spain opened up

Speaker 25 a phosphorus mine, a phosphate rock mine,

Speaker 25 on their land. And then Spain pulled out real soon thereafter, and Morocco occupied it and has controlled the mine ever since.

Speaker 25 And much of the native population of the area has been, you know, basically warehoused in these tent camps.

Speaker 25 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, mid-1970s.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 There's been guerrilla attacks on the mine, more specifically on they built the world's largest conveyor belt.

Speaker 25 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 be put on boats and shipped around the world. So,

Speaker 25 this stuff is

Speaker 25 incredibly valuable and it forces people to do things to each other that they otherwise wouldn't. And

Speaker 25 it's an old story for humanity, but this is one that not enough people know about.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 25 Absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, it has its downside, which we've talked a little bit about.
I mean, it's

Speaker 25 a life accelerant. And not all that, that's not, we don't want all of that life.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 So this isn't a problem that's going to go away on its own by any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 1 Reading about these inexhaustible, quote-unquote, quote-unquote, inexhaustible supplies of phosphorus in certain areas and then just how rapidly we burned through them,

Speaker 1 it seems like we're not learning that lesson. Like over and over again, the same things are happening.

Speaker 1 And maybe this is more of like a philosophical question that can't be answered and or the answer is just this is what humans do.

Speaker 1 But why do you think we haven't learned the lesson that inexhaustible doesn't really exist?

Speaker 25 Well, because it's been relatively like these deposits, 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.

Speaker 25 You know,

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It 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 croplands to such an extent that it just gets flushed off.

Speaker 25 It doesn't get taken up by the crop for which it's intended, and it goes into our water. And this, the water problem, I mean, I think they're both coming to a head.

Speaker 25 In 2008,

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 that's a huge demand of phosphorus. But

Speaker 25 we're coming to the point where we're going to have to start recognizing the virtuous circle of life that phosphorus stitches together.

Speaker 25 What we did was we took that circle and we turned it into a straight line where it runs from mine to croplands to water. And along the way, you know, it does a lot of damage.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 the waste stream of the American agriculture system. We can engineer,

Speaker 25 you know, we're never going to repair the true circle of life, but we can stitch it pretty close together. And in doing that, we'll do two things.

Speaker 25 We'll preserve the resources, the phosphorus rock deposits that we have today, and we'll also

Speaker 25 protect our water.

Speaker 25 You can just Google toxic algae, and you'll see

Speaker 25 it's just ravaging water from Florida to Washington State, the Great Lakes, and around the world. And

Speaker 25 it's a phosphorus problem. We need to keep that phosphorus on croplands.
out of the water. And by doing that,

Speaker 25 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 in.

Speaker 25 Safe water and safe, abundant food should not be mutually exclusive enterprises. And when you start peeling away

Speaker 25 the situation, they are. And it's because of misuse of phosphorus.

Speaker 1 And I want to get into some of this, like the interesting technologies or ideas on the horizon in terms of how we can repair this cycle.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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. where that are the biggest offenders?

Speaker 25 First of all, I don't want to disparage the agriculture industry or farmers.

Speaker 25 You know, there's nothing more noble than trying to 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.

Speaker 25 We talked a little bit about this before, but when the Clean Water Act was passed, the farms were small and

Speaker 25 the manure and the phosphorus that that contained was pretty diffuse, but that's not the case anymore.

Speaker 25 So because they're largely unregulated, they can with impunity just spread this stuff on landscapes.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It is time to, I think, rein in the agriculture industry and require that they treat their waste like any other industry. And

Speaker 25 we've got a history showing that this works. And it's going to cost money, but we're already paying a price for the system.

Speaker 25 For example, 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.

Speaker 25 Like in Lake Michigan, I'm thinking Lake Mendota over at the University of Wisconsin. I did a fair amount of research over over there.
They've got this gorgeous lake right on the edge of the campus.

Speaker 25 And, you know, 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 nearby farms. And that leads to these toxic algae outbreaks.

Speaker 25 So we're paying a price for failing to regulate adequately right now, whether we know it or not.

Speaker 25 And the thing about proper regulations is it regulates, you know, it levels the playing field for everybody.

Speaker 25 So if we do have to pay a little bit more for milk, 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 a half a million people for several days and it was a really scary situation because

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 So they had to call in the National Guard to bring in know, tankers of water and pallets of baby formula.

Speaker 25 It was bizarre because

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 So that's one thing and one industry that we need to think about. Another thing I would argue that we need to rethink is the whole ethanol enterprise.

Speaker 25 I just mentioned that about 40% of the corn we produce in the United States now ends up in our gas tank.

Speaker 25 And everybody who's looked at this issue who isn't a politician or a corn farmer knows that ethanol is just,

Speaker 25 it isn't the environmental

Speaker 25 savior that many people

Speaker 25 pitched it as. It requires huge energy inputs and also fertilizer inputs.

Speaker 1 It was a real moment for me when I, in your book, when you talked about like how presidential campaigns are basically started in this place where there's so much corn growing.

Speaker 1 And so it's like a real political career killer or just like, you know,

Speaker 25 I mean, Al Gore, Al Gore, when he ran for president, he pledged allegiance to ethanol. And, you know, he ruse that now and he'll he'll say as much.

Speaker 25 But he said, you know, if you want to, 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And if you don't, you know, really support the ethanol industry, you're not going to show well in Iowa.

Speaker 25 So you know, there are some things that are relatively simple that we could do to just start addressing the problem. And

Speaker 25 I don't know what it's going to take. It just, it blows my mind that this is just like academics know about this.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 fertilizer and therefore food prices just spike, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Speaker 25 I mentioned in 2008 there were food riots, and that to me is kind of a glimpse of where we could be. we could be headed.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 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 algal 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 25 Yeah, and in climate change. So it was really interesting.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 He didn't have the security that he has today. And

Speaker 25 he, you know, told me

Speaker 25 he supports ethanol. And

Speaker 25 so did, you know, 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.

Speaker 25 And at the same time that people were campaigning up there in support of ethanol and corn growth 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

Speaker 25 there was I can't remember it wasn't a calendar year but it was a 12-month period that was the wettest 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.

Speaker 25 And that, so this toxic algae that I've been talking about is primarily a freshwater phenomenon. And phosphorus drives freshwater algae blooms.

Speaker 25 Nitrogen is a bigger factor in saltwater when they have different types of algae blooms. In that summer,

Speaker 25 even as the presidential candidates were all

Speaker 25 loving corn up in Iowa, the people down in Mississippi were going out of business because so much fresh water hit their coast that it allowed for these freshwater algae blooms to take off.

Speaker 25 And so the beaches of Mississippi closed in late June of 2019 and stayed

Speaker 25 closed for the whole summer because of what was coming down the Mississippi River. It wasn't just water.
It was

Speaker 25 excess phosphorus coming off of croplands. So it flowed down.
I mean, they were getting salinity readings, you know, all along Mississippi. Like, it's supposed to be, I think, 30 parts per thousand.

Speaker 25 I'll probably 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.

Speaker 25 Well, it just wasn't typical ocean water. And so they had atypical toxic algae outbreaks, and that just ruined the tourist season.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 And I talked to one guy who had bought a fleet of jet skis for that summer. And

Speaker 25 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 them out. He was prohibited from doing that.

Speaker 25 So he was, when I talked to him he was just packaging them up and sending them to Georgia it was like a fire sale so he could pay the bank and he said something that 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 you know why am I paying the price and these are the dots that we got to connect

Speaker 25 it was a great question and and the answer is because we don't have the political will and I think we don't have the political political will because we don't have an educated public knowing, realizing what's going on here.

Speaker 1 We've talked about that this algae is toxic. What makes it toxic? Like, what are the health effects on humans?

Speaker 1 And then sort of, you know, part two is what are the cascading impacts on ecosystems that these algal blooms have?

Speaker 25 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 connecting dots.

Speaker 25 But I don't know if you're familiar with the zebra and quagga mussel infestation of North America's fresh waters.

Speaker 25 But you know, these little Drysenids, these little clam-like things came from the Caspian Sea basin and the region around that

Speaker 25 via ocean freighters sailing up into the Midwest on the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Speaker 25 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 mussels.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 they're just incredibly efficient at filter

Speaker 25 feeding. And they don't have brains, but they're smart enough not to eat certain types of algae, toxic algae specifically.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 Today,

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 25 moderate exposure will just give you a cough and a headache.

Speaker 25 Significant exposure can cause liver failure. It's been implicated in a kid who went swimming on a golf pond here in Wisconsin

Speaker 25 some years back, and he died. And he died because of acute exposure to the algae is called microcystis, and the toxin is called microcystin.

Speaker 25 And it's a liver toxin, and there's also increasing evidence that it's a neurotoxin related to

Speaker 25 some pretty nasty stuff, including ALS.

Speaker 25 So, yeah, it's not just a matter of icky, unpleasant odors. It's a matter of public health.

Speaker 1 And some people, you know, 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?

Speaker 1 Can you talk about some of these promising areas and especially manure and what we can mine from manure?

Speaker 25 The most promising thing on the horizon is people just waking up to the idea that manure is nutritional gold.

Speaker 25 You know, you think about, we were talking earlier about the lengths the British were going to to

Speaker 25 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,

Speaker 25 galore.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 neutrify a crop. It's done just to get rid of the stuff that's in your limited capacity manure lagoon.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 25 It becomes almost the same kind of product, it is essentially the same product coming from a fertilizer factory that's

Speaker 25 using rock-based phosphate. So

Speaker 25 we can do that. It's going to cost some money, but you know, 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.

Speaker 25 And then I was talking about Hamburg earlier.

Speaker 25 You know, it's where phosphorus was discovered. It was burned to the ground.

Speaker 25 And coincidentally, doubly coincidentally, Hamburg's kind of like putting on a clinic for the rest of the world right now on how to deal with phosphorus.

Speaker 25 Germany's got a law that's going to require its major wastewater treatment plants to just virtually eliminate any kind of phosphorus discharges.

Speaker 25 And they're significant because phosphorus is in human waste as well as animal waste.

Speaker 25 And they've built a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant on the banks of the Elbe River that basically strips all the phosphorus out. And this is going to do two things for Germany.

Speaker 25 It's going to help protect their water quality and it's going to give them a source of fertilizer that they don't have

Speaker 25 organically, if you will. They don't you know, Western Europe really doesn't have many, if any, available phosphorus deposits at the moment.

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 think of

Speaker 25 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

Speaker 25 stuff that decays is not

Speaker 25 something that's bad. It's something that's going to provide life for

Speaker 25 the next crop, the next generation of humans.

Speaker 1 Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed this and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillYou.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.

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