Book Review: The Devil's Element by Dan Egan

Dan Egan's book explains that wielding a powerful element comes great responsibility.

I previously read (by audiobook) Dan Egan’s exemplary The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, a tight, clear, compelling summary of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of humans’ effects on the Great Lakes ecosystems. I regularly work on issues of water quality and the intersection with climate change, so I was excited to hear he was writing another book about phosphorus and reserved a copy before it hit the shelves.

I wasn’t disappointed. Egan once again writes with journalistic pace and focus. There is a story to tell, and although it’s not always clear where the individual chapter narratives are going or how it will connect back to the broader themes, rest assured, it will get there, you’ll learn something along the way, and you’ll be fascinated by something you probably didn’t know, unless you’ve made it a point to learn about phosphorus already.

The book is different in structure than what I expected. I was anticipating a book that focused on the modern perils of phosphorus loading from agriculture and Lake Erie algae blooms and fish kills and hypoxia. I expected lots of testimonials from frustrated scientists, watershed managers, and state officials, opposite quotes from angry, anti-regulation farmers struggling to make a living. Thankfully, the book assumes the reader is somewhat aware of all these discussions related to phosphorus use. Egan doesn’t skip over essential perspectives or points of immediate concern, but he doesn’t dwell on them, either, instead keeping our attention on the broader arc of the history of phosphorus and where the use will take us in the future.

Egan spent considerable time in his past work investigating the overuse of phosphorus as a cause for environmental catastrophe. Notably, his 2014 series "A Watershed Moment," describes the element's role in toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie. My sense is that, rather than repeating himself, Egan is making an effort to keep the word count lower and treating this book as complementary to his earlier work.

He includes some bizarre stories that would make fascinating dramatizations. Phosphorus was first isolated by Henning Brandt in Hamburg in 1669, who was trying to distill gold by boiling his own urine down to sludge. Egan talks about his own amusing desire to—ahem—replicate Brandt's experiment. Thankfully, Egan consulted a chemistry professor that talked him out of it. There is a story about a young laborer, recognizing the value of phosphorus in animal excrement for agriculture, meticulously following livestock with a scoop for hours on end to collect dung. And Egan’s description of the Mad Men-esque culture of competition to condescendingly create phosphorus-infused detergents for housewives in the 50s and 60s could be expanded into a zany, tongue-and-cheek miniseries filled with eye-rolling, cringe comedy moments.

Perils and Promise of Phosphorus

It’s hard not to read this book without casting phosphorus use in shades of light and dark, good and evil. Phosphorus is critical to life as we know it. We can't live without it, and it allows us to feed more people in more places than we would be able to otherwise. But throughout its history, competition to find, gather, and sell phosphorus for profit has led to conflict, caused public health crises, and amplified countless environmental disasters, primarily to enrich a wealthy few. It has been a key ingredient in the things that tear society apart like incendiary bombs and poisons, and has been exploited to the peril of vulnerable populations and aquatic wildlife. It’s hard not to compare it to humans’ addiction to, and misuse of, fossil fuels.

Pandering Politics of Phosphorus

Lake Erie and the Great Lakes substantially recovered from phosphorus use in detergents and other products in the 60s and 70s. The Clean Water Act of 1972, as those in the field are keenly aware, set requirements for cities and industries to limit phosphorus discharge. But thanks to good, old-fashioned political pandering and the desire of political candidates to win the early Iowa caucuses, farms were exempt from the restrictions. As a result of this glaring regulatory loophole, extreme overuse of phosphorus on farms, and poor runoff management, toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie and the impairments caused by phosphorus have returned with a vengeance.

Phosphorus and the Great Acceleration

Perhaps the most interesting thread for me, woven throughout the book, is that phosphorus is not limitless, and overuse of the element has long-term implications beyond the issues we’re presently dealing with. Phosphorus use is a factor in the Great Acceleration, the notion that our consumption of so many things critical for a healthy Earth is far exceeding the planet’s ability to replenish those resources, and the rate of that consumption is accelerating at an exponential rate. We are using it an unsustainable rate in superfluous practices like making sure our lawns are cosmetically pleasing, and lush green, and on a broader, global scale, our agricultural systems have become over-reliant on phosphorus.

All of this means we’re headed for a reckoning. The only question is when. If farms continue to overapply phosphorus and allow it runoff to reach our waterways, the harm to the ecosystem on which people depend will eventually outweigh the benefit of having cheap crops.

Precarious Balance

While Egan isn’t shy about casting blame based on the evidence for the problems we’ve experienced, he dutifully, and a bit humbly, recognizes the complexity of phosphorus use and doesn’t pretend there are magic spells that will get us out of the mess we’ve made. He does, however, highlight some promising research. One example features restrooms at the University of Michigan that I’ve proudly used myself, intended to reclaim and repurpose phosphorus-loaded human waste.

Like The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, The Devil’s Element is a study of balance, scientific understanding, the intersection of knowledge and policies, our failures and progress. If I have anything negative to say about Dan Egan’s book, it’s only that it feels short, that it left me wanting to learn more, and I can’t wait to read his next book.