Author Dan Egan talks with The Texas Tribune about phosphorus overuse and toxic algae blooms

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Author Dan Egan spoke with The Texas Tribune to talk about his new e-book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.” The e-book takes readers on a deep dive into how phosphorus, a key element in fertilizer that is helping make stronger international meals manufacturing, additionally reasons toxic algae blooms that experience infected lakes, rivers and different waterways around the United States.

Discovered within the 1600s by means of a German alchemist in Hamburg, phosphorus’ complete possible to fertilize vegetation wouldn’t be totally discovered till the 1800s. Egan’s e-book main points how other people have constructed companies round extracting phosphorus from fabrics just like the bones of squaddies slain in wars, hen poop off the Guano Islands in South America and phosphate rock discovered in large part in Florida.

“This is what the story is about. It’s our constant chase for the next fertilizing substance,” Egan informed Tribune environmental reporter Alejandra Martinez. “People thought at the time that this was going to be an endless supply, we would never run out.”

Egan mentioned people have grow to be overly depending on phosphorus and are burning throughout the international’s provide at an “unsustainable pace.”

“There is no substitute for phosphorus, it is life’s bottleneck,” Egan mentioned.

Egan’s e-book says overuse of phosphorus has ended in toxic algae blooms within the Mississippi River basin, Lake Erie and each the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. For the primary time since 2018, Texas noticed toxic algae blooms this 12 months, close to Galveston Bay and the Rio Grande Valley.

The algae that blooms when fed by means of phosphorus — referred to as cyanobacteria or blue-green algae — reasons water to turn out to be a thick, inexperienced toxic gloop that may “kill dogs and make a swimmer vomit in a matter of seconds after an accidental gulp,” Egan wrote in his e-book. Climate trade is an extra consider algae enlargement, with intense spring rains washing chemical fertilizers from farmland into within reach rivers and lakes, Egan wrote.

“Right now what we’re doing is we’re putting too much chemical fertilizer and manure on the crop lands,” Egan mentioned within the dialog. “The philosophy was that a little is good, a lot is better, just in case. And so, more would go on the landscape than was needed.”

He mentioned that has brought about numerous phosphorus to building up in soils that’s going to leach out through the years. “We can’t just flip a switch and it’s going to be problem solved,” Egan mentioned.

Farmers can lend a hand save you long term algae blooms from contaminating water by means of consolidating manure right into a small house and then processing it the usage of anaerobic digesters to strip out the phosphorus, one thing he mentioned is “every bit as pure as what’s coming out of a chemical fertilizer factory,” permitting farmers to regulate the motion and quantity of phosphorus used.

“It’s here and it’s not going anywhere until we better control what’s coming off the land,” Egan mentioned. “Too many people too often just kind of throw up their hands and think, ‘Well, this is just natural.’ It’s not.”