Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance

– Welcome to University Place Presents.

I’m Norman Gilliland.

On the one hand, it has killed tens of thousands of people with painful death in wartime.

On the other hand, it has enabled us to feed billions and billions of people.

It’s key in both the good and the bad.

What is it?

We’re going to find out from my guest.

He is Dan Egan, the author of the book The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.

Welcome to University Place Presents.

– Thank you for having me.

– You right away tell some stories in this book that are remarkable.

I mean, for somebody who’s never been particularly afraid of phosphorus before, [both chuckling] I have to admit that now, I would steer clear of it, especially as you tell about it in a couple of your stories at the get-go.

– Yeah, yeah, it’s a bewitching element.

It’s the devil’s element.

And they call it that because of how poisonous and explosive it can be.

Also because it was the 13th element discovered.

This was back in the 1600s.

But there’s a real paradox there.

It’s essential to humanity and it’s also very dangerous.

– So a really basic sense, in a really basic sense it’s key to our very existence.

– It is, it’s in every living cell on the planet.

Maybe in the universe.

There’s no substitute for it.

Isaac Asimov said back in the early ’70s, he called it “life’s bottleneck.”

And so, yeah, we need the stuff desperately, but sometimes we mismanage it to ill effect.

– You begin with a story about a pursuit in Florida where a man is fleeing from the police.

– Yeah.

– He jumps over a fence and decides to escape by jumping into a canal.

And then what?

– Then he almost meets his demise.

Yeah, he was pulled over for drugs in Cape Coral, Florida, and he made a run for it.

And he ran into the backyards of some homes, and there’s canals in that city lacing the whole area like nautical alleys.

And he thought he could swim from the police, and he jumped into this goop that was green as guacamole.

And he soon learned, very toxic.

And yeah, he started retching, he started drowning.

And the police were in no hurry.

They were concerned about him, but they knew what he had jumped into.

And it was just this stew of toxic blue-green algae, which is very poisonous stuff.

And so they just started coaxing and coaching him to get to the shore.

And they finally pulled him out, and yeah, they washed him off with a hose and took him off to the emergency room, and later, I believe, charged him.

But it was, yeah, I thought that was a good way to open the book because it is a book about phosphorus, and people are gonna wonder, “Well, what’s a book about phosphorus gonna have for me?”

[Norman laughing] And so I knew I had to come out hard, so I came out with this story about what happens if you accidentally find yourself in this stuff.

– Well, we can imagine maybe that in Florida, parts of Florida, there would be a lot of canals and a lot of canals with blue-green algae.

We read about blue-green algae from time to time.

But you have another story that comes right after that, which takes place in Germany.

– Yeah, yeah, that was phosphorous’s birthplace.

And so Germany really just appears throughout the book.

But yeah, the opening chapter starts with a gentleman in his 70s walking down the beach on the Baltic coast.

In that area, Baltic amber is like, it’s like a thing.

It’s people go out harvesting it and selling it because the region used to be a conifer forest, so there was a lot of sap up there.

And that sap eventually became amber.

And so people go hunting for it.

Unfortunately for him and for a lot of people, they don’t always find amber.

They find nuggets of elemental phosphorus.

And this is a– – Norman: You described it as being, what he picked up, about the size of a quarter.

– Dan: Yeah.

– Norman: An orange… – Dan: Yeah.

– Norman: And since he was looking for a fossil, it’s not very interesting.

– Dan: No, he thought it interesting enough to bring home to his wife.

So he put it in his pocket.

And then his pants exploded in flames, and his leg exploded in flames.

And he instinctively went into the Baltic Sea to put out the flames.

And every time he’d come back out, his leg would light afire again.

And he had no idea, nor should he have, what had happened to him.

And he was thinking to himself, “I don’t smoke.

“You know, there’s no lighter in my pocket.

“There’s nothing in my pocket but a rock.

And why has it exploded?”

And that launches the book and really the story of phosphorus, and I’ll just explain real quickly that why that nugget was there was because it was dropped, as with, along with many, many, many bombs loaded with these phosphorus pebbles across northern Germany during World War II.

The idea that they were gonna burn, and they did burn Hamburg down to the ground.

But this phosphorus that was driving the explosions in these bombs stabilizes when it hits water.

So it’s almost like a time capsule.

All these nuggets of phosphorus are in the Elbe River up in Hamburg, Germany, and along the Baltic coast.

– Left over from, say, the fire bombing of– – Fire bombs.

– Dresden being the most famous, but there were more.

– Yeah, and Hamburg was just about as bad.

And so what it looked like at the time, I’ve described it, it’s just like fireworks.

When you see those glowing globules coming down from the sky, fireworks.

Those are basically harmless when they land in Lake Mendota or Lake Michigan or anywhere else.

These are not harmless nuggets.

These are very, very explosive, incendiary nuggets of elemental phosphorus.

And if they dry out and warm to just a tick above 80 degrees or so, they explode.

And your pants pocket, even on the Baltic Coast in December or whenever, I can’t remember the month that this happened, his pant pocket was warm enough to make this stuff explode.

And he burned, I think, 40% of his body.

He survived.

But they were gonna bring in a helicopter.

They’re afraid he’d take down the helicopter ’cause he just kept exploding.

It was crazy.

– It’s something that was known before World War II, what phosphorus could do in those circumstances?

– Well, so here we are in Hamburg, Germany, and so we open with the fire bombing of Hamburg in 1943.

But Hamburg is also where phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by an alchemist named Hennig Brand, who was chasing after the mythical philosopher’s stone.

This substance that the early chemists or alchemists thought they could use to transmute base metals into something more valuable.

– Norman: Turn lead into gold.

– Dan: Lead into gold, yeah.

And nobody knew exactly.

And the theory at the time was “All metals are evolving.

“We just need to find out what’s moving that process along and speed it along, and we’ll get rich.”

And so this guy thought he could isolate it from the human waste stream, from urine.

And so Hennig Brand in 1669 started to experiment, to tinker with tinkle, if you will.

And he ended up basically distilling elemental phosphorus out of that waste.

So elemental phosphorus doesn’t exist on its own in the natural world.

The element’s always bound up with oxygen atoms so it’s stable.

This guy figured out how to isolate it and strip it.

And so that makes it very volatile because it wants to get back in touch with those oxygen atoms.

So it explodes.

– Did he have adverse experiences in his experimenting?

– You know, the historical record doesn’t show that he did himself any great damage, but others who followed in his footprints did.

There were a lot of people who wouldn’t even touch it.

And so when he discovered it, you know, he didn’t really have a use for it because it wasn’t turning anything gold.

It was more just a curiosity because it was this waxy nugget that, like, glowed, it was phosphorescent, it glowed in the dark.

And you could sketch it on a wall and it would glow, the handwriting.

So they used it to just kind of wow the, you know, the courts of Europe; they would put on performances.

But after about a century, they realized that there were some other applications, some good for humanity and some not so good.

– And pretty early on in the history, by which I mean, well, certainly by the 19th century, early 19th century, post-Industrial Revolution population explosion, really.

You use England as an example where the population doubled in a fairly short number of decades.

– Yeah, I don’t remember the exact years or decades.

But yeah, so as this element was discovered in the 1600s.

By the 1800s, it was recognized as an essential fertilizer.

And it’s kind of a contorted, torturous story as how they figured out this stuff was phosphorus, but basically, the English were using anything they could think of to make a crop grow.

And this is, you know, throughout history, but it was really dire in the early, early 1800s during the Little Ice Age.

The famine was ever a threat, if not ever present.

And so the agriculture tinkering began, and they would put blood on crops, they’d put fabric, they’d put bones.

And bones really turned out to be a very potent fertilizer.

And they didn’t know why at the time, but they just knew that– – What kind of bones are we talking about?

– Any, humans included, you know.

The Battle of Waterloo took place, I believe, I’m gonna get this wrong– – Norman: 1815.

– Dan: 1815, thank you.

And some ten, let’s see, in about ten hours, 40,000 soldiers fell, and along with a lot of horses and other animals.

And if you were to go to the battlefield of Waterloo today, you would find no remains.

Which I guess isn’t surprising because it’s kind of a sacred ground.

And you could think that it would somehow be turned into a monument, and maybe the remains moved somewhere.

But if you went to visit the battlefield in 1825, ten years after the battle, you wouldn’t find any bones.

And that’s because the British, in their never-ending pursuit for fertilizer, realized that bones, and the first bones they were tinkering with actually came from like a, I believe it was knife factories.

And the handles, knife handles were used for bones, and there was a lot of shavings.

And it turned out to be like a Miracle-Gro.

And so that sent the English on the hunt for bones, and they ended up at Waterloo and battlefields across Europe, looting them, mining them, plundering them, you know, both their enemy combatants, the remains of their enemy combatants and of their own sons.

– Their own soldiers.

– Own soldiers.

So they built mills to grind these bones.

I mean, it was an industrial-scale operation.

– Was this well-known to the people of England?

– You know, I found some historic newspaper accounts where people were pretty…

The writer of this one article in, I think it was 1821, was horrified because they had thought that they were getting a shipment of animal bones, and they saw some human skeletons in it, and they were able to deduce where it had come from.

And I don’t think people had a big compunction about it because they were starving or in danger of starving.

So they did what they had to do.

– How long did that go on?

– Well, the bone rush, and that’s the story of phosphorus.

So it’s really interesting.

They were using bones, and at that point, they didn’t know that it was phosphorus that made those bones such a potent fertilizer.

They did know that animal waste was almost uniformly very, very productive as a fertilizer.

And this gets into some weird history.

Justus von Liebig, who’s kind of recognized as the father of modern chemistry, was scouring the English coast with some other scientists in the 1820s.

And they came across some skeletal, or not skeletal, I guess, fossilized remains of dinosaurs that were so intact, the dinosaurs had fossilized feces in their digestive tract.

And Liebig, the chemist, thought, “You know, if human manure “and animal manure is such an effective fertilizer, maybe this fossilized manure is.”

So he did an analysis and he realized, he was able to figure out and isolate, “This is phosphorus that we’re after.”

So then the hunt got more focused.

– Why the advantage though?

Because fossils are presumably a lot harder to come by than what they were already using.

– Yeah, but that was the jump they were able to make.

And there was actually a remarkable number of, they called them bezoas stones, I don’t know why, but they were literally clumps or nuggets of fossilized dung that were processed similar to how bones were.

Involved adding acid to release the phosphorus and the fertilizing properties of it on the crops.

But yeah, they ran out of dinosaur fossils real quickly, and that sent them to the other side of the globe to South America.

– Looking for what would be, in effect phosphate beds?

– Not yet; so they were on their way to realizing that there are certain rock deposits that are rich with phosphorus, but they did, Liebig, I believe, did the analysis.

But bird poop from the guano islands off the coast of Peru was just an incredibly potent fertilizer.

And the analysis they did, it’s been said that the ratio, so the three primary fertilizing ingredients are nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

That’s NPK.

That’s what you’ll see on a bag of, you know, whatever kind of fertilizer you might buy for your garden or for your crops if you’re a farmer.

And that’s what this bird poop had.

And you know, we had plenty of potassium at the time, and we weren’t in a danger of having an extreme shortage of nitrogen at that time.

That would come later.

But we would solve that in a different way.

But phosphorus is what we really needed.

So they started up this phosphorus trade that went on from the 1830s to the 1880s.

And there were news accounts at the time that these islands, so the islands were so rich with bird poop because of the Humboldt Current coming up the western coast of South America carried with it all sorts of plankton, which brought in fish, which brought in birds.

And the birds would eat the fish.

And they needed a place to nest and, you know, to poop.

And so they would go to these islands, and what made these islands unique, not just being in the middle of the Humboldt Current, but [clears throat] they’re so dry that it never rains.

So normally that waste would get washed back into the sea.

But in this case, it just, it turned into, over eons or millennia, turned into mountains of dried bird poop that was just ready to fertilize any kind of crop you could imagine.

– You had primarily what the English, other countries involved at this point, going for the guano trade?

– The English pioneered it, but the Americans jumped on board and so did most of western Europe real quickly.

And yeah, these accounts were like, “This is inexhaustible.

“There is so much poop, so much bird poop down there that we don’t have to worry about running out.”

And then within 50 years, they ran out.

That’s the story of phosphorus.

We keep hunting for it and we keep playing out whatever deposits we find of it.

– At this point though, you refer to the circle of life, and all of this is still part of the circle of life.

The kinda recycling of these materials.

– Yeah, so that’s, you know, we were saying earlier how phosphorus is in every single cell in every organism on the planet.

And historically, where did this phosphorus originally come from?

It came from after molten earth congealed, it was in certain rocks, igneous rocks, that just slowly eroded and leached their phosphorus molecules.

They’re actually phosphates, the molecule packaged, or the atoms packaged with phosphorus, with oxygen atoms, which is actually technically the fertilizing component that we’re talking about here.

But I just call it phosphorus for simplicity’s sake.

Anyway, that was a slow trickle of phosphorus into the living world.

And whatever took up that phosphorus, whenever it died, that phosphorus did not go away.

It was picked up by something else, whether it was in the ocean, in the lakes, on the land, it was circled over and over and over.

– So would you say phosphorus can be neither created nor destroyed?

– Exactly, yeah.

And so it was the governor of life, and how much phosphorus could leach from these rocks was how much life Earth could support.

And it was the circle of life.

And you know, this is a real simplification, but it’s actually really accurate.

A good illustration is just a pasture with a cow on it, an acre, you know, that’s basically what a grazing cow needs.

And that cow eats the grass, that cow poops, that poop grows grass, that cow eats the grass, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, circle of life.

Well, once we figured out that there were certain materials that were heavily concentrated or had heavy concentrations of phosphorus, we cracked that circle of life and turned it into a straight line.

And that line now runs from crop lands into our waters.

And sometimes that’s problematic.

But yeah, we broke the circle of life and we broke it in a real big way when we made the jump from, we went from bones to bird poop to finally rock deposits.

And these aren’t the rock deposits I was just talking about.

These are sedimentary rocks.

They’re basically just the result of dead sea life accreting on the sea floor.

And over time, that stuff turns, the pressure turns it into rocks.

And tectonic forces or whatever, ocean levels sink or climb, but it becomes accessible on land, where it can be mined.

So we’ve been mining these phosphorous-rich rocks since right around 1890.

Right when we started running outta bird poop, we turned to these rocks.

Those rocks are running out now.

– Well, there was quite a big boom in Florida, I know– – There was and there is.

– Central Florida in the 1890s.

– Yeah, that was like a gold rush.

I mean, it was, I mean, apocryphal or not, there was plenty of news accounts about people shooting each other over pebbles in the street because they had built streets in central Florida out of these rocks before they realized that they were nutritional gold.

So yeah, Florida had a big deposit, and we rely on that to this day.

I mean, the bread on your table is probably can be traced back to rocks being mined in Florida.

The problem is, just like bones and bird poop, we’re playing out these deposits, and it’s been estimated that the deposits down in Florida should be played out in three or four decades.

There’s some smaller deposits out west in Idaho and Utah, and there’s some in North Carolina.

But we’re gonna become dependent on other countries for our nutritional security, which is a lot trickier, I would argue, than energy security because we can have workarounds to oil.

There’s no workaround to life’s bottleneck, phosphorus.

– But it too, is limited.

Takes a very long time to develop any of those deposits that you talked about.

And also, there’s a finite amount of it.

– Yeah, you know, it’s a real paradox.

At the same time we’re running out of it, we’re overusing it to the point where we’re polluting our waters with… ‘Cause the stuff grows, corn, soy, wheat, anything we want on land, when it gets into the water, it grows stuff we don’t want, which is the toxic algae we were talking about at the beginning of the show.

– You have a story that’s remarkable about a place that originally was called Ocean Island.

With these just mountains of deposits.

– Yeah, yeah, and that wasn’t bird poop.

That was rock.

And that was around 1910.

We got really good thanks to the chemists of the day at zeroing in on these rare deposits.

And these islands were rich with rock deposits.

There were, I don’t know, probably a dozen or so.

But we literally, Naru and Banaba, I believe that’s how you pronounce that island, Banaba.

We basically stripped those islands to the waterline almost.

And you know, the inhabitants be damned.

Some of them stayed, some of them were exiled.

During World War II, some of them were enslaved by the Japanese.

And yeah, we destroyed cultures and islands in the name of putting food on our table.

And when I say we, I mean primarily Western society, Western civilizations.

– Well, I think you mentioned that the Allies after the war, Australia, New Zealand, or that particular island, basically relocated everybody 1,600 miles away.

Very different kind of place.

– Yeah, yeah, and they didn’t do really well.

I was gonna go out, COVID interrupted these plans, but I was gonna go out to, well, initially I wanted to go to Banaba Island, but because there’s some people who have resettled it, some of the Indigenous people.

There’s no airstrip.

There’s a boat that brings medical supplies and food every three months or so.

So if you wanna go there, you can go for a night or you have to go for three months.

[chuckling] And so that was making things a little dicey as far as itineraries.

– Once we get into this post-war period and people start looking for other sources then, as they know?

I mean, you point out that there’s one person at this point who controls what, 80% of the known phosphate.

– Well, that’s, yeah, that’s kind of what’s on the horizon here.

So I was saying these rock deposits are relatively scarce and they’re being mined intensively.

Today, 70% to 80% of the world’s phosphate rock reserves are in Morocco, in the Western Sahara territory that is occupied.

– You talk about actually a pretty hot war that very few people know about.

– The War of the Sands, yeah, in the 1970s.

So Spain developed a huge mine in Western Sahara in the early 1970s.

And then Spain pulled out of… Western Sahara was a Spanish colony.

Spain pulled out and Morocco filled that vacuum.

And the Native people of the Sahara Desert there didn’t really take too kindly to the idea of their northern neighbors coming in and taking over operation of the mine.

They saw that mine and the assets that it was pulling from the ground as theirs.

And so that started a low-grade war.

And so this was 1974, if my memory serves.

And next door in Algeria, they built, like, a tent city as a refugee camp.

And the idea was things are gonna cool down in two or three months and everybody can go home.

Those tent camps still there today, and they’re home to, like, 100,000 people.

They don’t have running water.

They don’t have, you know, sanitation in the sense that we do.

They don’t have a lot of hope.

And so this war over that mine pretty much flickered out in the 1990s, but it’s flaring up again.

And that mine is protected very heavily by Moroccan forces.

There’s berm, a massive berm.

It’s like a, I never remember my numbers, but I think it’s like 1,600 miles long, protecting not just the mine but that part of Western Sahara.

And it’s filled with landmines.

And on top of that are, you know, machine guns.

And on the other side of that are people who are, you know, trying to go home and feeling jilted because of the way that mine has been exploding with what they believe is their resource.

The Moroccans have a different side of the story.

– Yeah, it’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, isn’t it?

Where the Natives get pushed out, or at best make a few dollars off of this fortune that they’re sitting on.

– Yeah, and what makes this different from gold and silver is that it’s in a real way, it’s nutrition that they’re sitting on.

They’re sitting on the one thing, I mean, we can’t– – They’re sitting on a food supply, in effect.

– They’re sitting on, yeah, the Fort Knox of food.

– I think even back in 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President, realized the value, the importance, the crucial significance of phosphates.

– Yeah, he said we needed a national phosphorus policy, like an energy policy.

He recognized that.

Presidents today don’t.

I was at a phosphorus conference in North Carolina last year, and the organizers were saying their goal will be met if they can ever get a President of the United States to publicly acknowledge how dependent and how dicey our supply of phosphorus, isn’t necessarily today, but is gonna become in coming decades.

And we need to plan for that.

Now, this mongo deposit in Western Sahara and Morocco, like I said, it’s about 70% or 80% of the world’s proven reserves.

It’s been estimated, I mean, some people were a little, I think, a little alarmist saying that those deposits could play out in, like, 80 years and then we’re in big trouble.

More reasonable estimates are 300 or 400 years.

But that’s not long in the scheme of humanity.

And as I was saying earlier, or that you had mentioned, it doesn’t go away.

It’s not like we’re throwing this phosphorus away, we could never get it back.

But we use it as a food nutrient, as a crop nutrient.

And then it just disperses into concentrations that makes it very difficult to mine like we do today.

And I can’t imagine, I mean, we’ll figure something out.

Humanity may not be humming along with 10 billion people.

I don’t know.

I mean, who knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow.

But it’ll be very interesting to see how we manage phosphorus in the coming centuries.

And I think where we’re headed is back to the circle of life, back to being very careful about how we, how we fertilize with it and how we recapture that before we let it go into our lakes.

I mean, including Lake Mendota right here.

– Well, that’s another part of that.

We haven’t really gotten into it too much.

It’s one thing to think of phosphate as something that certainly is crucial and that can do so much, even though it’s gotta be managed from a content standpoint, from the amount of it that’s available is limited, that kind of thing.

But we haven’t gotten too much into what you just mentioned there, Dan.

And that is the effect on the environment of the way this phosphate is being used.

– Yeah, yeah, so the book’s organized in basically the hunt for phosphorus, which is what we’ve just been talking about.

And the second part of it is the price.

And the price comes not just from what a farmer has to pay to put something on his field to make his crops grow.

It comes in the form of polluted waters because the stuff has been, since we’ve figured out these rock deposits are so thick with phosphorus, we’ve been able to really hit ’em hard and unleash into the environment a lot of phosphorus, you know, on the scale that nature never comprehended.

And the consequences of that are not good, particularly for our waters because phosphorus washing off a crop does what everything else does, it flows downhill.

And downhill, no matter where you are, ends up being in water, and there, it grows stuff we don’t want.

– Now why is that the case?

Why is that the case if the phosphate is being used to grow a huge ear of corn, why isn’t it in the corn?

– Good question.

– Why is there so much running off?

– ‘Cause we put too much on.

So it’s been, so we’ve been mining it so intensively and for years, the sea grant or land grant colleges, you know, across the country, this being one of them, University of Wisconsin, for a long time, counseled farmers that, you know, it’s like when you’re making soup and something tastes good, a little’s good, a lot’s gonna be better.

And so they were taught, like, just as an insurance policy, in case rains come before the crops, the roots take hold and the crops start to grow, you may lose a lot of phosphorus on your landscape.

You better put a lot on.

And so you don’t really, I guess the farmer loses it, but the public also loses because then it goes into the water and then it grows this blue-green algae.

– How much of that strategy is just marketing, do you think?

– Well, I don’t know.

You know, I didn’t do a lot of research into the history of it, but I think, you know, miners gotta make money and, you know, I think it was, nobody really pondered the downside.

I mean, we didn’t really get to, like, it’s hard to call…

I mean, phosphorus is toxic in its elemental form, but it has toxic consequences because it grows this algae.

And we just didn’t realize the extent of this problem until the 1960s.

And back then, it wasn’t that we were worried so much about crop runoff, but it was detergent of all things.

So should I talk a little bit about that?

– Well, yeah, now, what’s the connection, first of all, between crop runoff and detergent?

– They both have phosphorus in them.

That’s about it.

But so, think about Lake Erie in the 1960s.

[Norman laughing] – Yeah.

Catching fire.

– Yeah.

– The river and that kind of thing.

– The Cuyahoga River catching fire.

– Cuyahoga River, yeah.

– Yeah, and you know, Time or Newsweek was calling it America’s Dead Sea.

Dr. Seuss took a crack at it in The Lorax.

– He did later at the request, about 20 years later, of some cleanup scientists, changed the line– – He did, yeah.

– In The Lorax.

– Yeah, but he had, I can’t remember the specific line, but he did not have good things to say about Lake Erie.

And so what Lake Erie was suffering from back then, wasn’t so much crop runoff, but detergent runoff or detergent waste.

So we didn’t really have laundry detergent until the 1940s and ’50s.

We had soap.

And so we invented and concocted detergent to work with washing machines, which weren’t really prevalent until after World War II and we could start making fridges and washing machines instead of tanks and airplanes.

And so they needed to concoct this supercharged artificial soap.

And it was based largely on phosphorous, phosphates specifically.

It’s what made Tide so potent.

– They advertised heavily.

– They did; they created a whole entertainment industry with the soap operas.

You know, that’s ’cause the detergent formulas were all pretty similar and they needed to distinguish themselves somehow.

So that was with marketing.

But yeah, so Lake Erie, it’s a dead sea in, say, 1969, ’68.

And this is an interesting story in the book as well.

Nobody at the time knew exactly what was turning Lake Erie, and lakes all across the country and across the world at that point, so green.

And there were theories, and the detergent industry, phosphorus was considered a prime suspect.

But the detergent industry argued ferociously that they weren’t the problem.

It was carbon or it was nitrogen, or it was something else that was getting into the water that was making lakes turn so dastardly green and lifeless, relatively lifeless.

The Canadians had an idea.

They said, “Let’s go up into the middle of nowhere, “find some lakes, and treat ’em like oversized test tubes or like lab rats.”

– Pour in the detergent.

– Yeah, or like, so in its simplest form, they did a bunch of experiments.

But the most famous and the most powerful one was they took a peanut-shaped lake.

So it had the exact same chemistry on both sides.

And they severed it in half.

And in simple terms, one side got phosphorus and the other side didn’t.

And in two weeks, one side was as green as a golf course and the other side was as blue as– – Norman: Two weeks!

– Dan: Two weeks.

So all the scientists at the time who had been going to state legislatures across the Midwest and the country, arguing that we’ve gotta get a handle on this phosphorus, that wasn’t really resonating when you were showing micrograms per liter and charts and stuff.

It was this picture, the picture is in the book, of this severed lake and how different the two sides looked.

And that brought us the Clean Water Act.

And that brought us a recovery of Lake Erie and other lakes to the point that the Clean Water Act came in in 1972 and by 1985, Dr. Seuss was pulling that line from The Lorax.

And people thought, “We’ve solved this problem.”

And we did at that time for detergent.

But today, the problem’s back.

Lake Erie’s as green as it’s ever been in summer.

– Norman: Yeah, and why now?

– Dan: I think it’s the cumulative toll of all the phosphorus we’ve been putting on the landscape.

I think it’s our farms, our dairy farms, livestock.

They’ve got, the operations have gotten so big, the concentrated animal feeding operations where you can now have a farm with 10,000 head of cattle when a hundred used to be big.

Those cows produce a lot of manure.

And as we were talking earlier about, you know, the British using anything they could to manure their crops, to fertilize their crops.

This is having a horrible effect on lakes and on Lake Erie in particular, and on Lake Mendota here in Wisconsin.

Why now?

I think it’s the size of the farms.

It’s the cumulative toll.

And then there’s some funky things going on in the ecology of these lakes.

And I’ll say real quickly, ’cause this is getting into the weeds, literally.

[Norman laughing] – Literally.

– But zebra mussels and quagga mussels, they’ll eat anything in the water.

They’re filter feeders.

They suck everything out.

And so they’re brainless, but they’re smart enough not to eat toxic blue-green algae.

So when you fertilize a lake with all this crop runoff or manure waste, it creates an algal bloom.

And you know, in earlier times, that would be an assemblage of a bunch of different species and they wouldn’t necessarily be toxic.

But now in too many places, when you have an algae outbreak, it’s gonna be toxic because the mussels are selecting for it.

They’re taking away the competition.

So this blue-green algae, microcystis is a very common one, has no competition.

So when a lake blooms, it blooms a toxic bloom.

– Was there then competition before we had the quagga mussels and zebra mussels, that there were things that were actually eating blue-green algae?

– Well, it wasn’t the case of things eating blue-green algae.

It’s blue-green algae having competition with other healthy algae species, which makes up the bottom of the food chain, you know?

And so this idea of Lake Erie being a dead sea, it wasn’t that it was lifeless.

It was actually that it was too full of life.

It was too full of algae.

And that this, in the 1960s, we’re not talking microcystis, we’re not talking blue-green algae.

We’re talking about all manner of algae.

Some, you know, we want, beneficial, some not.

But it was, you know, a big assemblage.

But there was so much of it that when it would inevitably die and decay, it would burn up so much oxygen in the water that fish couldn’t survive, hence the dead sea.

Fish and slugs were, I mean algae and slugs were about the only thing living in there.

– Is there any kind of advantage to having a relatively small number of large farms as opposed to thousands of smaller ones in terms of getting reform?

– Well, I think we’re in the midway point of getting to that.

And it’s a fraught moment because, you know, with the size of the family farm back in the, you know, middle of the 20th century and before, the manure could be managed, and with today’s sized farms, it really is difficult to, like, not overdose a body of water.

So I was mentioning that we got the Clean Water Act in 1972, and that really went after, like, the detergent industries and other industrial pollutants.

They were going after these chemical excrements by, you know, forcing industries to get permits to discharge any amount of pollution.

So it really, it basically throttled what was coming outta smoke stacks and pipes.

But they left alone at the time, in 1972, agriculture.

Because agriculture was still being conducted on a different scale.

And it was also thought to be not nearly as big of a source of phosphorus as the detergents and other chemical products.

So they thought, “We can plug a smoke stack, we can, you know, “cap a pipe, but we can’t really squeegee a cornfield.

“So that’s, you know, that fruit isn’t low-hanging enough.

We need to get what we can get and see how we do.”

And they did, and we did really well.

But today, we’re not doing so well.

So when you talk about is it better to have a bunch of big farms as opposed to a bunch of little farms?

In regulatory parlance, what they were calling this with the Clean Water Act was point source polluters, that was industries.

And nonpoint source polluters, that was agriculture basically.

And runoff from urban areas.

– Because they were more diffuse.

– More diffuse, yeah.

So now it could be argued that these big farms are point sources.

You go out to one of these farms and you see the size of the manure lagoons and the holding tanks, and you can’t help but think, “Wow, that’s a lot of potential pollution that we need to deal with.”

But it’s not just pollution; it’s going back to where the English were at the beginning of this talk.

They would’ve looked at one of these manure lagoons, not as a bunch of yuck, but as a bunch of yum, you know.

That’s food.

– Ultimately.

– Yeah, and that’s where we’ve gotta get back to this circle of life.

We’ve gotta engineer it now.

It’s not gonna be the natural cycle.

But what on earth isn’t left in its natural cycle these days?

But we need to look at that manure, not as something that needs to be disposed of, but something that needs to be harvested.

And it’s already starting to happen in certain ways and in certain places.

There was a story about a year, year and a half ago in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a farm that was about to start making more money from the methane produced from anaerobic digesters that it installed to process the manure.

It was gonna make more money in manure and methane sales from its manure than from milk sales.

– Yeah, milk is notoriously unprofitable.

– It is, and you know, we’re gonna find that this manure can be more profitable if we try to strip not just the methane out of it, but the nitrogen and the phosphorus.

And then you can do something with it.

Because right now, the problem is farmer, you know, farmers aren’t getting rich.

And I don’t mean to denigrate, disparage the industry that, you know, is part of our culture and part of my daily routine in that I eat every day.

But we need to get to the point where you can’t just spread this wherever is convenient.

We need to put this, put whatever nutrients are in this manure where it needs to be.

And you can only do that in a, you know, financially workable way by stripping it out and breaking down these elements in this manure down, back down to their elemental form.

And then you can move it places and you can store it.

And then you don’t have to worry about Florida’s deposits playing out so quickly.

Everything that we, you know, get on the back end from a cow is gonna be, you know, reserves that future generations can rely on from Florida and from other dwindling deposits.

So it is gonna cost money.

It is, but– – But it’s an investment.

– It’s an investment.

And there are other costs that, you know, aren’t necessarily on a balance sheet.

And I would say, here at the University of Wisconsin, we’re not far from the student union, which is on the banks of the shores of Lake Mendota, which is hit with these horrible algae outbreaks every summer.

And you know, there’s a price there that kids can’t swim in the lake.

You know, we did a talk down there back in late August with Charlie Berens and a couple of guys, a limnologist from UW.

– The quintessential Wisconsinite.

– Yeah, I thought it might, you know, bring some awareness to the issue.

And behind us, it was August 31, I remember it was just a bluebird day.

It was 80 degrees, you know, it was just the sailboats were gliding back and forth, and all the kids who are fresh on campus from a summer break are down by the water, but they’re not in the water.

They’re on the docks.

And you know, two days later, there were so many of ’em on the docks that one of ’em collapsed.

And, you know, that was lucky that nobody was hurt or killed because they easily could have been.

– Just landing in the water, dangerous enough I guess.

– Yeah, but they shouldn’t have been on the dock.

They should have been able to swim in that water.

And that’s where we gotta get to.

And so I don’t think that, you know, clean water, safe water, and food on the table are mutually exclusive enterprises.

And I don’t think anybody thinks that.

But we’re on a path right now where it’s kind of, that is the case.

What can we do to keep farmers making food and in business and to keep our waters safe?

Because this isn’t just, it’s not just a matter of this guy going into the water and he was vomiting.

But it’s a liver toxin, and there’s emerging evidence that it’s a neurotoxin.

And there’s been some studies, and this is dicey area, a dicey area because there’s been no causation established, but there is correlation between people who live by these heavily infested lakes and neurodegenerative diseases like ALS.

And the idea is you don’t even need to swim in this water.

You don’t need to drink the water.

It aerosolizes.

– Just breathe it.

– You breathe it in.

So this is serious stuff that is addressable, but so far, we have not yet gotten on that.

– Well, you mentioned this idea of separating out the components of the manure, for example, methane, what’s the market for methane?

– I mean, it’s natural gas.

There’s a big market for it.

You know, the reason why this guy, this Wisconsin guy, was making so much money was because California’s, I believe it’s their alternative fuel mandate, you know, requires renewable energy.

So they’re buying credits out in California for this methane that just goes into the grid and it’s being used.

But you know, this brings to mind another issue with how we go forward in a safe way.

And that is, once you start talking about methane, you start thinking about fuel.

Once you’re thinking about fuel, if you’re in the Midwest, you think about ethanol.

And so, ethanol is a big piece of this puzzle, and it’s not being addressed adequately right now.

40% of the corn that we grow in the United States– – Is grown for ethanol now?

– Is grown for ethanol.

– And of course, that doesn’t count worldwide the forests that are taken out to grow the corn– – Yeah, or soy.

– For ethanol.

– Yeah, or sugar cane.

Yeah, I mean, ethanol is intuitively, from my perspective, a great idea, but in practice, the only people who are happy with it are, like, growing corn or processing corn for fuel.

You know, it’s an energy source that really hasn’t proven to be the environmental or economic boon that people thought it was gonna be back when we passed the renewable fuel, whatever it’s called.

The ethanol mandate in the mid-1990s.

– How does the balance sheet look for ethanol then?

I mean, what are we getting out of it and what all is it costing us in the long run?

– Well, there’s been a lot of studies that it’s just a net loser in any way you look at it.

I mean, it takes a lot of land.

I think there’s 16 million acres of land that’s gone into production since the ethanol mandate.

And how big is that?

I don’t know.

I mean, Yellowstone National Park is, I don’t know, it’s 16 million acres is a lot.

I think Yellowstone National Park is 2.1 million acres.

– Okay, so… – It’s big.

– Several Yellowstones.

– Yeah, there’s a lot of land growing corn to put fuel in our tanks at the same time that people all around the world are having a hard time putting food in their stomachs.

So the drag on ethanol is the land, it’s the fuel it takes to plant it, and it’s the fuel it takes to make the fertilizers and it’s the fertilizers themselves.

And it’s not just phosphorous that’s problematic for this, it’s nitrogen as well.

And you know, you see a lot of stories coming out of Iowa in recent months about just water contamination and, you know, groundwater contamination.

And, you know, it’s largely, it’s not exclusively by any means driven by ethanol, but that’s a big part of the problem.

And that problem doesn’t stay contained to Iowa.

You know, in this book, I take a trip down the Mississippi, I go to the Iowa State Fair.

Well, I was here actually.

I was over at the Department of Limnology on an August day in 2019.

And I was talking to the scientists over there about, you know, how do we fix this lake?

And I was talking to some of the student researchers, and they, one grew up in Madison and said that it was, you know, just tragic to go to the beach that she went to as a kid and she can’t swim in it.

And so I thought, well, let’s follow this, you know, the source of this problem.

And so I drove over to Iowa, and that was during the beginning of the presidential campaign.

And this is a tricky situation.

If you wanna be President of the United States, at least in 2019, you basically had to pledge allegiance to ethanol because you have to do well in Iowa, and you’re not gonna do well in Iowa unless you support the renewable fuel mandate.

– And this was 2019?

– 2019, so it’s a political poison pill to take if you go into Iowa and say– – One would think.

– “I don’t support ethanol.”

But so, and I didn’t literally drive down the Mississippi, but from Iowa, I went down to New Orleans because 2019, it might have been saddled 2019/2020, but there was a 12-month period in there that it was the wettest on record in the Mississippi River Basin.

And so we flushed a lot of stuff from up here down there, including nutrients.

And so the Gulf of Mexico has a famous dead zone as well today.

That’s because it’s salt water, that’s largely driven by nitrogen.

One of the, you know, there’s three main properties to fertilizer: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

Nitrogen’s a problem in salt water.

It’s usually not a problem on the coasts.

But in 2019, so much water went down the Mississippi, so much waste, nutrient waste, that the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, it’s like some 40 miles of Gulf Coast that they have.

Every beach was closed because of phosphorus because the water was so fresh along the coast, relatively fresh, that it could harbor this freshwater algae, this microcystis that we’ve been talking about.

This blue-green algae.

And so you have, I was talking, like, to this guy who bought, like, a fleet of 20 or 30 jet skis to rent for the holiday, the holiday season being July and August down in Mississippi.

‘Cause if you’ve ever been down there in the summer, you wanna be in the water.

And every beach was closed.

And this guy was packing up his jet skis and selling ’em in Georgia ’cause he had bills to pay.

And he said something I found very resonant, and he was like, “Why am I being regulated out of business “when the source of the problem “up the Mississippi River is under-regulated?

It doesn’t make any sense.”

– And you don’t, I guess, hear a lot about the source upriver from these problems.

– They’re talking about it now down there.

But yeah, we tend not to because it’s, you know, it flows away from us.

– But you would need presumably some kind of federal regulation because what’s in it for Iowa– – Exactly.

– Or Minnesota or Illinois.

– And manure’s driving a lot of this too.

And you know, the manure and the ethanol, those are two pieces of fruit that we could probably pluck.

And by that, I mean we could manage them better.

And again, we need food, we need farmers farming, but we also need to take care of the waters that our lives collectively depend on.

– Is the problem then mainly phosphorus?

– For fresh waters, it’s phosphorus.

For salt water, it’s nitrogen.

And then for groundwater with, like, nitrate, you know, you hear about wells going bad.

– Norman: Yes.

– That’s obviously nitrogen, but that’s still manure.

And so you solve that nitrogen problem, you can solve the phosphorus problem as well.

– Well, is there a way somehow of extracting the phosphorus and the nitrogen from the whole bovine process?

– Yes, but I can’t tell you how.

[laughing] – But it can be done.

– It can be done, yeah.

And you know, it can be every bit, you can get food grade phosphorus.

‘Cause phosphorus does go into, like, phosphates, you know, like the soda drinks.

I mean, it is used, phosphorus is used in a lot of different products.

So Hamburg, Germany, okay, we started in Hamburg, Germany, and let’s go back to Hamburg, Germany.

In 2022, on the banks of the Elbe River, where there’s been people, I talked to a woman who picked up a nugget on the Elbe River as well and it exploded.

A nugget of phosphorus on the banks of that same river.

It’s not the entire EU, but I think it’s more than Germany.

But anyway, in Germany, they’re requiring that phosphorus levels in their human sewage be brought down to basically, you can never get to zero, but as close to zero as technology will allow by 2029.

So they’ve built this state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant, like two miles from where this guy discovered phosphorus in 1669.

It’s crazy.

And right where the city was burned to the ground by phosphorus, now they called it “phosphorus coming home.”

You know, they’re gonna harvest the phosphorus from their waste stream.

It could be turned into phosphoric acid that could find its way into food products.

It’s never gonna just for political reasons, but it will be fertilizer grade and they will be able to grow crops with that.

And that will preserve, you know, whatever deposits they’re depending on in future generations.

And that’s just the start.

I mean, if it really takes off there, it should take off everywhere else.

– I can’t resist a kind of a little appendix here though, because you mentioned in your book Lake Okeechobee.

And a huge lake, you know, in Florida and a bone of contention between, well, the Army Corps of Engineers, at least previous governors of Florida, and then, of course, the people caught in between.

– Yeah, you know, that’s a real, there’s a chapter on this in the book, and it’s a real good illustration of how sticky this problem can be.

So Lake Okeechobee in the middle of the state, it’s really like the wellspring of the Everglades.

And historically, it was just a big swamp, you know, the whole interior of the state.

And so these flood waters would laze on the flat landscape and just kind of drift their way down the peninsula and through the Everglades and out to the Gulf of Mexico, or the tip of Florida.

I don’t know if that’s Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, but that’s the way things worked in their natural state.

But we don’t leave things alone, particularly in Florida, at least in their natural state.

And so we figured we could farm this swampy land.

So that required basically building up the lake so it didn’t chronically flood south toward the Everglades.

So you’ve got this artificial berm around the lake, and it’s a berm that was not constructed with any kind of modern engineering in mind.

And this was in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s.

So this lake is in danger of bursting through its banks and flooding downstream.

To keep that from happening, to keep the water from getting too high on the berm surrounding the lake, Florida sends that water down canals to the Atlantic coast near Stewart, Florida and to the Gulf Coast near Fort Myers.

And those flows are not just water; it’s this green sludge because all the farm waste is going into the lake.

That lake is about nine feet deep and 30 miles in diameter.

– Yeah, a huge lake, but very shallow.

– Very shallow and warm as a hot tub.

And so that’s just a, it’s basically like a big incubator for blue-green algae.

So you’ve got these people who really wouldn’t be concerned.

I don’t wanna make too big of a generalization, but you’d have people on the Florida, on the Atlantic coast who wouldn’t necessarily wear the badge of environmentalists, but they care what’s going on in that state because, or in that lake because that lake water, you know, toxic as it is, is being sent to their beach towns.

And so they get beach closures because of, you know, regulatory failure upstream.

And this is all, you know, we can push it off and just, like, kick, I don’t know if kick the can is the analogy I want to use.

We could float the boat down the canal for a while, but we’ve gotta clean up our act.

– It will come home to roost no matter where you are, sooner or later.

– It will.

Yeah, it will.

– Well, Dan Egan, thank you for just scratching the surface in this phenomenon of the devil’s element, but it’s also something that we can’t live without.

– Exactly, and we’re gonna have to learn to live smarter with it though.

– I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me the next time around for University Place Presents.