LONG READ: The Devil’s Element

“From the canals of south Florida to the waterways of Louisiana and all the way north to the Great Lakes, it is becoming difficult to find a major body of water that hasn’t been negatively impacted by fertilizer runoff and animal industrial waste.

Farms throughout the midwest often rely on drainage tiles (plastic pipes today) that lower the water table to create more productive harvests. These pipes carry excess water to the river ways along with excess fertilizer — which finds its way to lakes and, in the case of Iowa farmland, to the Gulf of Mexico.

What’s particularly tragic about today’s phosphorus crisis is that, as Egan notes, we’ve been down this toxic road (or river) before. He takes us back to the 1950s when phosphorus-loaded detergents became national brands and rivers began spilling over with suds. Fortunately, governments enacted regulations — though not without years of well-funded resistances from the makers of Tide and others (who would have guessed that a book could make me group the makers of Tide in with oil drillers and meat producers).” - EcoLit on Dan Egan’s The Devil’s Element: Phosphorous and a World out of Balance