The Devil's Element Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance

Dan Egan

eBook - 2023

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year "Lively...and thought-provoking." —Robert W. Howarth, Science The New York Times best-selling author on the source of great bounty—and now great peril—all over the world. Phosphorus has played a critical role in some of the most lethal substances on earth: firebombs, rat poison, nerve gas. But it's also the key component of one of the most vital: fertilizer, which has sustained life for billions of people. In this major work of explanatory science and environmental journalism, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dan Egan investigates the past, present, and future of what has been called "the oil of our time." The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. Fir...st discovered in a seventeenth-century alchemy lab in Hamburg, it soon became a highly sought-after resource. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted... more