Josh Ginsberg
Dan Egan is a recidivist Cary lecturer. He covered the Great Lakes for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for many years, and more recently, writes occasional articles for many different outlets on climate change and other issues, including our local newspaper, The New York Times. He is the--and I wrote this down to make sure I get it right--the Brico Fund Journalist in Residence at the Center for Water Policy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences, where Dan lives in Milwaukee. In November 2017, I was sitting where Jane Lucas is sitting, and we had a conversation about the perils facing the Great Lakes and ways we can restore and revive them for generations to come. It was a great lecture, and was based on Dan's New York Times best-selling novel, The Death and Life of Great Lakes, showing that you can write a serious book about a serious issue and get it on the Times Best Seller list. Dan is a graduate, local, of Columbia School of Journalism, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer, but has also won the Alfred duPont Award at Columbia, John Oakes Award, the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
Now for those of you who are also recidivists at Cary Thursday or Friday nights, I'm usually sitting where Jane's sitting, but Jane and I were talking a couple weeks ago, and I realized she was so passionate--well, Jane is passionate about soil microbiomes and looking at how things get composted and other things--but she's very passionate about this book and the subject. And I said, "Well, maybe you'd like to interview Dan about it." So I finally get to sit with you guys in the audience and listen to them talk. Now I should give a little more detail on Jane; in addition to soil microbiomes, she's fascinated by microbiomes of all flavors and how they're affecting the composition and function of microbial communities and why that's important to us for agriculture and other reasons. She has a PhD from the University of Oklahoma, and did her postdoctoral work at the University of Idaho, and arrived at Cary Institute at a very strange time, in June of 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Last week, she and the aforementioned scientist, Evan Gora, for the last week, sorry, and for this week, they are teaching our annual two-week Fundamentals of Ecosystem Ecology course, bringing students from across the country and around the world to Cary Institute to learn about how we think about ecosystem science. I am really glad to welcome the fee students, and to say that people still want to come here and learn about the subject we are passionate about. So on that note, and without further ado, let me say thank you all for coming on a snowy January night, and I hope you enjoy the show.
Jane Lucas
Wonderful. Thank you all so much for joining us, and thank you so much, Dan, for being here. I want to start with just a huge thank you for writing this book. As a scientist. I really appreciate the ability to find texts and engaging stories to talk about things that sometimes are complicated and, so not only myself, but my future students and current students thank you for bringing such dynamic stories to a sometimes overlooked part of our ecosystem. And so my first question is, just what made you write this book, and why phosphorus, this often overlooked but highly important compound or chemical?
Dan Egan
I get asked that that's an obvious question, why? Why write a book about phosphorus, especially if you're not a scientist, which I'm not. But it was a really came out of the work that I did for the book on the Great Lakes, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And I just gotta share something. I just thought of this when I walked into the auditorium, but when I was here in 2017, I had just finished that Great Lakes book, and it was getting more attention than I thought it was would, including it was on The Daily Show two nights before I arrived here, and they kind of made fun of me, but I was willing. I was willing to go along because you want to get the word out, and the next day, just luck would have it, I was flying out to New York, so I emailed the guy, Michael Costa, and I say, "Hey, I saw the piece last night. I really liked it. I was wondering if you give me tickets to the show" (ticket; I was by myself). He's like, "Sure, you just got to be here by five." So I fly in, and I get stuck in traffic, and I get there at like, 5:20, doors shut, like, theater, you can't get in. He texts me. He's like, "I'm sorry." I'm like, "Well, I do have one quick question, because they wanted me to write a story about what it's like to be on The Daily Show," and he's like, "Well, what is it?" I'm like, "It's best if we talk." He came with security. They thought I had gone out there to come out here to put a hit on him or something, is how I was treated. But that's relevant, because that book got attention, and the Great Lakes, Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And one of the chapters in the book was about, is about Lake Erie and the troubles that they're having with phosphorus. And we were chatting a little bit before this all started, about how it was kind of an exercise in frustration to write this Great Lakes book because it was based largely on work that I had done for the Milwaukee General Sentinel. So I felt like I was rehabbing an old house rather than building something from scratch. And I thought, boy, it'd be fun if I could do something from scratch. So when, you know, this book was out for about a year, the publisher came back and said, "Do you have any other ideas?" And I said, "Yeah, how about a book about phosphorus?" And he wasn't convinced.
Jane Lucas
Well, hopefully they're convinced now. Yeah, I mean, it's here.
Dan Egan
So yeah, well, I made my pitch to him, and, you know, I said it's so more so important in so many ways that people don't understand, and there are so many interesting historical stories tied to it that I think you can make something, you know, readable for a lay audience, which is what I tried to do.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, absolutely. So I love the very deep history of how we initially discovered phosphorus. It's a crazy story, and I'm happy to have you talk about that. But I also would love to hear kind of so we have this onset of the Industrial Revolution, and it creates this really intense soil fertility crisis, and it causes this scramble for phosphorus. And so could you maybe talk about where we started to look for phosphorus, and maybe some of the less than savory places we found it?
Dan Egan
Yeah, well, at first we weren't looking for phosphorus. We were just looking for stuff that made stuff grow. You know, when we first started really hunting for it, we didn't know what it was, but certain things made, particularly England was really good at it, because it's an island nation, limited crop availability, and the Industrial Revolution was booming, and people were hungry, and they needed to grow turnips and wheat. And for some reason, bones worked really well. They didn't understand at the time, well, what it was about bones, but bones were, you know, very sought after, to the point that in 1815, the Battle of Water...1815?, I'm going to get it wrong, but I think it was 1815, pretty sure, the Battle of Waterloo, it lasted like 10 hours, and like tens of thousands, 30,000 to 40,000 people died, and horses. But if you were to go to the battlefield of Waterloo today, which I did in researching this book, there are no bones. They didn't then. There haven't been any bones there since the 1820s because the British went back five, seven, 10 years after the battle and looted or mined the battlefield for the bones, and they built special bone-crushing mills back in England. And this is all in newspaper articles of the time, they talk about this. They were grinding up bone dust, of you know, the bones of their own kids and the enemy combatants. They didn't care. They were hungry. And that's that really got set us on this aggressive path toward exploiting phosphorus reserves. Again, as I said, like, so this is in the 1820s: we didn't know what it was about bones, what it was about cow manure, what it was about bird poop, but we just knew that certain materials made things grow. And when we figured out that it was phosphorus, then we got really good at it, and we, a billion of us, have that to thank for being here. But you know, the story of phosphorus is often like, we think we've found an unending supply, and we always, always run out.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, that's a really good segue to a couple of chapters that I constantly come back to, because they really stick with you, because you realize that, yeah, we find these amazing sources. So I'd love if you could kind of talk about, and those of you online, and here can see we have a couple spots on our slide. You know, the Guano Islands of Peru, Bone Valley in Florida, and, of course, Banabaa Island. Do you think you could briefly talk about how these different places are part of the phosphorus story? And also kind of touch on both the, like, social as well as ecological consequences of these exploits?
Dan Egan
Sure. So there's a chapter in the book that is, it's "From Bones to Stones," and that's literally where we went in our hunt for phosphorus. So after the battlefields and graveyards across Europe--I mean, they didn't plunder every graveyard, but they did a lot--after that played out, they went looking for fertilizer in other places. And Humboldt was on his excursion in the early 1800s going up the west coast of South America, and he came by what's now known as the Guano Islands off of Peru. And these islands are just, you know, mountains of fertilizer because it's very arid. It basically never rains there. And all the birds, the fish-eating birds, need a place to nest and rest and to, you know, live when they're not flying or swimming, and poop. And so that excrement just piled up over millennia. So when Humboldt arrived, it was, you know, literally, mountains of this guano, which a lot of people think of it as bat poop. But it was, it was bird poop. And he noticed that it was locally used very precisely into great effect in growing crops in South America.
So he brought a load back to Europe, and this is around the 18 teens or so. They did some test plots. And next thing you know, there's this burgeoning trade where there were. like, hundreds of ships at any given time are sailing between the Guano Islands of Peru and Europe. And a little bit later, they did chemical analysis, and they figured out what was in guano, and it had, they're just, you know, this is the time where they're just learning what, what's phosphorus, what's nitrogens, what's potassium. But it had, a lot of these deposits have an NPK, nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio similar to what you can buy at a farmers co-op. It was the perfect, the perfect fertilizer. And at the time, as I mentioned earlier, they wrote about how this was just an endless supply, and that we're going to have bread on our table forever. And this is by now when it was really going, it was in the 1830s and by the 1880s it was all gone. And, you know, talk about the cultural impacts, there were a lot of basically enslaved Chinese people who were, tasked is a kind word, but compelled to mine this stuff. And it's super caustic. And there were a lot of stories that--this isn't ancient history, it's really weird to be able to go into newspaper archives and see reports of this. But there were, like, people jumping en masse off these cliffs because the work was so miserable.
But, yeah, we were on a guano binge. And when I say we, I mean just basically the Western world. England pioneered it, but we fell in line quickly, along with Western Europe, and we scraped those islands basically down to the water line. But by then we knew what we were looking for. We were looking for phosphorus. And there's this chapter in the book: I can't remember; I was just mentioning books get edited, and I haven't really looked at it closely in a couple years, so I don't know what's always remember what exactly is in there. But the girl who wrote, She sells sea shells.. [Yeah, Mary Anning, yeah, yeah]. She was a fossil hunter on the bluffs overlooking the English Channel, and she found these specimens that were so intact they had fossilized feces in their digestive tract. And they started finding these things everywhere. And it was Liebig, the pioneering chemist. He had this epiphany. He's like, well, if poop is such an effective fertilizer and so rich in phosphorus, maybe, maybe this stuff is too. They called them bezoar stones. And they were convinced for a while that it was all dinosaur poop. It turned out a lot of it was sedimentary rock that had been washed and rounded to look like nuggets of poop. But once they realized that you could get phosphorus, commercial-grade, crop-growing phosphorus from certain rock deposits, it changed everything. And this was, like, 1900, so. And that meant these, the poor people in the South Pacific, I don't know, these Banaba, yeah, it's over. Yeah, whole populations that had lived independently and successfully and apparently happily, were, you know, removed so, the British, Australians, and the United States could go in and and crunch this rock up to spread it on our fields.
And, yeah, those deposits, played out pretty like maybe in the 1920s or so, and we've been limping along now on these Bone Valley, yeah, Bone Valley is in Florida, and the US has been feeding the world and ourselves with these deposits since the 1890s but now they're saying that they're going to play out in about 20 to 30 years, at which point...I guess we didn't talk about this, but every living cell--and I don't know who I'm talking to, I'm not a scientist, I imagine that there's a lot of scientists in this group--but every every living cell needs phosphorus, and so when you talk about nutritional security, it's a lot dicier than, I would argue, energy security, because there's workarounds to oil, and technology can save us to a certain degree with that. There's no technology that's going to bring us more phosphorus. The only thing that's going to save us is to realize that this stuff, it's like a water molecule, it doesn't go away. It cycles through the environment. In some places it's easy to harvest and to use and in some places it's not. And we're blowing through all the easily harvestable stuff. And we got a little taste of it back in 2008 when there was a spike in fertilizer prices and there were food riots. And you know, it's one thing to riot over the price of gas, but it's another thing to riot over like there's no food on your table.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, absolutely. And to mention, you know, I think it's interesting how we find it in probably unknown places, and it's interesting to see if something like that will show up again. I don't think this will be the next Guano Island, but I did some work looking on ant poop, and it is also highly [ant poop?] is highly enriched. Now, people don't think about ant poop very much, but it has phosphorus in it too.
Dan Egan
You can just squeeze the whole hand.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, you could.
Dan Egan
And, that's interesting, you know, there's igneous. So these rock deposits are typically sedimentary, so it's just dead life, just raining down on the seabed until it compresses and turns into rock and somehow becomes accessible to us through ocean-level decreases or seismic heaves, whatever. But there are igneous rocks. That's where the original stuff came from, and it's not nearly as concentrated in these rocks, but I think it was, was it Denmark? There's, there's some, some country, there's some deposits way up by the Arctic Circle that they think hold promise, but they're nowhere near as accessible as what we have, and they're nowhere near as potent. So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna have to figure this out sooner than later. And I would just say if we did find another Guano Island deposit that was easily accessible, that's not all good either, because it's the paradox of this stuff. We need it, we're running out of it, and we're wasting it to the point that we're wasting our waters. So.
Jane Lucas
Absolutely. So you mentioned Liebig, and as a scientist, we talk about him all the time, and he has a very famous analogy of, you know, you can't build new biomass or grow unless you have this limiting nutrient. And we love to use this barrel stave of, like the lowest barrel stave is the one. So I'm just curious, you know, thinking about his understanding of almost like a prescription for how to grow crops and to add nutrients to soil. How does that kind of understanding and discovery by him change how we start to use fertilizer in our ag systems?
Dan Egan
I don't know if it changed it so much as it just focused us and allowed us to, it changed it in that we got to grow a lot more stuff. I mean, so we talked about nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And, you know, until 1909 or 1910 whenever the Haber-Bosch process was invented, perfected, and scaled up, nitrogen was a big problem, too. But once we figured out how to make bread from air, as the Germans say, then the pressure really fell to phosphorus. And so, you know, we've had unlimited--not unlimited, seemingly unlimited--access to these two critical nutrients for more than 100 years now. And like I said, that's why we have 8 billion of us or so. But it's, it's not, you know--sustainable seems like an abstraction. Is that sustainable? This is not an abstraction. This is like when we start running out. We're never going to not have any phosphorus. We just, you're going to have to work harder to get it. Or we can be smart and start managing it in the fashion that nature did, and that is, you recycle it, you just use it over. It's not one and done, and you throw it in Lake Erie, and then wait for the National Guard to bring in pallets of baby formula, because Lake Erie is growing so much toxicology that people can't drink from it.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, that brings up such a kind of a great and kind of paradoxical moment of, we were promised with this green revolution that it's going to change and help feed the world, and there are aspects that it has done that, but it also really broke up and separated different sources of our food chain, and has kind of segmented them. [Yeah, decoupled it.] Yeah, decoupled, exactly. So could you kind of talk on how this fact that we are no longer these maybe subsistence or small scale farming, how that's changed the phosphorus cycle and put things out of balance?
Dan Egan
Yeah, it didn't even really change it as much as broke it. You know, and it was, and we, even when we were breaking it way back in the 1600s and 1700s you know, we were still patching it back together. And I'm thinking about the night soil in Europe and, to a greater extent, in Asia. But you know, people were collecting that human waste and that animal waste, and they were bringing, you know, the bread was being eaten in the city, and the poop was being hauled back out into the countryside to grow more wheat, to make more bread. And so they intuited or lived within, tried to live within, that circle. But when we get to an industrial scale, you know, everything's just about as much and cheap as possible as we can get. And it's taking, it's taken these waters getting so fouled up, for people to realize we, I think culturally, we, we're not like, Look seven generations down the road, we look like seven months, if that. And so, yeah, we really have decoupled, like, where we eat the food and where we grow it, and that's had some pretty negative consequences.
Jane Lucas
Yeah. So I think one of the stories that I keep coming back to, and I bring it up all the time in my classes, and that, you know, it's just an interesting connection, and has some twists and turns in it is the story of the detergent use and how that has really been a kind of up and down in phosphorus inputs. And so I would love to kind of have you, if you can explain how you found that story, where did it come from, and then also maybe tell people a little bit of how detergent has such a huge role in our phosphorus story.
Dan Egan
Yeah, okay, right at the beginning of the book, I think I try to dispatch of this whole, like, phosphorus or phosphates. I mean phosphates. Phosphorus in the natural world doesn't exist. It's always bound up with oxygen atoms to create phosphates. That's what's in our fertilizer. And for a long time, for whatever reason, phosphates really made whites whiter and brights brighter. So a box of detergent in the 1950s and '60s was almost a box of phosphorus. And that's when we had Lake Erie going, you know, chartreuse, and the national media was writing about the death of America's, you know, Great Lake, or America's Dead Sea. And that was because we were overloading it with detergents and other industrial excrements, but primarily detergents, to the point where it would grow so much algae, and that algae would die, burn up all the oxygen, and almost nothing could survive. And at the time, people didn't know what it was that was making--and it wasn't just Lake Erie, but Lake Erie was the poster child, the poster lake--they didn't know if it was carbon or nitrogen, or some other kind of concoction, industrial concoction.
And so these Canadians--I didn't really find this, as much as like, it's as an ecologist or, you know, soil scientist, it's a pretty well known event--but I got to go up there and talk to the people who, you know, played a role in it. But the Canadian government wanted to get to the bottom of what was making Lake Erie so green; they gave license to these, this team of scientists up in far, far northwestern Ontario, to treat these lakes like, you know, test tubes, or, you know, mice. They could poison them with anything they want to see what would happen, and the most famous experiment--I think it was Lake 226. There's so many lakes; that's, yeah, that's how you know you have a lot of lakes. It's like, oh yeah, it's over by Lake 11. Lake 226 was this peanut-shaped lake, and I'm going to simplify it, but they basically took a polyurethane curtain and severed that lake at the pinch point, and then one side got nitrogen and phosphorus, I think, and one side just got phosphorus. Basically one side got phosphorus and one didn't, but they did get nitrogen. One side turned golf-course green in two weeks, and one side remained deep, Canadian blue forest lake. And that changed everything.
Once they had these pictures to take to regulatory agencies and to state legislatures, you know, it was more than a thousand words. And from that we got, not only because of that, because, you know, the Cuyahoga River was burning, that didn't have to do so much with phosphorus, but just with our, you know, cultural compulsion to just treat water like a liquid dump. But the the the algae problem was a big driver, and we got the Clean Water Act. And, you know, at the time, the ecologists, at the time, they did their homework, and they put Lake Erie on a theoretical diet, and they said, if we can cut, I think it was about 50%, cut the inputs in half, we're going to see a remarkable recovery Lake Erie and waters--it wasn't just Lake Erie, it was waters all across the states, all across North America and the world, really. And so they said, if we do this, if we follow the science, we're going to get the results that we want. And so the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and The Lorax was written by Dr. Seuss in like, 1971 or '72 or something. And in that original Lorax, he had this line about, I can never...you should be able to remember Dr. Seuss, if you're going to quote any author, it should be Dr. Seuss, but I can't. Anyway, he talked about Lake Erie, the water being so smeary, you know. And this is 1971 or '72. Well in 1986, these people from, extension agents from, Ohio State University, wrote Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss, and said, you know, that line about Lake Erie and the Lorax fit for the time, but it wouldn't fit now, you should come up and see what Lake Erie looks like. This is 13 years later, and it had worked. You know, it's a shallow lake with a huge overturn. Again, you basically get a new Lake Erie every two or three years, because there's so much water coursing through there, whereas water that goes into Lake Superior, I think it's residence time is 200 years. I think it's 99 years in Lake Michigan. But so Lake Erie is uniquely vulnerable, but also uniquely prone to get better if things feeding the water, feeding it, gets cleaned up. And so 1986, Dr. Seuss writes back and says, Yeah, I'm pulling that line from The Lorax. And he did. And if you to go to the bookstore, were to go to the bookstore today, that version of The Lorax wouldn't be in there. And he said in an interview at the time that he wrote that out of anger. He was really, you know, just disgusted with where we were going culturally in regards to the environment. And he said he knew that it was not going to be popular with everybody, but they're going to have to, they're going to have to do it, he's going to have to write it. And so he was angry. He got his results. Lake Erie got better. But he's dead, but were he alive? He'd put it back, I bet 100%, because Lake Erie is green again, as green as it was. And now, because of some complicated dynamics going on with Zebra mussels and whatnot, that are selecting for, you know, this toxic algae, they'll eat everything in the water column, except for spitting out this stuff called microcystis. And so when you get an algae outbreak, it's, it's going to be brilliant green, and it's going to be poisonous, and Lake Erie is getting it awful right now.
I mean, it's just, it's a travesty what's happened. And you can't even use the analogy if it's, oh, it's like a frog in a boiling pot, which is a crock anyway. But this is, this isn't happening slowly. This is happening--that frog would know something was wrong right away, and so do people. I was at, I was at the Western Basin, it's called Maumee Bay State Park, last fall, and it was the Great Lakes Commission, which is a group that representatives from the eight Great Lakes states and two Great Lakes provinces. And they were talking about all the work they were doing restricting the flow of phosphorus through over application of fertilizer and manure onto the fields. And they're like, we're making progress. And they called me in to speak, and there was nobody there to interview me, and I thought there was, and so I just interviewed myself. [Did you do a good job?] I thought I did, because, well. I actually somebody said later, like, oh, you know, he was throwing bombs. And I said, truth bombs, because what I pointed out was, for all the back-patting that they were doing themselves, there were these kids there, and they were like seventh graders from nearby, and they were there for a science class. And there were 15 of them. And during a break, before it was my turn to speak, I asked how many of them--and this is a beautiful state park, like the beach is 150 yards wide at least--I asked how many had been swimming in Lake Erie, and one had. I said, that's the only number that you need to pay attention to, because these kids aren't swimming in this lake. They're going to treat it like a dump too. And so pay attention to what and how people are using this lake if you want to know how you're doing. And if you do, you're going to find out you're not doing very well.
Jane Lucas
Well, you mentioned Schindler, and I have to go back to it for a minute, because I think, as a lot of scientists in the rooms will say, we love to talk about that experiment. It's somewhat elegantly simple, and really has such a like extreme example. You can see the two sides of the lake. In the photo up here, one side, you can guess which one got phosphorus, the other one didn't. And, you know, I know you say you're not a scientist, but you spend a lot of time thinking about the science world. And I'm curious, you know, what do you think about the value of these big lake scale environments? It's a wild thing to, you know, do the ethics of it? Yeah, I'm curious. I
Dan Egan
don't know. I mean, they did a lot of good. Yeah, I don't know if, well, I mean, these experiments are still going on up there, but I don't think it's nearly to the cowboy extent. And I don't know if I did mention it was so Schindler was the brilliant young scientist who moved his wife and kids up there. And, yeah, I mean, he was patient wife,
Jane Lucas
I think,
Dan Egan
I don't know if it's in the book again, but there's this one scene where they had a toddler, and they were, they were cradling them, whatever you, bassinetting them in this I think it was their depth finder, The box for their depth finder, and they lived on a little island in the lake, because there's a lot of black bears up there, and just for peace of mind, so he'd canoe out there. But I was in Madison last fall, and this guy comes up and buys 10 of my books. And I'm like, why so many? He's like, Well, it just helps explain my dad a lot. And it was Schindler's kid. He's a biologist out in Washington State. Yeah, so cool. But what the ethics of doing that? I mean, you gotta I didn't have a problem while I was researching this, I thought, you know, this is really kind of a aggressive, ambitious but intuitive way to approach this problem. You needed to find out what was going wrong so you could regulate it today. We know what's going wrong, but we're not regulating it. Yeah,
Jane Lucas
yeah. It seems like we've managed to put a lot of loopholes in the Clean Water Act. And so I'm curious, thinking about those kind of what they are, and your thoughts on how we could maybe close some of them?
Dan Egan
Yeah, that's a great question and point so 72 we get the Clean Water Act, and it didn't address agriculture, because at the time it was, it was, you know, believed that the the waste from farm fields was too dispersed and too hard to get your hands on to actually require farmers to treat what was coming off your like. You can't squeegee the bad stuff off your field. But that was 50 years ago, and we farm way differently today. You know, back then, 50 cows was a big was a big number. And today, in my home state of Wisconsin, aka America's dairy land, there are dairies that are 10,000 cows. And if you see the size of these manure lagoons, that is, you know, since I guess I mean kind of a sciencey environment, there's non point solution, non point source, pollution, which is agriculture, and there's point source, which is industrial. Basically it's pipes and smoke stacks. And you go to a modern farm today, and you look at the size of these manure lakes, and that is, by definition, a point source pollution. The problem is, if these guys could time travel and go back and look at that manure with the hungry eyes of the British in the 1800s they would just blow it. Would blow their mind. They would think that they hit gold, and that's what it is. But we, we're just not at the point now where we're recognizing it. It's still something that's largely to be just disposed of. And there's, there's so much in that. I mean, it's not just the nitrogen and the phosphorus. There are farmers in Wisconsin who are making more money off of their manure, off of the methane in their manure, than they are off their milk, which is just bizarre, but yeah, the Clean Water Act failed us in that respect. And you know, it's perfectly understandable why they did it, and you know it didn't what? Isn't really a big problem, but today it is, and I don't want to discourage farmers at all. You know, that's the thing that kind of riles me, is when you start just bringing up these undeniable facts and that people start feeling defensive, it's like, Look, you don't even you didn't create the system. Nobody's blaming you. You're operating in the assistant. I mean, they helped shape it, but this is a societal problem. And, you know, I don't think of farmers as driving around getting rich. They're, they're the hardest working, you know, those are the hardest working jobs going, but they can be done better in a way that, because right now we've got putting food on our table and putting water in our bodies, that's on a collision course. And they shouldn't be mutually exclusive enterprises, but too often right now, they are. And this isn't a Lake Erie story, and you know, it's not a Florida story, it's it's a global, global story. And you know, on one level, you can't really blame us. It's like thinking about ants. You got me thinking about ants, but ants are like a Jolly Rancher piece of candy on the ground. They're gonna go for it. They're not gonna say, hey, let's save some later, for a rainy day. You know, that's what we're doing. We're just like, you know, moss in a tree and all the leaves. We're just doing what, organisms do, but we're supposed to have some higher intelligence, and we're not exercising it.
Jane Lucas
So that's a really good segue to a part of the book that I think is really fascinating and people maybe don't think about, is the connection of the Sahara to the phosphorus story. And I think that maybe this will show a little bit. You know, it always surprises people to learn that our tropical forests are fed by dust from the Sahara, because it is a huge source of phosphorus. And you can see that in this photo here from NASA, that is a dust storm coming that happens every year from the saharas to the tropics, which, surprisingly, are incredibly diverse, but, you know, could be seen as persisting on kind of nutrient, or phosphorus, poor soils and and so I'd love for you to kind of expand on what is the role of the Sahara in this phosphorus story, and kind of looking forward, yeah, I think it's going to play a pretty big role.
Dan Egan
Well, Saharan phosphorus, yeah, and I you, you know, I feel like I shouldn't be answering this to you, because this is your expertise, and I just stumbled upon a couple of studies. But yeah, it blew me away. And it really illustrated this idea of the phosphorus, the circle of life. It really is the circle of life. You know, things have to die so things can live. And, yeah, there was, I don't know how many studies have been done, but I saw there was a NASA study, and they just tracked what was going out, out the Amazon, basically in phosphorus through, you know, the rainforest of the jungles, was what was going in on these air currents. And it was coming from the Sahara, which is where today, 70 I was saying earlier that were running out of our own of our domestic reserves. 70 to 80% of the proven reserves phosphorus on the planet are in Morocco and Western Sahara, which Morocco occupied in 1970 something, when the Spanish pulled out. And there's a huge mine there, a huge phosphorus mine there. And it's, it's a flash point. I mean, there was a lot, they called it the war in the sands that went on from the native people. I always sahari, the native people of the Sahara see that as their own. And, you know, so do a lot of other people and countries and, you know, the world in general. There they they think that basically, they were just watching their birthright just be shipped across, across the ocean. So there's, you know, it's a heavily mined, heavily guarded operation, and all that phosphorus goes out on Is there a picture of that? Yeah, that stripe up there is a, okay, can you explain it's Bucha phosphate mine. You see that, that white line there, that's, that's the world's longest conveyor belt. It's 100 kilometers long, and it takes, it takes phosphorus from the mine out to the Atlantic, where it's shipped around the world. There's, I mean, increasingly, Morocco is under pressure, because, you know, what they're doing is arguably theft. But people want to eat and you know, so this is really where, where things are headed, I think, as far as the tensions and potentially, hopefully not violence, but it's, you know, there's a dead end to the to this, the road that we're on. It's not a circle. It needs to be a circle. And this is all kind of great. And so then you think, what do you do? Yeah,
Jane Lucas
is that a question? Nope, we're not going to ask that yet. Of course, it's a question. Yeah. One thing I wanted to highlight that I think is interesting is that as we experience increasing global change, the we know that in wetter years, which the Saharan actually is getting sometimes drier, but also wetter, not getting as much of that transport off of it because, of course, it's wet, it's not getting picked up by the wind. So that means the tropics are getting less deposits. And so unfortunately, there's a, there's a whole global change dynamic that's going to affect whether or not that gets to the tropics. And so, yeah, you know, it's, it really emphasizes how phosphorus is a global cycle, and they're super interconnected. But yeah, and
Dan Egan
it's, it really does stitch together the circle,
Jane Lucas
yeah, and along those lines, I think your book really nicely points out. And you've had so many conversations with people that phosphorus emphasizes the ecological connection and the interconnectivity of so many dimensions of our lives. You know, the farmers up, you know up the Mississippi are affecting individuals down in the Gulf, and what we're choosing to eat is affecting what is being done throughout. And so I'm just kind of curious, like, how do we take this phosphorus story as a chance to highlight the unity? And do you think we can convince people to act proactively. Or do we need these unfortunate giant algal blooms to persist before we can really make changes? I think we're going to need
Dan Egan
we talked about the Cuyahoga River like we need some kind of Cuyahoga moment for to wake people up. And in 2014 when Toledo lost its drinking water supply. A lot of people thought that that was such a moment. And I remember Rahm Emanuel gathered all the Great Lakes mayors at the Chicago shed aquarium, and they said, you know, this has got to change. We've got to change the way we're treating these lakes and all the waters. And nothing changed at all. So I don't know what will bring people together, but it's got to happen at some point. And you know, this book I wrote just as an introduction for people like myself who know nothing of phosphorus to explain why it matters and what are the consequences if we don't care more about it, that was really my only goal. And I say specifically that I didn't want it to be a prescription, you know, a manifesto. It's just an introduction. But there are a couple things that we could do, and I think one would be to readdress the management of agriculture, particularly these large factory farms, concentrated animal feeding operations, so they are regulated like any other industrial polluter. I think in the in within a number of years, farmers would be happy that we did this, because they'll see it as a potential, you know, managing their manure better, as you know, a revenue stream and not just a waste stream. And then the other thing that we should look at tomorrow is ethanol, because, like, 40% of the corn that we grow in this country goes into the fuel tanks that, you know, nobody thinks is a good idea, except for the people who are growing the corn or making the ethanol. And you know, there's a section in the book where I went to the Iowa State Fair, they have this famous thing called the soap box, where all the candidates stand there. And the soap box is not much bigger than than where we are right here. I mean, you're there, you can fit three people up there and to a candidate, they all support ethanol, and I was sitting like less than from you to me away from Joe Biden when he was running in 2000 This is August of 2019 I kept raising my hand. I was like a school kid, and he just, we wouldn't answer. And so I followed him into the bathroom. Afterwards, it's amazing the lack of security. Like, all right? And he was, I can't say I follow, like, right behind, because I had to explain to somebody how I really needed to use the bathroom. She her bath was still the fact that he was in there. And so I opened the door and he was coming out, and I said, Hey, I just want to ask you, nobody brought up ethanol. And he's, like, basically, I support it, and I said, you know how? And there's this mythical cellulosic ethanol that everybody talks about where, once we can start, you know, using elements of the corn beyond the kernel, then it's going to be a money maker and an environmental winner. And that's what's being promised. It has been promised for more than a decade, and we're not getting there. We don't, we don't need this fuel. But my point is here. Joe Biden supported it. I ran into Elizabeth Warren up on the one fork of the Des Moines River, which is just a night. They've got big nitrogen problems, which is fine, you know, similar to phosphorus, and they because they have nitrogen. They have phosphorus problems. She's like, now is not the time for more regulations. And it's just like, it's very frustrating and disheartening the Democrats no longer. And so that's the thing. Iowa was always at the top of the primaries, so calendar. So if you wanted to do well in Iowa, you had to pledge allegiance to ethanol and and Gore did it. Everybody did it. And, you know, that's that's just unfortunate. So what's it going to take to change? I don't know. Maybe a bunch of people reading a little green book. I know I wouldn't be so presumptuous, but I do think people getting educated and realizing what's going on, yeah, dealing with
Jane Lucas
any other like, individual things you can think of. I mean, obviously reading the book is a great one, and getting educated, it's sometimes hard when you think about phosphorus at these, like, really grand scales,
Dan Egan
it is, I mean, and it's also got to fight for place at the table with climate change. And, you know, I guess what's good for the climate could also be good for the phosphorus cycle, but it's overwhelming in certain ways. You know, you can, you can, you know, quit meat, which I eat meat, but I shouldn't, because not, I mean, for many reasons, it's not healthy, but how well it's not healthy if you eat too much of it or the wrong kind of it. But I just, I just don't see like anybody you know, in the USDA saying, all right, we're not going to eat meat anymore. We're going to go to, you know, soy based. So it's like, what can you do about individually, about climate change? You try to travel less and just be in tune. But really, it takes a societal, global movement, and that's what's going to have to happen on the phosphorus. And I don't know what what that path forward looks like, but I do know that we can't keep going the way we have been. We can for we can, until we can, until we can. Yeah, so
Jane Lucas
Well, I hope that is a somewhat uplifting and that there is some space to move, but a little, you know, hard to know that it's a hard thing to solve individually, but collectively. It feels like there's space that we can be made and and we can point to a specific thing. It's, it's phosphorus. We can hopefully make some progress on that, yeah,
Dan Egan
I mean, I think we will, because we'll be squeezed on our diminishing rock reserves. And then once people realize that you can make money off of this manure, there's a there's a co op in aptly named Brown County, home of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is my hometown. But they've got like, seven or eight CAFOs that they're plumbing themselves together, and they have this massive Digester, and they're going to be processing, they're going after the methane, but they'll be able to get, you know, the nitrogen and the phosphorus as well. So you know, when people talk about factory farms, I think there's often a knee jerk, like, that's bad. Family Farms good, if you were looking at phosphorus, I think, you know, it's almost good that, because the first principle, one of the first principles of pollution control, is getting your hands on it, and they've done that themselves already. It's just sitting there in these lagoons. Now, you exploit it, you know, and you do something meaningful or helpful with it, rather than just spray it on fields, which is really what typically happens now,
Jane Lucas
yeah, well, we're coming to the end before we open it up to questions, and so the last thing I just want to say, you've given us lots to think about. But if there was just one take home point that you want people to have after reading your book, what is it that you want everyone in this room and online to remember?
Dan Egan
Well, that there's, I mean, the whole system is built on a you know, element that you don't even think about. I don't know, you know, it's that's what makes this issue so challenging. There isn't, I don't think that there's one kind of pithy point I can make other than, you know, if you see a story about phosphorus, read it because it's, you know, I was with, there's this phosphorus sustainability alliance based out of University of Montana, and I think, University of Arizona. Jim L, Jim Elser, I don't know if you guys run into him here, but anyway, their group has one goal, and that is to get the President of the United States, whoever he or she may be, at some point, to say the word phosphorus, if they can just and so. But you know that happened in 1930 something. It was Roosevelt. He said, We need a national phosphorus policy. And you know, it never, never happened. But he was on to something. Maybe we'll see what happens going forward.
Jane Lucas
Well, maybe a take home point is that, Hey, we should care about phosphorus.
Dan Egan
It's a good t shirt slogan,
Jane Lucas
hey, well, let's take a second to thank Dan, and then we will open it up for questions. Thank you. You. So please raise your hand. We'll be taking questions both from the audience, and then I'll keep an eye on Josh when you're ready, and I'll repeat the questions for those of you online. So does anybody have a question for Dan? Yeah. Can we start here? That's allowed the farmers
Dan Egan
who have these lakes of slurry,
Jane Lucas
what do you what do you do to recycle? They don't here, I'm gonna answer. So the question was, for the farmers that have these manure type slurry lakes, how do they actually recycle that? Or what do they do to use with it, or to use it? Yeah,
Dan Egan
right now they don't. Well, I mean, they recycle it in that they put it on their fields as fertilizer, but the fields often don't need. The rule of thumb is, if you have to truck a truck manure, if you have to move manure by truck more than 10 miles, it's a big economic loser, and you're not going to do it. So you just find a field. It's not necessarily your own field. You just put it on there, and that's, that's our management policy, basically right now. Now, what could you do with it? There's these anaerobic digesters where you can strip the methane from it, and there's technologies. So this story starts and ends in Hamburg, Germany, because Hamburg is where phosphorus was discovered. A guy cooked it out of his urine because, like I mentioned earlier, it doesn't exist as phosphorus, as elemental phosphorus, it's always bound up with oxygen atoms. But he discovered phosphorus. Then phosphorus bombs were used to burn down Hamburg, Germany in 1943 phosphorus and magnesium, but incendiary bombs, they just figured out that you don't blow something up. You burn it down if you want to really do a number on a city. And then it ends with today, on the Elbe River, there is state of the art phosphorus recovery. Plant. It's part of the wastewater treatment plant. I don't know if it's a European Union wide or just certain countries in the EU, but they have a mandate to be removing all the phosphorus. You know, you never get to zero, but they have a mandate to do everything to get to zero by the end of this decade. And so that's just dealing with human waste, but that's stuff that can happen on the farm too. What works, you know, on human waste stream works on manuria, on animals as well.
Speaker 2
In the back there, yeah, there's a farm in northwestern Connecticut, a dairy farm that uses a methane digester out of before I farm, and the one of the two brothers that run the farm was able to put together the digester with the help of the Department of Agriculture and the EPA, et cetera, several decades ago, maybe three decades ago, but it does, and there have been some attempts to join digesters with natural gas, etc, in California. Why do you think the digesters just are not catching on with dairy
Jane Lucas
farms? So the question is, why are digesters not catching on or maybe not catching on quicker
Dan Egan
with dairy farms, I don't know, but I think one of the factors is that they've been too small for it to have the scale that you need. But now they farms are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and I think regulations could push it along, but there's probably regulations tied with financial incentives. It's, it's coming. It's just too big of a resource to just ignore. And it's, you know, right now, it's, it's a toxic mess, and it, that's how it's viewed. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, it's better that we harness it, rather than just have the cows just fart it. Yeah, it strips it, strips that smell that you smell is, you know, wasted gas.
Jane Lucas
Yeah, it's pretty cost prohibitive. It's expensive, and you do need a pretty large operation. So, like you mentioned, took some people to come together to invest in it, but
Dan Egan
I think, well, and California is driving this a lot too, because they have a trade program so people who are polluting out on the West Coast can compensate for it by buying methane from farmers here, which probably, I don't know this, but probably means helping build it, build these things.
Speaker 1
So Jane, I'm going to ask an audience question from the virtual audience. Dan, what's, in your opinion, the major culprit of The Dead Zone formation in world's oceans? Is it phosphorus? Is it nitrogen? Is that an area? Well, it's investigated.
Dan Egan
I'm not a scientist. I depend, I rely on the kindness of scientists. No, I mean, for. What I understand, salt water blooms are typically driven by by nitrogen, but that, you know, Phosphorus is a component of that. And in this book, I do talk about there were some fresh water algae bloom outbreaks in the Gulf, at Louisiana, but also east to Mississippi. Mississippi, all of their beaches were closed, and it was Microcystis, which is a freshwater organism, but there was so much fresh water coming down the Mississippi that year, it was like the welded, wettest 12 month period on record that it turned the coastal areas basically fresh water, but the big dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. I mean, you solve that, and you solve a lot of phosphorus problems too, because it's all waste coming down from the agriculture fields in the Mississippi Basin, which spans 40% of the United States and stretches from the Rockies to Pennsylvania. We were just talking about that. But yeah, nitrogen. Do you have a Do you have an opinion on this? No,
Jane Lucas
it's Yeah, we talked about that today in class, so you could come talk to any of our key students here, and they would tell you why nitrogen and phosphorus have little differences in marine and terrestrial systems. Yeah, you mentioned that some of
Speaker 3
the value of that lake experiment was like creating this picture of these regulations. Like they show these regulation agencies. And I was wondering if you think, like in this day and age, if there's still a lot of value in those images, when it seems like it feels like we get really oversaturated with all these different like climate change graphs, like you think they still have as much impact, and if so, do you think that, like when scientists are trying to investigate these things, if in as much as they can, whatever they're testing, should sort of try, or at least think about those, sort of like simple
Dan Egan
visual representations or
Jane Lucas
images. Yeah, I think really quick. The question is that the images of the lake turning green was really impactful and helped create change, and is now a time we think that could have a similar impact, or are we oversaturated? And if it is still valuable to have these, should scientists be finding those Green Lake type images in their science?
Dan Egan
Yeah. I mean, I don't think that we're oversaturated. I think the simpler, the better. And also there's the tension where the scientists, lot of them, want to do science for science sake, and don't want to get involved in public policy. But this was a case where it was so bad, I think that they kind of, they didn't throw that out the window, but they put it, put that to the side, and said, Let's, let's find out what's causing this problem, and then let's put it in the hands of people who have something to do with it. But you mentioned with the climate change, like graphs and stuff, but you get bar graphs and data points, and you're going to lose, you know, Congress, did you have a
Unknown Speaker
question here to answer the question? That
Speaker 4
was years ago, I went to Wisconsin to look at 100 pound dairy farm, thinking that all the farmers should go that direction. But my conclusion at the time it was too complex and too expensive for that to happen. Now, with all these large farms happening to me, there is no reason with some financial incentive that they cannot capture them. So it's going to just taken. The question I have is, other than Central Florida, where else is phosphate mined
Dan Egan
in this country? There's some deposits up in like Idaho and in North Carolina, and that's pretty much no, no. Even the, you know, there's a, there's a phosphorus museum down in near Mulberry, Florida, west, east of Tampa. And there's like a think tank too. There's like four guys who just think about phosphorus. They were all guys, but they, they were saying, Yeah, 20, we got 20 or 30 years. They're still going to be, you know, phosphate rocks there, but they're going to be underneath subdivisions. And, you know, when push comes to shove, we're always going to put food on the table, but just the the mineable, you know, in today's, by today's standards, stuff is running out fast, and we're exporting it too, you know, which is something we should be thinking about
Jane Lucas
not doing we're gonna take another question from the virtual. The virtual.
Speaker 1
It's a two part question, what is the role could you? Could you just explain, again, the role of phosphorus in the cyanobacteria blooms? Yeah, and how that works, but also why the devil's element?
Dan Egan
Okay, those are, that's not two parts. Those are two questions I gotta I'm gonna forget the second one. I'll help you with it. Okay, the devil's element. I'll just start with. So that's what it was known as when the alchemists discovered it. And the guy who discovered it was Hennig brand in 1669, I believe. And, yeah, he distilled it, basically cooked it for days and days on end. And he added some hocus pocus, and there was some chemistry going on there, but that's what he got. Were these little glowing nuggets that were phosphorescent, and nobody had seen anything like it. And it was devilish because it was the 13th element. It's the number 15 on the Periodic Chart right table, and it's the 13th element that was isolated and discovered, and it's dastardly, you know, it's, it's, it's poisonous, but it's also incredibly flammable. And I was going to open the book, so I was mentioning right before we started, my father in law spent his career working on catalysts for nitrogen production. He was a chemist, and he was going to come help me make some phosphorus at my house over Thanksgiving. When I talked to a guy at Johns Hopkins, he's like, the closer you get to success, the closer you're going to get to blowing yourself up. Yeah, and ruin your turkey fire. Okay, so that's the devil's element. And the other question was
Jane Lucas
cyanobacteria.
Dan Egan
So this stuff does a remarkable job of growing anything we want it to, but when it washes into the water. And so that Devil's element book cover there, that's Lake Erie. That's not a filter or anything. That's just Green Lake Erie. And that's cyanobacteria, Microcystis. Specifically, you can see a little research boat going through on the above the T, but you wouldn't want to be breathing the air that those people are breathing. They're they're implicated in all this, because once this phosphorus hits the water, it grows stuff that we don't want, and that's what it grows. And so, you know, we hope it's going to grow a soybean or a corn kernel, but then, too often it does this. And then I mentioned earlier, it's a little complicated, but what's happened since the 60s? Why we have toxic outbreaks when we didn't have that so much back in the 60s, is the zebra mussels. The zebra mussels are just smother the bottom of Lake Erie, so they're eating everything in the lake, but that nasty green stuff.
Jane Lucas
All right, we're gonna take maybe one or two more questions, and then we will have time afterwards for those of you here to ask questions and get your book signed. So, yep, I see, I see fertilization. Runoff
Dan Egan
is the form of in the form of manure and then chemical applications, fertilization.
Of problems, yeah, I'm just
Jane Lucas
curious what, well, I mean, so the question is, fertilizer runoff is a big part of the phosphorus problem. Isn't over fertilization also a part of it,
Dan Egan
or education it kind of it is the problem, really? Yeah, no, you hit it head on. And for a long time, extension agents from the land grant universities, they were telling farmers, we got all we needed this stuff. It's a little is good. A lot is better. Put it on in case you get spring rains and it gets off before the washes off before the crops grow. It's gotten expensive now. So they're not just doing it out of, you know, a sense of environmental responsibility, but it's, it's really expensive, but you're right over. Fertilization is a problem, but it's not a problem as I understand it to like growing a beet. It's a problem that it's not growing a beet and it's going in the water so, so and you know, it is getting really expensive, and it's only going to get more expensive, and that's going to help solve the problem, from a water perspective, from their perspective, it may drive them out of business, because the margins that they operate at are so slim, good question.
Speaker 1
So I'm going to jump in and say, Can we thank Dan and Jane for a lovely conversation?
Speaker 1
Now I know how I can retire. Succession planning is really important. Anyway. I'd also like to note that Dan will be up. Thank you Merri bookstore. They have brought lots of Dan's books. If you'd like to buy one and get it signed, Dan will be up at the exit signing books. Please don't rush the stage and ask lots of questions questions, because then poor Dan can't get up to sign your books. So thank you again. Thank you for coming on a snowy January night, and we'll see you again next month. Thank you very much. Thank you.
