Where the Power Is

Just six elements​ are always necessary for the formation of life as we know it: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Collectively, they are known by the clumsy, vaguely pharaonic acronym CHNOPS (though I prefer the more memorable SPONCH) and together they comprise 99 per cent of human body mass. Of these six ingredients, phosphorus is the least abundant and the most inaccessible. Phosphates are locked inside rocks, folded into continental strata or scattered as sediment on the ocean floor. It is only when they are eroded into soil and water that they can be absorbed by plants and animals. The rarity of phosphorus makes it the single most limiting factor for the growth of biomass on Earth. It is, as Isaac Asimov puts it, ‘life’s bottleneck’ – the toll which must be paid by all matter that aspires to be something more.

While carbon, hydrogen and oxygen make up more than 90 per cent of human body mass, on average phosphorus accounts for less than 1 per cent. More than four-fifths of this is found in our bones and teeth, where phosphorus combines with calcium, hydrogen and oxygen to form hydroxyapatite: a hexagonal crystal of great strength and architectural utility. The element provides similar structural integrity for our genetic material, forming the helical backbones of RNA and DNA. It also has just as vital a role as the currency of energy for all living organisms. The molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) contains three phosphate groups bonded together in a chain. Breaking this chain releases a crackle of stored energy, like the snapping of a glowstick. Each time your body flexes a muscle, duplicates a cell or thinks a thought, it is phosphorus that provides the necessary power. The human body contains just 250 grams of ATP, but it cycles through fifty kilograms of the stuff per day, using each molecule more than a thousand times, breaking the phosphate chains to release energy and then reforming the bonds using the fuel provided by food.

There is a limited supply of phosphorus on the planet: around 300 billion tonnes. It can’t be manufactured, and there are no synthetic substitutes, so it must be constantly trafficked and circulated on both individual and planetary scales. It is these phosphorus cycles that are the focus of Jack Lohmann’s White Light, a history of the element’s role in the intertwined systems of biology, geology and agriculture. In these networks, living matter is merely an intermediary, transporting phosphorus from one location to another. Biological organisms, including humans, function as phosphorus sinks: we gather it into our bodies, transform it into something more useful – phosphates, in which phosphorus is bonded to oxygen atoms and thereby made stable and soluble – and move it across the landscape, releasing it back into the broader ecosystem through excretion and death. ‘This is, in essence, the phosphorus cycle,’ Lohmann writes. ‘It is the movement of atoms between biology and geology, between water, land and life. It is an interaction of continual loops, a complicated interchange in which every living being plays a part.’ And it is a cycle which, Lohmann warns, is now potentially broken.

We think of rock and organic matter as separate domains but in reality they are not so distinct. Limestone is formed from the compacted remains of coral, molluscs and other marine life; marble is limestone compressed and heated over millions of years; chalk is the remains of planktonic algae. What was once living is now a cliff-face or a statue or the façade of a museum. Drifts of phosphate in the land beneath our feet were once living creatures. The oldest phosphates date back to the Paleoproterozoic era, some 2.5 billion years ago, when the Great Oxygenation Event kickstarted the evolution of complex, multicellular life on Earth. The widespread release of oxygen into the atmosphere by photosynthesising cyanobacteria enabled new forms of efficient energy release through oxygen-based respiration. Life thrived and died, gathering then spreading phosphates in the process. Subsequent flourishings and extinctions during the Cambrian, Ordovician and Permian periods left their own strata, laying down vital stores for future lifeforms. Usually these phosphates are released into the water system through the slow process of erosion, but occasionally geological oddities release large amounts all at once. The formation of the Himalayas fifty million years ago, when the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia, was one such event, ‘leading to a surge in life that continues today: although that range represents only 4 per cent of the world’s drainage area, it accounts for one quarter of the nutrients that flow from rivers into seas.’

There are more accessible sources of phosphate, though, dung in particular. Phosphorus is one of three key elements in fertilisers (alongside nitrogen and potassium, both comparatively abundant), and humans have been manuring their fields for at least ten thousand years. In ancient Mesopotamia, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were said to have been nurtured by hydroponic systems that dissolved fertilisers into water; five thousand years ago, the Minoans built sewage systems that recycled wastewater for irrigation. The Bible contains numerous divine instructions that bodies be left to decompose on fields ‘like dung’, and the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus ranked the fertile qualities of various types of manure. In De agri cultura, the oldest surviving work of Latin prose, Cato the Elder advises readers on proper technique: ‘See that you have a large dunghill; save the manure carefully, and when you carry it out, clean it of foreign matter and break it up.’ Societies that properly attended to these matters flourished. Tenochtitlan, the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas and the heart of the Aztec Empire, developed a technique of agriculture known as chinampa: floating gardens fertilised with human excreta. In Edo (now Tokyo), in the 17th and 18th centuries perhaps the world’s most populous city, landlords sold night soil collected from tenants’ shared toilets. In Osaka, around the same time, this resource was so valuable that it was denominated; landlords collected faeces while tenants kept the urine, giving rise to the saying ‘the landlord’s child is brought up on dung.’

Not all excrement is equal, though. Lohmann notes that per pound, there can be twenty times as much phosphate in bird droppings as in cattle manure, and the demand for such fertile guano has built nations. The Inca Empire, at its height in the 15th century the largest in the world, established itself along the western coast of South America, matching ‘precisely the extents of the habitats of nesting seabirds’, whose colonies were managed for their production of ‘white gold’. Guano was so important that anyone found killing or disturbing nesting seabirds would be put to death, according to the chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, while Inca guano collectors made offerings to the god of birdshit, Huamancantac (He Who Causes the Cormorants to Gather), before collecting his bounty. In the 19th century, growing populations required ever greater agricultural yields and the demand for guano – desired both as a fertiliser and as a source of saltpetre for gunpowder – catalysed conflict and colonial competition. Spain, Peru, Bolivia and Chile battled over resource-rich land in the ‘Guano Wars’ of the 1860s and 1870s, while the Guano Islands Act of 1856 is seen as a milestone in America’s growing imperial ambitions. The Act states that any citizen who ‘discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government’ can claim the land as US territory. More than a hundred islands were seized under the legislation, ten of which remain in US possession, including vital military outposts such as the Midway Atoll, halfway across the Pacific between the US and Japan. The guano islands illustrate the way that a rare resource can become dangerously valuable when it is concentrated in a particular spot. Not just a bottleneck, but a chokepoint.

As the Guano Wars show, the planetary extinctions of the past had not laid down enough corpses to feed the growing demands of the industrialising world. So nations began to raid more recent tombs. The catacombs of European cities were relieved of their phosphate-rich bones, and when Britain conquered Egypt, it shipped 180,000 mummified cats back to Liverpool to be processed into fertiliser. Soon the dead were being reclaimed before they could even be put to rest. ‘Early representatives of the fertiliser industry scoured the killing fields of Leipzig, the Crimea, and of Waterloo too, to send back the bones of grenadiers and dragoons, hussars and cuirasseurs, to be ground into powder and used to feed the new generation,’ the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz wrote in 2011. ‘In the military language of today, it’s what one might call a collateral benefit of war.’

These expediencies were accompanied by growing scientific understanding of the role phosphorus plays in biological systems. In the 19th century the German scientist Carl Sprengel was the first to recognise that all living beings required the same basic ingredients for growth, and that growth would therefore be limited by the scarcest of these. This insight was popularised as the ‘law of the minimum’ by the chemist Justus von Liebig, who identified phosphate and nitrate as the primary limiters. Von Liebig had been interested in agriculture since childhood. During the ‘year without a summer’, 1816, the fallout from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before destroyed crops across Europe and resulted in widespread famine. His experiments in agricultural chemistry included new methods for preserving beef extract and brewer’s yeast (eventually leading to the creation of Oxo cubes and Marmite), but his attempts to commercialise phosphate production failed. Instead, his insights were seized on by a number of British entrepreneurs who patented new ways to process mined phosphate using acids and created the ‘artificial manure’ known as superphosphate. As these processes became more efficient, they overtook more unusual methods of phosphate procurement, though they still required huge industrial inputs from mining. Stores were discovered then exhausted in England, then across Europe, with mining operations following colonial expansion into Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. As a result, phosphates were transformed from a local resource into a global commodity.

The industrial production of phosphate, and its harmful side effects, occupy much of White Light. Mining produces dust, air pollution and increased levels of gamma radiation. Living near mining operations increases your chances of contracting a range of ailments from asthma to leukaemia. Most of the harm is caused by phosphogypsum, a by-product of fertiliser production which traps heavy metals and radioactive elements within gypsum. It is produced in great quantities, only a small proportion of which can be used (in building materials), and takes thousands of years to degrade. It is heaped into giant mounds known as gypstacks, some hundreds of feet high. In Florida, the heart of the US phosphate industry, a billion tonnes of phosphogypsum have been created to date, with thirty million more added each year. Gypstacks can cover thousands of acres, and the tops of them are often hollowed into basins and used to store acidic wastewater, another harmful industrial by-product. In 1997, a gypstack released 56 million gallons of wastewater into Florida’s Alafia River, ‘effectively destroying a 42-mile stretch of water’ and killing more than a million fish. In 2004, a gypstack spilled 65 million gallons into Hillsborough Bay, and in 2021 the Piney Point gypstack near Tampa Bay suffered a partial breach, prompting evacuations and the declaration of a state of emergency. In order to prevent major flooding, 215 million gallons of contaminated water were pumped into the bay. Lohmann notes that situations like these are exacerbated by financial engineering: fertiliser companies often mine the phosphate, pile up the phosphogypsum, then declare bankruptcy and leave the taxpayer to pay for the clean-up.

The saddest story of such industrial scarring concerns Nauru, an island nation in the South Pacific. At just 8.1 square miles, it is the third-smallest country in the world. The island was settled by Micronesians around three thousand years ago, but over the past 150 years has been annexed, occupied and administered successively by the German Empire, the League of Nations, Axis-aligned Japan and the United Nations. Nauru was the source of the world’s purest phosphate, its deposits formed from decaying marine organisms fused with guano and fossilised over thousands of years. When it gained independence in 1968 it embraced the mining industry as a source of revenue. In the decades that followed, 80 per cent of the island’s surface was strip-mined, leaving behind swathes of uninhabitable land. The island’s population, roughly five thousand at the time, briefly became the richest in the world by GDP per capita. The government provided free schooling, public transport and medical care, but squandered money on overseas investments including the funding of a disastrous West End musical about a love affair between Leonardo da Vinci and Mona Lisa (titled Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love).

By the 1990s, Nauru’s phosphate deposits were depleted and the island struggled to replace the income. With no resources to fall back on, it capitalised on its sovereignty and became a tax haven, selling passports and laundering money for criminals and terrorists. Since 2001, it has been a home for Australia’s offshore immigration detention facilities, part of the so-called Pacific Solution. In 2016, the Guardian published a cache of documents leaked by a worker on the island. They contained 2116 reports of harassment, sexual abuse, assault, self-harm and suicide attempts, with more than half of the incidents involving children. A worker for Human Rights Watch who interviewed detainees reported: ‘A woman who misses her husband in Australia carves his name into her chest with a knife. A girl writes in her school notebook, “I want death, I need death.”’

The phosphorus cycle, in Lohmann’s treatment, emerges as a hyperobject: an entity that sprawls across space and time, operating on every scale from the microscopic to the planetary, and whose potency brings life but also destruction. White phosphorus is a waxy substance that ignites in the open air and sticks to the skin, burning deep into flesh and burrowing all the way to bone. It has often been used on the battlefield, by Israel, the United States and Russia among others, ostensibly to provide cover or illumination, but in actuality against humans in violation of international law. In another form, as phosphate, the element has been essential to feeding the planet’s growing population, helping boost crop yields in the 1960s as part of the Green Revolution. Lohmann is interested not only in such contrasting applications but in how they converge. The use of phosphate as a fertiliser, for example, has delivered short-term improvements but also escalating ecological damage. Lohmann quotes one researcher who notes that industrial farming practices have ‘saturated our environment’ with phosphate. This overuse has caused algal blooms which consume oxygen in lakes, rivers and seas, suffocating other forms of marine life. The resulting ‘dead zones’ have already consumed the Baltic Sea, Arabian Sea, Chesapeake Bay and wide areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the South China Sea, and threaten to spread further. The mass-death events caused by the overabundance of phosphorus will likely result in the laying down of stores of phosphate to be discovered by future archaeologists. Perhaps they too will direct their diggers to liberate this life-giving element from the ground, feed it back into the soil, and continue the cycle once more.