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

Egan, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1324002662 ISBN 13: 9781324002666

Verlag: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

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. First 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 for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan harrowingly reports, our overreliance on this vital crop nutrient is today causing toxic algae blooms and “dead zones” in waterways from the coasts of Florida to the Mississippi River basin to the Great Lakes and beyond. Egan also explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide—which risks rising conflict and even war.The Devil’s Element

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dan Egan is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, he lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and children.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes— Louise ErdrichNew York Times Book ReviewLos Angeles Review of Books

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• ISBN 10: 1324002662
• ISBN 13: 9781324002666
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 228
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar