Dan Egan, a former Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter, has released a new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World out of Balance,” in which he sounds alarms on both the scarcity and overreliance of phosphorus.
In 2017, Egan released “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes,” which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a Go Big Read book at UW-Madison.
Thanks to heavy use of phosphorus in fertilizers, many experts foresee it becoming a scarce resource, write Jim Higgins of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But too much phosphorus in the wrong places leads to toxic algae blooms that ravage bodies of water, kill tourism and make people sick.
Egan has been on the trail of phosphorus as a catalyst for ecological calamity for some years, as evidenced by his 2014 series that included a deep exploration of the element’s role in toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie.
