A fine account, worthy of fertile discussion, of yet another environmental disaster.
A disquieting study of what Foreign Policy called “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”
Phosphorus was discovered in 1669 by a German alchemist who observed a white, waxy solid that glowed in the dark and burst into flame “just a little above room temperature.” Egan, who won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, explains its most vital role: producing food. Two of three essential elements in fertilizer—nitrogen and potassium—are nearly inexhaustible. Not so with the third. When phosphorus runs out, plant growth stops, and feeding 8 billion humans requires massive amounts of fertilizer. Morocco and the Western Sahara hold 70% to 80% of the world’s phosphate reserves, which may or may not run out in this century. After a short history of its production, Egan devotes most of the book to phosphate poisoning. All life requires phosphorus, including ancient blue-green algae. Thriving on a massive inflow of phosphate, they are destroying America’s rivers and lakes. They often cover bodies of water with “guacamole-thick,” toxic mats, and as they die, they suck out the oxygen, producing dead zones. Egan tells the tragic story of Lake Erie. For most of the 20th century, detergents, sewage, and industrial waste produced a widely publicized dead body of water. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was a significant milestone, and by the 1980s, Lake Erie was clean. However, by the turn of this century, it died again, the result of the act’s one yawning exemption: agriculture. Massive phosphate-rich fertilizer from farms and manure from titanic feed lots poured into rivers that emptied into the lake. After recounting the havoc phosphate wreaks elsewhere, the author turns to possible solutions. We waste about 80% of agricultural phosphate, so there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, many current efforts are confined to pilot projects—e.g., recycling sewage and manure—or are largely symbolic, such as banning phosphate from lawn fertilizer.
A fine account, worthy of fertile discussion, of yet another environmental disaster.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781324002666
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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