What Connects Bones, Bird Poop, and Toxic Green Slime? Hint: Without It, Half of Us Wouldn't Be Alive Today

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s the 13th element on the periodic table, it glows in the dark, and it spontaneously combusts if it gets any hotter than 80 degrees Fahrenheit; little surprise, then, that phosphorus is known as “the devil’s element.” But this satanic substance is also essential to all life on earth, which is why it's a key ingredient in fertilizer—without which, researchers estimate, we could only grow enough food for half as many humans as are alive today. The incredible crop-growing powers of phosphorus have led humans to do some pretty extreme things to get it—from seizing Pacific islands to scavenging bones from Europe’s most famous battlefields—but they’ve also created a devilish paradox. The world is running out of phosphorus, and yet there’s way too much of it running off farm fields into rivers, lakes, and oceans, where it fuels toxic algae blooms. This episode, we've got the story behind the phosphorus paradox, as we ask: is there any way to fertilize the planet without sending it to hell? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	New body cam footage showing a guy reportedly running from police and then jumping into
0:06.6	a Cape Crockin' Al filled with toxic blue-green algae.
0:10.5	Take a listen.
0:11.5	Just north to beach Parkway.
0:13.5	Come on the water.
0:18.0	Got himself in a bill of the algae and he's not liking it very much.
0:27.0	This sounds like just another day in Florida, but the cop was right that algae can do some
0:31.3	pretty serious damage.
0:32.9	Just in case you were worried, the man was okay, although he still was arrested.
0:36.5	You might have heard of toxic algal blooms there in the news almost every summer these
0:40.7	days.
0:41.9	You probably also know that humans are to blame.
0:45.0	We usually are.
0:46.7	But this is a weirder, bigger, and much more problematic story than some nasty green slime.
0:53.0	In this episode of Gastropod, we're diving right into that slime-filled canal, luckily
0:57.7	not literally, but we are getting into why the food for that algae has also been what's
1:02.2	caused us as a species to explode in numbers, at least, just like the algae.
1:07.0	Literally half of us that are alive today wouldn't be if it wasn't for this algae food,
1:11.9	which most of us know by the name, fertilizer.
1:14.9	Speaking of names, I'm Nicola Twilly, and yes, you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast
1:19.3	that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
1:21.9	And I'm Cynthia Graber.
	...

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