When it washes from soil into waterways, it essentially disappears forever. Studies suggest that humanity has grown too dependent on it for feeding the planet-and we are running out of this nonrenewable resource, which comes from geologic deposits that take millenia to form. We have liberated Earth’s caches of phosphorus so rapidly that the element now pollutes freshwater ecosystems, where excesses cause harmful algal blooms, infiltrates the snowpack, and decreases levels of dissolved oxygen in lakes and rivers. But sometimes there’s too much of a good thing. That approach worked remarkably well: The post-World War II “Green Revolution” fed countless people thanks to fertilizers and pesticides. By the middle of the 20th century, companies had industrialized chemical processes to turn it into a form suitable for supercharging crops, hardening them against disease and making them able to support more people and livestock.
Nations quickly began mining caches of “phosphate rock,” minerals rich in the element. Since the 1800s, agriculturalists have known that elemental phosphorus is a crucial fertilizer.
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