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The Devil's Element
- Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
The New York Times best-selling author on the source of great bounty—and now great peril—all over the world.
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.
With The Devil’s Element, Egan has written an essential and eye-opening account that urges us to pay attention to one of the most perilous but little-known environmental issues of our time.
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A Memoir Of Life As An Adventure In Nature
- By Sara on 02-01-16
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Garlic and Sapphires
- The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
- By: Ruth Reichl
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl's riotous account of the many disguises she employs to dine anonymously. There is her stint as Molly Hollis, a frumpy blond with manicured nails and an off-beige Armani suit that Ruth takes on when reviewing Le Cirque. The result: her famous double review of the restaurant: First she ate there as Molly; and then as she was coddled and pampered on her visit there as Ruth, New York Times food critic.
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Read engagingly by Bernadette Dunne
- By Nicole on 11-16-05
By: Ruth Reichl
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What Your Food Ate
- How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health
- By: David R. Montgomery, Anne Biklé
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 15 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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David R. Montgomery and Anne Bikle take us far beyond the well-worn adage to deliver a new truth: the roots of good health start on farms. What Your Food Ate marshals evidence from recent and forgotten science to illustrate how the health of the soil ripples through to that of crops, livestock, and ultimately us. Navigating discoveries and epiphanies about the world beneath our feet, they reveal why regenerative farming practices hold the key to healing sick soil and untapped potential for improving human health.
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I might have to read rather than listening
- By Kindle Customer on 09-08-22
By: David R. Montgomery, and others
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Blight
- Fungi and the Coming Pandemic
- By: Emily Monosson
- Narrated by: Rosemary Benson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Fungi are everywhere. Most are harmless, some are helpful. A few are killers. Collectively, infectious fungi are the most devastating agents of disease on Earth, and a fungus that can persist in the environment without its host is here for the long haul. In gripping, accessible prose, Emily Monosson documents how changing climate, trade, and travel are making us all more vulnerable to invasion.
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Illuminating
- By Logan Jones on 02-27-24
By: Emily Monosson
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The Alchemy of Air
- A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler
- By: Thomas Hager
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.
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Great Book Thoroughly Researched
- By Terry A. Gray on 10-21-11
By: Thomas Hager
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Dances
- A Novel
- By: Nicole Cuffy
- Narrated by: Samya De Meo
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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At twenty-two years old, Cece Cordell reaches the pinnacle of her career as a ballet dancer when she’s promoted to principal at the New York City Ballet. She’s instantly catapulted into celebrity, heralded for her “inspirational” role as the first Black ballerina in the famed company’s history. Even as she celebrates the achievement of a lifelong dream, Cece remains haunted by the feeling that she doesn’t belong.
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Great ballet book good story
- By J. Davis on 09-20-23
By: Nicole Cuffy
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The Invention of Nature
- Alexander von Humboldt's New World
- By: Andrea Wulf
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infested Siberia. He came up with a radical vision of nature, that it was a complex and interconnected global force and did not exist for man's use alone. Ironically, his ideas have become so accepted and widespread that he has been nearly forgotten.
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Poignant origin story
- By Jeremy Fairbanks on 03-03-16
By: Andrea Wulf
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Most Delicious Poison
- The Story of Nature's Toxins―from Spices to Vices
- By: Noah Whiteman
- Narrated by: Noah Whiteman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?
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Off topic
- By Stewart on 12-26-23
By: Noah Whiteman
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The End of Eden
- Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown
- By: Adam Welz
- Narrated by: Jason Keller
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.
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Great book, worth every minute
- By LK on 10-16-23
By: Adam Welz
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Mexican WhiteBoy
- By: Matt de la Pena
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Danny's tall and skinny. Even though he's not "built", his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce that any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball, but the boy's not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound, he loses it. Ball ends up so far out of the strike zone it's laughable. But at his private school, they don't expect much else from him. Danny's brown. Half-Mexican brown....
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Where does a Mexican whiteboy fit in?
- By Thin Lizzy on 03-19-21
By: Matt de la Pena
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Coyote America
- A Natural and Supernatural History
- By: Dan Flores
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.
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Very Enjoyable Book, Subject Matter, and Reader
- By John Townsend on 03-17-17
By: Dan Flores
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The Great Displacement
- Climate Change and the Next American Migration
- By: Jake Bittle
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming worsens over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world, fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.
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Where we're headed
- By Dr. Stuart A. Blair on 03-09-23
By: Jake Bittle
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Unit X
- How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
- By: Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins, Raj M. Shah, Christopher Kirchhoff
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites—all these and more are becoming part of America’s DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation.
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Poor Job Telling a Great Story
- By Andrew N Dobson on 10-31-24
By: Raj M. Shah, and others
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Entangled Life
- How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
- By: Merlin Sheldrake
- Narrated by: Merlin Sheldrake
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
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Mycology for Everyone
- By Cephalopods Revenge on 05-12-20
By: Merlin Sheldrake
What listeners say about The Devil's Element
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Suzette G Dewey
- 06-22-23
Eye opening!
A must read if you are concerned about humanities future. Left me pondering and googling for updates. Thank you Dan Egan; and thank you Jason Culp, you kept me walking and listening!
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- DJJ
- 03-30-23
Exceptionally well crafted
"The Devil's Element" is a captivating book that seamlessly blends history, current events, and future issues in a way that is both informative and engaging. Egan expertly weaves together the stories of early chemist scientists, the environmental and health consequences of the phosphorus industry, and modern-day efforts to mitigate damage. He explores the broader social, economic, and political implications of the phosphorus industry, and raises important questions about our collective responsibility to protect our planet and our culpability in participating in this system however unknowingly. I also thought his book about the great lakes was very well done so when I saw this has come out I picked it up immediately. It's well worth your time
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1 person found this helpful
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- Phil
- 04-20-23
Informative and entertaining
Eye opening and a good look at a more sustainable future and good ideas for future businesses
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- Phil Bigelow
- 03-26-23
A great primer on phosphorus
Well written and entertaining. An easy read on an element that we cannot live without.
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- Bookie
- 03-27-23
Essential Science
Powerful implications for policy, planners, engineers, and ethical
agriculturists. Easy and enlightening to read.
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