Phosphorus is technically speaking a renewable resource.

Creative people should be able to use this fact in their favor.

The bat has to be getting phosphorus in its diet. Inside the bat gut, whatever the bat eats gets turned into excrement that is rich in phosphorus.

We can't synthesize the element itself, but someone might be able to duplicate what goes on in the bat's gut that turns raw bat food into phosphorus-rich guano.

Isaac Asimov wrote a column on phosphorus. According to his calculations, phosphorus is the bottleneck of life: It's the element that limits how much life there can be on Earth. He noted that we're allowing tons and tons of phosphorus to wash off into the ocean, where it won't be used for land-based life -- including food crops.

It's interesting that there'd be phosphorus shortages probably thirty years after Asimov wrote the column.

A lot of phosphorus comes from the feces of sea birds who get their food from the ocean. So it seems that it some of that phosphorus does make it back to land after all.

Maybe we can improve the efficiency of nature's phosphorus-recycling process somehow.

Andrew does a wonderful job of charting the economics and the politics of phosphorus, but there's some really interesting science here that I'd very much like to learn more about myself.

You tantalize us with mention of the latest scary story on the perilous state of the planet's phosphorus supplies, but it's an empty, broken link.

Please fix; I want to read your primary sources. Thanks!

I wish I knew where the column originally appeared; I know I have a copy here somewhere, but it could be in any number of Isaac's books or in one of the many, many back issues of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction I collected just for his column.

I'm sure he noted that sea birds are one way for phosphorus to cycle back onto the land. But compared to fertilizer runoff into the oceans, and our sewage treatment plants emptying into the oceans, the sea birds are just a drop of poop in the bucket.

The good news is, there's always the possibility someone will work out a way to mine the phosphorus from the oceans. Or maybe from meteorites and asteroids.

And, yes, Salon could use a really good science columnist, and not anyone like that Pablo guy they've got. A popularizer like Asimov would be wonderful.

@artemis:

the correct link to the Times Online article is http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4193017.ece

They're going around the karmic wheel anyhow.

Maybe if we aimed for healthier oceans filled with plants and fish and protected migratory sea birds and allowed their populations to increase, we could improve the rate at which phosphorus moves from the ocean floor into the bird food chain and out of their behinds.

There are two rates we have manage -- the rate at which it goes into the ocean and the rate at which it comes out.

Farmers will have to learn ways to spread fertilizer that keep it from being washed into the ocean, and they'll also have to start caring about overfishing, migratory sea birds, and the spread of dead zones in the ocean.

Organic farming without the use of commercial fertilizers brings more yield per acre and does not destroy the soil or damages our fragile ecosystem.Then we would have plenty of phosphorus for matches.

Crack with matches. Amy Winehouse and the rest of us should be fine. The cheap lighters that you can crank up the flame on works best!

There are only so many phosphorus atoms that exist our planet. Those atoms were synthesized by high energy nuclear processes inside stars. We only have a fixed number of those atoms to work with, whether they are bound up in commercial fertilizers or organic fertilizers or in bird feces or in match heads or in the mud on the ocean floor -- there are only so many of those atoms on our planet and we're never going to get more.

Unless we learn to make our own supernovae or something.

As we increase the population, we increase our demand for those atoms. Maybe that will end up putting the ultimate cap on the world's ability to support human life.

Looks like I need to start investing in bic lighters and zippos.

At the present time, Atlas Match which is located in Euless, Tx. is the largest supplier of matches in the world and all items used in the manufacturer are bio-degradable and approved in the U.S. where not all matches from china and India are. the matches from those countries flash and put off a pungent odor and as the wood is cheap balsa from Malasia they burn fast. Atlas can make all the matches that are needed. This news artical is incorrect and has false information. Sad to say but the world of journalism needs to print the facts and not just want it wants to or what they think will sell papers such as WAR IN IRAQ, CRIME, POLITICIANS, ETC.

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I wish I chose your name. I tease and I smile. Silence is so refreshing and important.

India is a land of fascination. I spent one month in the state of Maharashtra after a bad earthquake in 1993. It was terrible. Maybe up to 28,000 people died. The first report estimated that death tolls could be as high as 60,000. O burial detail duty! Hop a flight to India! I was in Bombay after a quick trip to DC to look into Humanitarian Relief Groups.

Baba `Nam Keva'lam-means love is everywhere. The unusual group were wonderful. I use the word Peculiar because Peculiar is a better word that is a compliment. We western folk bastardize words. We are comfortable with stoic clones. We the troubled "weird"... Or, read the word weird, for example? I love weird. I love pleasant eccentrics. I love real humans.

~

I learned something with the monk and nun, and the laypersons who were inspired by a Indian man named Sarkar. he group developed an education system labeled PROUT. It's worth a google read. The web is beautiful. Baba 'Nam Keva'lam (Kirtan) is a chant and meditation. It means 'good and love can experience it all the time' and even in sad atmosphere.

War or Natural devastation? A group of Indians and worldwide, those spiritual aspirants I met and dug via stone boulders and pulled out humans put me up....And I'll never forget it. Hospitality. They lived it. They were not hypocrites. Imperfect, but likable. Gt to know other cultures.

Focus. okay. Stone walls rocked and swayed like a baby cradle in the Fall when many foods/grains were to be harvested. Mustard, sunflower, and harvest season is beautiful with marigold. Huge timber frame beams, carved from centuries ago, fell upon rural villagers, and their barn livestock, as they slept.

Babies were still being pulled from massive stone piles that crunched rocking cradles and infant bones. Days after the quake shook the Earth, people were pulled from temporary rock burial graves. Mass graves were dug with bulldozers. The Deccan plateau's underground vault extends toward Nepal and it shifted. Why? It shifted. The massive quake was about 4 AM. Humanitarians insisted the Deaths were not the consequence of a natural calamity. Many believed it was a consequence of underground weapon testing.

`

The Village Market Places had foods and the bidi smoke rollers who sold hand rolled local tobacco. Thy were being economically threatened because a pack of global Pall Mall. PALL MALL was being marketed by CEO's and Wall Street investors. They market that Pall Mall as a "famous cigarette" and smoked "Wherever Particular People Congregate"....

A pack of 20 cost 11-cents. That irked the smoke-leaf, bidi roller, cigarettes growers.I hope this rant weaves into the same flow... Thanks Andrew Leonard. I gonna take Silence's good advice today and shush.

I feel like striking a bidi.

Silence? You got a match?

I ramble. Andrew Leonard, followed by the interesting comments~

The Safety Matches and sulphur etc., made me remember a story.

A mouse was having night mares about a younger mouse chewing.

Before "safety matches" came along a mouse may chew a match tip.

Then the mouse ran like blazes with a lit match stick to ignite a blaze.

Where did the mouse scamper to with a fireball of a match combustibles?

The White House, Capital Hill, DoJ, DOD, The Department of Global Agriculture.

Vadana Shiva takes great interest in agriculture, markets, and unsustainable babble ruins.