Complimentary Blueberry Juice

I highly recommend White Light: The Essential Element that Changed the World, a book about Phosphorous, by Jack Lohmann. Published just last year in 2025, the book details the Phosphorous cycle and its crucial role in life on Earth, its discovery as an agricultural fertilizer, and the severe environmental and political implications of mining it. It also has a super awesome book cover that I would gladly have as wall art (or at least the one I have did).

For Lohmann’s first book, he does an amazing job explaining stuff and taking the reader on the journey. Even as a reader who knows a lot about science topics in general, I found the narration here very good. For anyone who knows nothing of the topics, you’ll also find it easy to follow along, as Lohmann doesn’t drag things down into academia.

There’s also a lot of rather shocking stuff in here, politically speaking, that is very well placed. Anytime Florida is involved with agricultural disasters you’re in for a good eye-opening and jaw-dropping ride.

I certainly learned a lot from this well-researched and well-footnoted book, and I also like that there was an editorial choice of sorts not to bog the writing down with citations. The footnotes are simply listed in the back, which made for some good source mining.

The best quality of the book is that the author takes a more meta-level approach to it all, I mean to say the totality of the life cycles on the planet, the geology, the way phosphorous is woven into billions of years of evolution, and how it shapes things and makes or breaks things. I often feel like these realities are lost on us puny humans, especially in these times of never-ending information bombardment, growth at all costs, consuming the environment for our own silly and selfish short-term interests.

I hope Lohmann has some more science-type books in development, but in the meantime, this one is a banger.

Graham

thanks for reading Complimentary Blueberry Juice