Author of New Phosphate Book Comes to Tampa and St. Pete

Jack Lohmann, author of the upcoming book White Light, will make two local appearances to support its Match 18 release. The book details our history with phosphorus, with a section dedicated to phosphate mining in Florida that includes Manatee County. 

“There would be no life without constant death.” So begins Jack Lohmann's debut book, White Light, before delivering a mesmerizing swirl of ecology, geology, chemistry, history, agricultural science, investigative reporting, and the poetry of the natural world. White Light reflects on the cyclical nature of life, what happens when we break that cycle, and how to repair it—told through the fate of phosphorus.

In 1842, when the naturalist John Stevens Henslow, Darwin’s beloved botany professor, discovered the potential of that rock as a fertilizer, little did he know his countrymen would soon be grinding up the bones of dead soldiers and mummified Egyptian cats to exploit their phos­phate content. Little did he know he’d spawn a global mining industry that would change our diets, our lifestyles, and the face of the planet.

Lohmann guides us from Henslow’s Suffolk, where the phosphate fertilizer industry took root, to Bone Valley in Central Florida, where it has boomed alongside big ag—leaving wreckage like the Piney Point disaster in its wake—to far-flung Nauru, an island stripped of its life force by the ravenous young industry. We sift through the earth’s geological layers and eras, speak in depth with experts and locals, and explore our past relationship with sustainable farming—including in seventeenth-century Japan when one could pay rent with their excrement—before we started wasting just as much phosphate as we mine.

Lohmann will be at Tombolo Books in St. Pete on Thursday, March 20. Click here for more information. Lohmann will also be at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa on Tuesday, March 18. Click here for more details. You can also pre-order White Light on Amazon.