Strip mining of phosphate, “Bone Valley,” Florida. Photo: Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

March 23 – Bone Valley, Florida

If there’s one thing about ecology everybody should know, it’s the story of shit. If you already do(o), or are squeamish, please skip the next paragraph.

Back in pre-industrial and pre-capitalist days, farming was sustainable. Poop, and pee too, were collected and used as fertilizer to nourish crops, creating a virtuous cycle of growth, digestion, deposition and re-growth. That system was destroyed by industries requiring a large, concentrated labor force, cities located far from agriculture, and flush toilets.

For the first time, human waste was not returned to the soil, but carried off as sewage and put into streams, rivers and oceans. This “robbery system,” as the German plant scientist Justus von Liebig called it in 1862, created a metabolic rift that could only be overcome by the application of alternative or artificial soil nutrients. Initially, it was bones harvested from European graveyards and battlefields, and then, when that ran out, guano – bird droppings harvested from a few islands off Peru. When that source too was exhausted, scientists discovered a method (the Haber-Bosch process), of producing ammonia from water, methane and atmospheric nitrogen. However, other nutrients are also needed to fortify soils, most of all phosphorus. That’s collected from mines, some of the biggest of which happen to be in central Florida.

If you drive due west on Route 60 from Vero Beach to St. Petersburg, like we did today, you pass subdivisions, cattle farms, spent orange groves, and strawberry fields. Just past Mulberry, Fl. (pop. 3,592) you see on your left a mountain rising several hundred feet in the air. It’s a “gyp-stack” containing about five million tons of phosphogypsum, the byproduct of phosphate mining. There are some 25 of them in this part of Florida, an area called “Bone Valley” because the phosphate is mixed with prehistoric fossils. The largest U.S. producer of phosphate and potash (also used in agriculture) is The Mosaic Company, a global corporation headquartered in nearby Tampa. It employs 13,000 people in the region, and mines about 15 million tons of phosphate every year. Zora Neale Hurston, writing nearly 100 years ago, managed to romanticize the industry. She described “sweating black bodies, muscled like gods, working to feed the hunger of the great tooth…They go down in the phosphate mines and bring up the wet dust of the bones of prehistoric monsters, to make rich land in far places…”

The miners back then, however, didn’t just sweat – they died; phosphate mining is a poisonous business. To get at the stuff, you strip everything off the ground – in this part of Florida it’s mostly wetlands — and then dig. The process produces vast quantities of waste, most of it toxic, and some radioactive. After a mine is exhausted, the terrain cannot be restored to its prior state.

Sinkholes sometimes open beneath gyp-stacks, and dam breaches occur, imperiling millions of Floridians and billions of fish and other marine creatures. True to form, President Trump recently declared potash a “critical mineral” and is expected soon to give the same designation to phosphate. This will further weaken already inadequate E.P.A. regulation and ensure even greater contamination of water. Air too: fine dust from the mines contains heavy metals that can lodge in lungs.

There is an alternative to phosphate: pee. If Americans recycled their urine, they could produce as much phosphate as all U.S. mining operations. (I can show you the math.) In addition, if phosphate fertilizers were applied more judiciously, we’d have a surplus. Then, the U.S. could sell its pee globally. But by that time – the start of Trump’s fourth term — other countries would also be in the game and there would be reciprocal urine tariffs. The headline writers would have a field day: “TRUMP AND E.U. GET INTO PISSING CONTEST.”

March 26 – A Georgia Gumshoe

Like Jekyll Island, where we stayed last night, Saint Simon’s is one of the Georgia Sea Islands. However, it’s not planned and manicured like Jekyll, and Mallery Street, which runs down to the harbor, feels like a seaside Main Street of old: tourist shops, bait and tackle stores, fish restaurants and cafes. We were looking for the office of David Kyler, one of our A2 (Anthropocene Alliance) members who runs the Center for a Sustainable Coast. After twice walking past his address — 221 Suite B – we saw the numbers stenciled above a tattered white door. We pushed it open, climbed the blue painted........

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