White Light

The Elemental Role of Phosphorus-in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World

By: Jack Lohmann

A profound and lyrical reflection on the cyclical nature of life, what happens when we break that cycle, and how to repair it—told through the fate of phosphorus

“There would be no life without constant death.” So begins Jack Lohmann’s remarkable debut, White Light, a mesmerizing swirl of ecology, geology, chemistry, history, agricultural science, investigative reporting, and the poetry of the natural world. Wherever life has roamed, its record is left in the sediment; over centuries, that dead matter is compacted into rock; and in that rock is phosphate—one phosphorus atom bonded to four oxygen atoms—life preserved in death, with all its surging force.

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.

Sui generis, filled with passion and rigorous reporting, White Light invites us to renew our broken relationship not just with the earth but with our own death—and the life it brings after us.

©2025 Jack Lohmann (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"White Light tells the history of life through an element's history. It is at once lyrical and exacting, clear-sighted and deeply informed—a beautiful book."—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

"An effervescent—or I should say phosphorescent—debut from a talented young science writer. Jack Lohmann travels across time and space, from eroding English seasides to lonely Pacific outposts, and from 50-million-year-old fossil beds to modern factory farms, to explore how the humble element phosphorus underpins our world. By the end of the journey, you too will see this often-ignored element in a new light—the white light that underlies life itself."—Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh paleontologist and New York Times/Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

“Last week, I had no interest in phosphorus; now, thanks to Jack Lohmann’s ground-breaking book, I find life and death—the whole universe—within it. Every sentence in this deeply original work sparkles with astonishing facts, prodigious research, crystal clarity. White Light is a conscience-driven tour de force.”—Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life