All too often this deviation from topic occurs - for example in chapter 1 we get a story of nineteenth century agricultural arson in East Anglia and the life of John Henshaw for around four pages, followed by a similar amount on geology. Even the very opening, which makes use of a decaying whale in the ocean (and throws in the nature of near death experiences) seems to meander far from the subject.
This isn't helped by a tendency to make sweeping passing statements that are hard to justify. For example, in the prologue it is said that farming using phosphate fertiliser is 'a kind of agriculture that, incidentally, tends to preference men who lack knowledge over women who possess it' - both a bizarre generalisation and an odd statement given that agriculture rarely expresses any kind of preference.
Sometimes the author seems to get stuck in a sequence of short hand-waving sentences. For example: 'There would be no life without constant death. The bodies of our forebears came to form the base of our lives today. All of us are made of accumulated parts worn down and enlivened by billions of years of excess and limitation. Our bodies are living remnants of the past,' and 'We wander on this planet, looking around with trepidation, and we try to justify our place here. We lay out how it happened. There was an egg, a dream, a metamorphosis of worlds. The earth was only oceans: a diver came. A woman in the clouds fell groundward toward a group of water-dwelling animals:...'
When there is science or history of science, it can be vague or doubtful. We are told that phosphorous was 'the first chemical element that had ever been identified' - so no gold or silver or iron, for instance, was identified before? Apparently 'Davy gave Faraday his first university appointment' - impressive in that Faraday never held a university appointment. Physics particularly seems to be an issue. We are told that 'The movement of a particle through space can be modelled by what quantum physicists call an amplitude, which the rest of us typically refer to as a wave.' Hmm. Then 'When a uranium atom decays, it releases radiation, mainly in the form of photons, which move in a pattern that roughly resembles a repeating S shaped curve.' Wiggly photons: there's a novelty.
There is no doubt that phosphorus mining has had a terrible impact on environments and lives. Or that we need to look at better ways of making use of fertiliser. There are plenty of sensible points here. But it's all set in typical university humanities frame of the horrors of colonialism and capitalism. It somehow typifies the writer's cultural approach that quinoa soon turns up. Small is always beautiful. The sweeping statements return with, for instance, the claim that 'It is small farms, not large ones, that produce food more efficiently’ - this might be true, but I know some small farmers personally, and they struggle to make enough to live on - perhaps food is too cheap, but we don’t hear about that side from Lohmann. I checked for a reference to back up the claim, but the one given was to a paper about organic farms, and there are many papers demonstrating these are less efficient than conventional farming, not more.
For the right audience - fans of polemic nature books, perhaps - I can see there's an appeal, but for me it's a disappointment.
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