Endangered Species? Should Cheap Phosphorus Be First On An Elemental 'Red List?'

Should the periodic table bear a warning label in the 21st century or be revised with a lesson about elemental supply and demand? If so, that lesson could start with one element considered a staple of life -- but growing endangered, like the Asiatic dhole -- phosphorus.

Why is phosphorus pivotal? Phosphorus is in the DNA of all plants and animals. It is a key ingredient in fertilizer, but high quality phosphate deposits for mining are limited in both quantity and locality. Indeed, there are increasing concerns that with 85% of the resource limited to three countries in the world, inexpensive phosphorus may become a vestige of the past.

What could happen then? That's a question that scientists James Elser, a professor at Arizona State University, and Elizabeth Bennett, a researcher at McGill University in Canada, want to tackle sooner rather than later. In their commentary "The phosphorus cycle: a broken biogeochemical cycle" published in the Sept. 6 issue of Nature, the duo examine the lack of public and governmental discourse about the plight of the element phosphorus -- and the potential social consequences of inaction.

Elser and Bennett in North America, and researchers Dana Cordell and Stuart White with Institute for Sustainable Futures in Australia, are just a few of the rising tide of scientific voices calling for early environmental attention and action. Awareness is a critical piece that needs to be addressed, along with better global accounting and technological innovation, the researchers say, to build pre-emptive, sustainable solutions for this broken biogeochemical cycle