Thursday 3/27 @ 6:00PM

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street

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

Jack Lohmann’s White Light is a synthesis 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.

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 this discovery would 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. 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, before we started wasting as much phosphate as we mine.

 Filled with 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.

Jack Lohmann is a writer from Richmond, Virginia. White Light is his first book.

Brian Eugenio Herrera is, by turns, a writer, teacher and scholar - presently based in New Jersey, but forever rooted in New Mexico. Brian's work, whether academic or artistic, examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. 

This event is cosponsored by The Princeton Public Library, the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, and Labyrinth Books.