Sensing the Anthropocene with Phosphorus in Lake Champlain
By Chris Gish
May 6, 2021
Head to Lake Champlain on a hot, still summer day and the placid water might resemble a thin pea soup. The murky blend is cyanobacteria, a community of native microbes whose growth is limited by a lack of phosphorus. When weather conditions are right and sources like wastewater treatment plants and farms release excess phosphorus, cyanobacteria populations ‘bloom,’ creating conditions that are both unsightly and toxic.
As the Executive director of the Lake Champlain Committee (LCC), Lori Fisher is familiar with these fickle, problematic blooms. She oversees a community monitoring network for cyanobacteria at more than 150 sites in Vermont, New York, and Quebec, in which volunteers monitor for cyanobacteria at least once a week and contribute to a tracker map that provides timely information on water safety. “Cyanobacteria are natural,” Fisher said. “What we focus on is when they get out of hand.”
A similar focus motivates a raft of programs that have sprung up to help monitor phosphorus and its effects in Lake Champlain. Since 2012, when the US Environmental Protection Agency mandated stricter Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) in Lake Champlain following a suit from the Conservation Law Foundation, Vermont has increased efforts to limit the amount of phosphorus entering Lake Champlain. Everyone from community volunteers to university professors are developing new ways to monitor and reduce what extension agents call the “wicked problem” of phosphorus.
Phosphorus, though, is not just an isolated molecule. It is embedded in complex socio-ecological patterns of unsustainability and harm. As increasing data is collected on phosphorus, I am curious whether another, perhaps more important question—how phosphorus traces our transition to the Anthropocene—remains askable.
Like plastics and fossil fuels, phosphorus in the “Age of Humans” causes global ecological and geological change as humans unearth it in mass quantities and add it to biological cycles. The so-called “phosphorus apparatus”—a term coined by anthropologist Zachary Caple—now applies over 15 million tons of phosphorus fertilizer annually, radically altering the cycle of a naturally scarce nutrient to feed growing, urban populations.
In Vermont, agriculture is at the heart of the phosphorus apparatus. Farmers rely on phosphorus for high yields, and Vermont farms, primarily dairy, make up the largest source of phosphorus to Lake Champlain. Dairy farmers in Vermont seldom directly apply phosphorus fertilizer, but, on net, they import feed from out of state that has been grown with generous phosphorus inputs. Policies that maintain low prices and overproduction in the dairy industry and a farming model that relies on imported nutrients are key parts of Vermont’s phosphorus apparatus. Dairy cows are too. To produce the most milk possible, their female bodies are forced through accelerated cycles of pregnancy and lactation, arranged so tightly in barns that they might not turn around for their whole adult lives. Phosphorus shows just how aptly the Anthropocene is also the Capitalocene—an age when cheap goods proliferate through the “cheapening” of countless human and non-human lives.
Thinking through the complexity of phosphorus and its monitoring led me to a 2017 paper, A Wary Alliance: From Enumerating the Environment to Inviting Apprehension. Nicholas Shapiro et al. note that “the very pursuit of finding buoyancy and meaning among indeterminate data resists bigger/ ancillary/other questions becoming askable.”
This dilemma stuck with me as I noticed how the practices used to sense and monitor phosphorus were articulated through the same systems that create phosphorus pollution in the first place. Sensing practices—the many methods that produce knowledge about phosphorus in the environment—present an opportunity to explore problems and potential solutions to the Anthropocene, but they remain embedded in the Anthropocene’s messy, unjust patterns.
Raju Badireddy and Andrew Schroth are two professors at the University of Vermont (UVM) who are involved in technical efforts to ‘enumerate’ phosphorus pollution. Badireddy, an environmental engineer, is developing low-cost microsensors that will measure dissolved phosphorus in soil or water and store the data on flash memory. Schroth, a geology professor, makes detailed models that correlate UV/Vis spectrophotometry (a measure of how water absorbs light at different wavelengths) to phosphorus levels in three Vermont watersheds as part of a National Science Foundation grant on phosphorus and eutrophication in Lake Champlain.
The phosphorus accounting of Badireddy and Schroth follows in the legacy of what critic Larry Lohmann calls molecular fetishism. Molecular fetishism, a fixation on the importance and (explanatory) power of isolated molecules, is central to the Anthropocene. It enabled chemical agriculture in the first place, as farmers reduced management decisions to the right N-P-K ratios and pesticide applications. Now, as too many of the wrong molecules accumulate in lakes and rivers, phosphorus becomes a “wayward” molecule. Once its amounts and distributions are quantified in sufficient detail, the logic of molecular fetishism goes, technical interventions can solve the problem without any structural changes to underlying systems of power and production.
Badireddy and Schroth were clear that more detailed data on phosphorus molecules are key to a healthier lake. Schroth emphasized the importance of constant monitoring and frequent sampling because “there are things that, with much lower frequency data sets, you tend to miss.” Likewise, “more data,” Badireddy said, “will give us a better understanding of what’s going on in the system, and how we should improve or change the best management practices.”
The barriers to this straightforward solution, according to Badireddy and Schroth, are the same ones that impede any capitalist enterprise: time and money. Badireddy lamented how lab analysis is held back by “the time it takes to process these phosphorus samples, and the amount of labor and the cost.” The alternative, in-situ sensors, currently cost a few thousand dollars each.
Community monitoring of cyanobacteria also bases its relevance on the assertion of universal, objective scientific truths. The LCC began monitoring in 1999 when a rash of dog deaths revealed the danger of cyanobacteria to public health. Unlike many examples of ‘citizen science,’ the program has institutional roots, borrowing UVM’s deep water sampling method and applying it to the near-shore areas that people interact with. Moving from “labor-intensive and very expensive” lab tests to a volunteer community monitoring model allowed the program to expand from fewer than two dozen sites to over 150 in 2020, according to Fisher.
The goal of scientific reproducibility remained despite the transition from laboratories to volunteer observations. All volunteer monitors undergo training and must follow a consistent process that involves a “three-tiered visual system,” standardized “jar tests,” and established weekly testing times for the “integrity of data,” Fisher explained. The LCC “ground truths” community monitoring data with occasional lab tests to make sure there is no systemic discrepancy between non-expert observation and ‘true’ lab results.
LCC’s community monitoring folds in another key aspect of Anthropocenic world-making: hierarchies of knowledge and agency, in which the most affected bodies have the least agency to change their situation. Remember the dog deaths that sparked LCC’s community monitoring? They are part of a hierarchy of cyanobacteria harm, with wild natures at one end and expert policy-makers and scientists at the other. Wild natures suffer the most damage but have the least agency to alter the dynamics of phosphorus pollution, while experts have great power to ameliorate phosphorus but seldom have to directly experience its harm. Pets, children, and community monitors populate the middle of this spectrum, with decreasing proximity to direct harm and increasing agency to affect the problem.
Similar hierarchies emerge to govern the knowledge produced in community monitoring. Excess phosphorus and potential toxicity is made visible through the rapidly-reproducing bodies of cyanobacteria, but it takes human monitors to translate that knowledge into something ‘significant.’ Volunteer observations show up on the tracker map, but ultimately the data are validated by experts at the LCC and Vermont Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation. As they clean, analyze, and present the data, these institutions are vested with the power to produce knowledge that, in turn, is legible to other expert and policymaking institutions. When I last spoke to Fisher on March 18, 2021, these groups had not finished the analysis of 2020 field data.
These tiered understandings, though, are not fixed; as they come, go, and change shape like the cyanobacteria blooms they seek to sense, they open up space for different systems of knowledge and power. Fisher noted that volunteers were often the first to detect uncommon new forms of cyanobacteria. As these observations trickled up to program directors, community monitors ended up co-creating the testing standards and processes that are ostensibly passed ‘down’ to them to carry out. Paying attention to these inversions of power and expertise—which are always present but often overlooked—might reveal unexpected ways to reorganize systems for regeneration and more just futures.
Even Schroth’s nonliving computer models confuse the boundaries between a subject able to produce knowledge, and a passive ‘object’ being known. In science, a subject supposedly knows nature, independent of any influence from the object itself. Power flows one way, from the (often white, male, colonial) knower to that which is known, just like other unidirectional ways humans relate to nature in the Anthropocene. The algorithms that Schroth uses to model watershed phosphorus, however, are in a way written by the places they seek to sense. The relation between UV/Vis spectrophotometry and phosphorus depends on unique factors like soil type, topography, land cover, and land use. Factors like land cover and land use, crucially, live at messy human/nonhuman interfaces. Like Caple noted of the apparatus that left Bone Valley, Florida, a devastated landscape exploited for over 1 billion tons of phosphorus since 1880, the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is always a “patchy” one. It is precisely this patchiness that demands that watersheds co-create their algorithms. As the environment changes, Schroth noted, the algorithm must change as well. This, too, is the Anthropocene: the place where established ways of ordering and knowing break down as we engage with new human/nonhuman entanglements.
Beyond mutable hierarchies, phosphorus sensing also gives a window into other shifting, ambiguous entanglements that mark Anthropocene landscapes. One of these is the persistence and proliferation of living labor. Since Marx, critics like Lohman have pointed out that the advance of machines (and now computing) has not resulted in the elimination of human or animal labor. Rather, it has led to the more thorough exploitation of “living labor” to accommodate, interface with, code, fuel, and maintain the dead labor of machines. This is the case for the Anthropocene-making phosphorus apparatus, as it demands everything from alienated farm workers and sacrificial creatures like dairy cows (life-giving producers with barely a life of their own) to the millennia of genetic information needed to breed more productive crops and cows.
Living labor likewise persists in the sensing apparatuses that detect phosphorus here in Vermont. The community monitoring program depends, obviously enough, on uncompensated labor to interface with the environment. Volunteers interpret ambiguous environmental conditions into a legible “sample,” and attend to changing conditions so they know when to resample even if it is beyond the weekly schedule. Coordinators, meanwhile, have to call volunteers weekly to negotiate consistency among variable lake conditions and human interpretations, then assimilate dissimilar reports from across the basin into coherent standards, processes, and statistics.
Schroth and Badireddy do not have to manage the inconsistencies of human volunteers, but their projects still demand living labor for the idiosyncrasies of watersheds and changing geophysical baselines. Schroth relies on regular water samples, manually collected and analyzed in the lab, to provide “ground truthing” for the algorithms he creates. “A common perception is that once you have sensors, you don't need to collect water samples,” he said. “It turns out you still need to collect a lot of water samples.” Similarly, Badireddy noted that even for the small site in Colorado where his team will be testing microsensors this summer, “there will be a technician present there at all times.”
Despite being couched in a language of objective scientism, the living labor of phosphorus sensing inhabits the ambiguity of the environment in the transition to the Anthropocene. Schroth noted that the difficulty of his work is precisely that it is hard to discern, out of the “noise” of bio-geological difference, what interventions actually change phosphorus loads. Community monitors, meanwhile, negotiate the ambiguity of visual phenomena—is that duckweed, pollen, cyanobacteria, motor oil, or algae? Or some combination of the five? Even when the goal is to transform the environment into manipulable, universalized data sets, the actual ‘act of translation’ remains full of uncertainty.
If the Anthropocene is understood as the end of the stable, life-giving Holocene epoch during which human and non-human life flourished, then a collective goal might be to exit the Anthropocene as quickly as possible. Paying attention to the details of this transition, with everything from community monitoring to digital sensors, is vital. Noticing ambiguity and entanglement invites not just more of the same—more studies, more living labor subsumed, more hierarchical knowledge—but also other ways to make sense of and act with phosphorus.
Schroth described the difficulty of ascribing causal agency to changes in phosphorus levels, but the Anthropocene is not a univariate problem. We inhabit a knot of globally distributed, brutally unjust dilemmas with no single cau
