How wonderful for the Kaiser, then, was Fritz Haber’s invention of industrial nitrogen fixation. In one stroke Germany would be able to produce all the fertilizer and explosives it needed— provided the war didn’t last too long. In 1913 the first nitrogen-fixing plant began operations at Oppau. A year later, Austria’s heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo. Germany soon pushed Austria to declare war and loosed its own troops both east and west. World War I ended four years later with the establishment of Soviet Russia and the collapse of Germany, leading directly to the rise of Nazism with all its horrors and to World War II.

None of this could have come about without the discovery of commercial nitrogen fixation. In trying to save Europe, Fritz Haber came close to destroying it. And in trying to feed humankind, we may yet starve it. Civilization’s bloodiest century, sent on a rampage by nitrogen’s emancipation, has passed into history.

But the paradox of nitrogen remains.

First it was all around us and we couldn’t use it. Now we know how to use it, and it’s suffocating us. The planet’s 6 billion humans (and counting) rely more than ever on fertilizer to augment the natural nitrogen in soils. In fact, we now produce more fixed nitrogen, via a somewhat modified Haber-Bosch process, than the soil’s natural microbial processes do. Farmers tend to apply more fertilizer rather than take a chance on less, so more nitrogen accumulates than the soil can absorb or break down. Nitrates from automobile exhaust and other fossil-fuel combustion add appreciably to this overload. The excess either gets washed off by rainfall or irrigation or else leaches from the soil into groundwater. An estimated 20 percent of the nitrogen that humans contribute to watersheds eventually ends up in lakes, rivers, oceans, and public reservoirs, opening a virtual Pandora’s box of problems.

Algae, like all living organisms, are limited by their food supply, and nitrogen is their staff of life. So when excess nitrogen is washed off into warm, sunlit waters, an algal bacchanalia ensues. Some species form what is known as a “red tide” for its lurid color, producing chemical toxins that kill fish and devastate commercial fisheries. When people eat shellfish tainted by a red tide, they can suffer everything from skin irritation to liver damage, paralysis, and even death. As Yeats put it, “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.”

Algal blooms, even when nontoxic, block out sunlight and cut off photosynthesis for the plants living below. Then they die off and sink, depleting the water’s supply of oxygen through their decomposition and killing clams, crabs, and other bottom dwellers. In the Baltic Sea, nitrogen levels increased by a factor of four during the 20th century, causing massive increases in springtime algal blooms. Some ecologists believe this was the main cause of the collapse of the Baltic cod fishery in the early 1990s. Every spring, the same process now creates a gigantic and growing “dead zone” one to 20 yards down in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, which drain 41 percent of the continental United States, wash excess nitrates and phosphates from the farmlands of 31 states, as well as from factories, into the Gulf. The runoff has created a hypoxic, or deoxygenated, area along the coast of Louisiana toward Texas that has in some years grown as large as New Jersey. This area supports a rich fishery, and dire consequences similar to those in the Baltic Sea can be expected if nothing is done.

So Haber’s gift of nitrogen was not entirely a boon in the area of food: It increased food production on land, but now it threatens our supply of food from the sea. Four years ago the Environmental Protection Agency formed a task force of experts to address the dead-zone problem. Their final plan of action, submitted in January, calls for increased research, monitoring, education, and more planning. Above all, the plan proposes incentives for farmers to use less fertilizer. But the addiction will be hard to break.

Unlike nuclear energy, nitrogen fertilizer is absolutely necessary to the survival of modern civilization. “No Nitrates!” and “Fertilizer Freeze Forever!” are not viable slogans.

At the end of the 19th century there were around 1.5 billion people in the world, and they were already beginning to exhaust the food supply. Today, as the population surges past 6 billion, there is no way humanity could feed itself without nitrogen fertilizers.

As Stanford University ecologist Peter Vitousek told us recently, “We can’t make food without mobilizing a lot of nitrogen, and we can’t mobilize a lot of nitrogen without spreading some around.”

Algal blooms are just one of the many disastrous side effects of runaway nitrogen. In Florida, for example, nitrogen (and phosphorus) runoff from dairies and farms has sabotaged the native inhabitants of the Everglades, which evolved in a low-nutrient environment. The influx of nutrient-loving algae has largely replaced the gray-green periphytic algae that once floated over much of the Everglades. The new hordes of blue-green algae deplete the oxygen and are a less favorable food supply. So exotic plants such as cattails, melaleuca, and Australian pine have invaded the Everglades. Just as shopping-mall and subdivision developers have paved over most habitable land to the east and south, these opportunists have covered the native marshes and wet prairies where birds once fed.

Beneath the surface, the faster-accumulating remains of the new algae have almost completely obliterated the dissolved oxygen in the water. Few fish can survive.

Nitrogen also contaminates drinking water, making it especially dangerous for infants. It interferes with the necessary transformation of methemoglobin into hemoglobin, thus decreasing the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and causing methemoglobinemia, or blue baby syndrome. The EPA has named nitrates, along with bacteria, as the only contaminants that pose an immediate threat to health whenever base levels are exceeded, and increasingly they are being exceeded. According to a 1995 report by the U.S. Geological Survey, 9 percent of tested wells have nitrate concentrations exceeding the EPA limit; previous studies showed that only 2.4 percent of the wells were dangerous.

Beefing up agriculture not only contaminates our water, it corrupts the air.

As fertilizers build up in the soil, bacteria convert more and more of it into nitrous oxide (N2O). Nitrous oxide is best known as “laughing gas,” a common dental anesthetic, but it is also a powerful greenhouse gas, hundreds of times more effective than carbon dioxide, and a threat to the ozone layer.

Like a Rube Goldberg contraption designed to create and foster life on Earth, our ecosphere can apparently withstand little tinkering. Bend one little pole the wrong way, and the whole interlocking mechanism goes out of whack.

Scientists around the world are working to reverse the effects of eutrophication, as the introduction of excessive nutrients is called. But while fuel-cell car engines and other advances loom in the near future, and chlorofluorocarbons have largely been replaced with safer chemicals, there is no such substitute for nitrogen.

“An enormous number of people in the underdeveloped world still need to be better fed,” says Duke University biogeochemist William Schlesinger, “particularly in India and Africa. When they come online agriculturally, sometime in the next 50 years, at least twice as much nitrogen will be deployed on land each year.” 

Improving the management of fertilizer is one good way to decrease runoff. If we can better understand exactly when crops need to absorb nitrogen, farmers can learn to apply fertilizer sparingly, at just the right time. “When application and uptake are coupled,” says Schlesinger, “it minimizes the amount of runoff.” In some watersheds like the Chesapeake Bay, farmers have reduced their nutrient runoff voluntarily. In other areas, farmers haven’t had a choice: When the Soviet Union and its economy collapsed, fertilizer was suddenly hard to come by near the Black Sea. As a result, the hypoxic zone in the Black Sea shrank appreciably.

Another, less drastic strategy for reducing the use of nitrogen is called “intercropping” and goes back to Roman times. By alternating rows of standard crops with rows of nitrogen-fixing crops, such as soybeans or alfalfa, farmers can let nature do their fertilizing for them.

Intercropping could be a godsend to the developing world, where fertilizer is hard to come by. The difficulty is devising new plowing schemes, and farmers, like everyone else, are reluctant to abandon tried-and-true methods. But even successful farmers in the United States might be convinced. Aside from protecting the global environment— a somewhat intangible goal— intercropping could save them money on fertilizer. And farming areas are often most affected by groundwater contaminated by nitrates.

Other researchers are developing natural processes to clean up our mess. Just as some bacteria can draw nitrogen from the atmosphere and expel it as nitrates, others can consume nitrates and expel nitrogen molecules back into the air. Denitrifying bacteria are too scarce to clean up all nitrogen pollution, but they could be used much more extensively. For example, some farmers in Iowa and near the Chesapeake Bay drain their fields through adjacent wetlands, where denitrifying bacteria are common, so that excess nitrogen is consumed before it reaches streams, rivers, and bays. Biologists willing to brave a slippery slope might want to go further, adding denitrifying bacteria to soil or water contaminated with nitrates. In the last few years several bacterial strains that might be useful have been identified. Why not genetically modify them to do exactly what we want?

To anyone familiar with the ravages of invasive species worldwide, the danger is obvious.  Genetically modified microbes would have to be spread over large areas, making them hard to monitor. And in developing countries, where the need is greatest, there are few experts to do the monitoring. The specter of genetically engineered bacteria spreading beyond the targeted regions, and mutating into new strains, brings to mind a picture of biogeochemists in the 22nd century looking back on the halcyon days when people still had the luxury of worrying about nitrogen.

Fritz Haber couldn’t have imagined that he was altering Earth’s environmental balance when he thought to heat up uranium, hydrogen, and air at high pressure. If we’re not careful, our attempts to rectify that balance will only trigger another, even more destructive chain reaction.

Haber’s uranium was Oppenheimer’s uranium in more ways than one.  

A Short, Salient History of Nitrogen 1910 Kaiser Wilhelm II wants Germany to expand but lacks the necessary fertilizer and explosives for war. The missing ingredient: nitrogen. 

1912 A brilliant young chemist named Fritz Haber discovers the keys to mass-producing nitrogen: high pressure and a uranium catalyst. 

1956 Nitrogen-based fertilizer production is growing exponentially. In Minnesota, models in fertilizer sacks pose on a production line. 

1980 Over the next decade, more man-made fertilizers, like this nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium mix, will be put on crops than were used in previous human history. 

1995 The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is destroyed by a bomb made mostly of ammonium nitrate and diesel-fuel oil, killing 168 people. 

2001 The Florida Everglades are slowly being choked by vast algal blooms as dairies and farms send their nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich runoff into the swamps. Native species such as periphyton, adapted to water with fewer nutrients, are being displaced by exotic plants such as cattails, melaleuca, and Australian pine.

For more about methemoglobinemia, or blue baby syndrome, see the Environmental Protection Agency report “Is Your Drinking Water Safe?” (Publication No. EPA 810-F-94-002, May 1994), which can be found at: www.epa.gov/region5/drink.html.

For further information, contact EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Hotline: 1-800-426-4791.  For more about threats to the Everglades’s rare subtropical ecosystem, see the National Parks Service Web site, “Can the Everglades Survive?” at www.nps.gov/ever/home.htm.

To learn more about the EPA action plan to control eutrophication in the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” see www.epa.gov/msbasin/actionplanintro.htm.

Read the speech given when Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on ammonia synthesis: www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1918/press.html.

****

The following has been extracted from the article, God Nears Wake Up Call For Humans On Nitrogen Atmosphere Planet Of Ants

On 3 November, after a solar storm caused a temporary crack in the Earth’s magnetic field, unusual pink aurora borealis swarmed the skies above Norway, and is most critical to notice because pink auroras are a sign of nitrogen in a part of the atmosphere it shouldn’t be in.

At the end of the 19th century there were around 1.5 billion people in the world, and they were already beginning to exhaust the food supply.  Today, as the population surges past 6 billion, there is no way humanity could feed itself without nitrogen fertilizers.

As Stanford University ecologist Peter Vitousek told us recently, “We can’t make food without mobilizing a lot of nitrogen, and we can’t mobilize a lot of nitrogen without spreading some around“.

The planet’s 6 billion humans (and counting) rely more than ever on fertilizer to augment the natural nitrogen in soils. In fact, we now produce more fixed nitrogen, via a somewhat modified Haber-Bosch process, than the soil’s natural microbial processes do. Farmers tend to apply more fertilizer rather than take a chance on less, so more nitrogen accumulates than the soil can absorb or break down. Nitrates from automobile exhaust and other fossil-fuel combustion add appreciably to this overload. The excess either gets washed off by rainfall or irrigation or else leaches from the soil into groundwater.

Algal blooms are just one of the many disastrous side effects of runaway nitrogen.

An estimated 20 percent of the nitrogen that humans contribute to watersheds eventually ends up in lakes, rivers, oceans, and public reservoirs, opening a virtual Pandora’s box of problems.  Algae, like all living organisms, are limited by their food supply, and nitrogen is their staff of life. So when excess nitrogen is washed off into warm, sunlit waters, an algal bacchanalia ensues.  Some species form what is known as a “red tide” for its lurid color, producing chemical toxins that kill fish and devastate commercial fisheries.

When people eat shellfish tainted by a red tide, they can suffer everything from skin irritation to liver damage, paralysis, and even death.  As Yeats put it, “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed“.

Algal blooms, even when nontoxic, block out sunlight and cut off photosynthesis for the plants living below. Then they die off and sink, depleting the water’s supply of oxygen through their decomposition and killing clams, crabs, and other bottom dwellers. In the Baltic Sea, nitrogen levels increased by a factor of four during the 20th century, causing massive increases in springtime algal blooms. Some ecologists believe this was the main cause of the collapse of the Baltic cod fishery in the early 1990s.

Every spring, the same process now creates a gigantic and growing “dead zone” 1 to 20 yards down in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, which drain 41 percent of the continental United States, wash excess nitrates and phosphates from the farmlands of 31 states, as well as from factories, into the Gulf. The runoff has created a hypoxic, or deoxygenated, area along the coast of Louisiana toward Texas that has in some years grown as large as New Jersey. This area supports a rich fishery, and dire consequences similar to those in the Baltic Sea can be expected if nothing is done.

So Haber’s gift of nitrogen was not entirely a boon in the area of food: It increased food production on land, but now it threatens our supply of food from the sea.