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With Germany facing outrage from half the world, Fritz Haber was even entreated by his own wife “to forsake poison gas.”9 But Haber would not be budged, and on May 2, 1915, a stricken Clara Haber committed suicide, using her husband’s own military-issue revolver. Following this personal tragedy, Haber traveled to the Eastern Front to supervise gas attacks on Russian soldiers there. (It should be remembered that, at the same time as condemning Germany for its barbarism, Britain quickly developed and used its own poison gas weaponry.) His reputation was ruined, and Haber died in 1934 following years of depression and increasing Nazi persecution because of his Jewish origins. His postwar award of the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was so controversial that the ceremony had to be postponed until June 1920 because of protests from the former Allied countries.

THE NITROGEN APE

Thanks to Fritz Haber, humans are the only species on the planet, apart from Rhizobium bacteria, that are able to fix their own nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. (Rhizobium are the symbiotic inhabitants of the root nodules found in legumes.) In that sense we are perhaps biologically closer to peas, beans, and clover than to our great ape relatives. Certainly everywhere humans dwell, the Earth is richly fertilized: In general it is a surfeit rather than a lack of nutrients that lies behind many of our most intractable environmental problems. The production of synthetic fertilizer now mobilizes some 100 million tonnes of nitrogen every year, and as a direct result the carrying capacity of the world’s croplands rose from 1.9 to 4.8 persons per hectare in the century from 1908 to 2008. Turning stones into bread, in Haber’s phrase, is now so commonplace that we give it scarcely a moment’s thought.

The process was not one of steady expansion after Haber’s breakthrough. Ammonia production stagnated in the 1920s, and global output really only began to take off after the Second World War, led by the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Revolution then brought high-yielding hybrid crop varieties to developing countries that were enormously productive when grown with artificial fertilizers. China, faced with a growing population and no free land, built thirteen ammonia plants in the 1970s, and by 1989 had become the largest nitrogen producer in the world. The United States remains heavily dependent on agricultural fertilizers—so much so that major crop-growing regions are actually served by ammonia pipelines. Today, more than half the nitrogen produced by the world’s crops originates in ammonia production plants using the Haber-Bosch process. Given that most of this ends up as our food, it is fair to say that most of the protein in the modern human being’s body is of synthetic origin.10

Even while the production of artificial fertilizers has clearly been good for humanity, it has also begun to cause serious environmental problems. Because reactive nitrogen is so rare in nature, ecosystems are highly sensitive to it, whether on land or in the water. Nitrogenous fertilizers quickly wash off fields and into watercourses, where they stimulate blooms of algae and deplete the water column of oxygen. This “eutrophication” process has dramatically affected rivers and lakes across the Northern Hemisphere, and where this nutrient-rich soup pours out into coastal oceans, enormous oxygen-depleted “dead zones” mount a silent takeover of continental shelves. The latest scientific count found a worrying 400 separate dead zones spreading out from the world’s most densely populated coastal regions, from Shanghai to the mouth of the Mississippi. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone now affects an average of 20,000 square kilometers each summer. Large areas of the Baltic Sea in northern Europe are similarly affected by runoff and nutrient pollution. In the latter, as in many inland lakes, phosphorus pollution—from detergents as well as fertilizers—is arguably an even bigger problem. In the oceans the only species that can survive a seasonal dead zone are those that