Issac Christiancy was a white-bearded 79-year-old when the shooting over nitrogen started.
It was January 15, 1881, and the U.S. envoy to Peru had to duck for cover. Bullets whizzed through a suburb of Lima, “pattering thick and fast upon the buildings around us,” he later wrote back to Washington, D.C. Christiancy fled, throwing himself over walls and wading through ditches over an eight-mile run as shells from Chilean gunboats exploded around him, until he stumbled into his offices. Peru soon surrendered, and the night that followed was “a nightmare of chaos and unutterable horrors” as the remnants of the defeated Peruvian army looted, burned, and terrorized the city.
Chile had invaded Peru for a seemingly unlikely prize: nitrogen fertilizer. Twenty years earlier, the great European powers and the United States had come to the brink of global war over three tiny islands off the coast of Peru covered in mountains of nitrogen-rich guano. Why would anyone come to blows over piles of bird crap? Because nitrogen gave these countries the power to feed their growing populations. Peruvian guano was, as one historian put it, “worth more than all the gold shipped back to Europe in the Spanish treasure galleons.”
Nitrogen is everywhere. It makes up 80 percent of the air you’re breathing. On its own, it has no real value. But if it’s combined into a molecule with another element, like hydrogen or oxygen, it becomes something that can react with other chemicals. In this “fixed” state, plants can use it to build proteins. Our bodies use those proteins, in turn, to build muscles, bones, DNA, and babies.
But back in the 19th century, fixed nitrogen was limited. In the early 1800s, the English scholar Thomas Malthus warned of famine as population growth began to overtake farm production. Then settlers discovered the guano islands and nitrate mines of South America, and fertilizer-laden clipper ships streamed around Cape Horn back to Europe, giving farmers bumper crops and feeding a baby boom.
Britain’s population quadrupled over the next 100 years. Then in 1908, as South American nitrogen was beginning to run low, the chemist Fritz Haber discovered a way to take the inert nitrogen in air and turn it into the reactive forms plants and animals use. “Haber opened the faucet for nitrogen to flow from the air to the living world,” wrote geographer Ruth DeFries. Instead of waning, populations continued to boom.
This breakthrough solution created a crisis as large as the one it solved. Since Haber’s discovery, humans have nearly doubled Earth’s natural flow of fixed nitrogen, overwhelming the capacity of ecosystems to remove it. The resulting buildup is poisoning the planet’s waterways, creating a crisis some consider even more threatening than the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
But we can’t simply turn off the spigot of industrial nitrogen, because we depend on it. More than 3 billion people wouldn’t be alive today without Haber’s industrial process.
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Earth is marinating in the flood of nitrogen Haber uncorked. Start with so-called “dead zones.” Less than half of the nitrogen that farmers spread makes it into food. The excess washes out of fields with other fertilizers and winds up in rivers, lakes, and bays where it catalyzes algal blooms. The bacteria that eat this algal slime suck the oxygen out of the water, killing every animal that can’t flee, and creating huge areas covered in slime and suffocated of oxygen and light. There are now more than 400 of these dead zones around the world (and algae problems in Florida recently barged into the U.S. Senate race), covering an area the size of Oregon. In the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River, an estimated 235,000 tons of fish and other sea creatures perish each year.
Wherever they gather, nitrogen compounds turn poisonous. In drinking water, they cause blue baby syndrome, which prevents infants from absorbing oxygen; in lakes, they fertilize neurotoxic algae; in farm country, they are a major source of suffocating smog.
Then there’s the climate. Some of the nitrogen seeps out of the ground as nitrous oxide (yep, laughing gas), which turns out to be a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer sucks up 1 percent of all the energy humanity harnesses, more than all the wind and solar energy produced worldwide last year, and produces as much greenhouse gas as all the homes in the United States.
The world’s largest factory for fixing nitrogen sits alongside the west bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, an hour’s drive from New Orleans. The CF Industries Donaldson Nitrogen Complex contains 1,400 acres of concrete tanks and steel gridwork with twisting pipes that lead to a series of chambers where gas and air are brought together at up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, creating a pressure cooker that could squish a human body like a grape. That’s what it takes to turn nitrogen from the air into fertilizer.
At least, that’s how humans do it. Bacteria accomplish this same feat of engineering within the fragile wall of a single cell. They offer a microscopic solution for this enormous problem.
Instead of fossil fuel, these bacteria run on sugar, which they get from plants in exchange for nitrogen. And they produce fertilizer exactly when and where plants need it: Pivot’s bacteria coat roots “like a glove,” Temme said, feeding them tiny squirts of nitrogen as they grow. That’s much more precise than spreading synthetic nitrogen, or organic guano, or liquid manure pumped from a holding tank under a hog barn. In short, turning to bacteria for fertilizer holds the potential to stem pollution without famine, food rationing, or more wars over nitrogen.
— source grist.org | Nathanael Johnson | Oct 2, 2018
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