A mindset transformed the way we grow food. It started in the UK in the nineteenth century when a handful of clever chemists thought they figured out that soil health and thus plant growth could be determined and manipulated with three elements: N, P, K, or nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Europe started importing vast, I am talking vaaaast, amounts of guano (bat shit) from these magical bat shit mountains on the coast of Peru and Chile. Most bat shit around the world falls on the ground and its nutrients (its super high in nitrogen) get integrated back into the current ecosystem. Lame. On this 200 mile strip of coast the conditions were such that the bat shit just accumulated over millennia. This allowed greedy colonizers to take it back to their farmers to put as many fat fingered blond children on this planet as possible.
Low and behold Europe got hooked on that shit and kept increasing their imports. They extracted it with exploited local laborers who occasionally died in the process. Soon there were no more shit mountains to feed the growing and industrializing Europe. Instead of going to guano rehab meetings, Europe turned to a harder drug: oil. Enter stage left Fritz Haber. In 1909 Haber invented a process to “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants crave. See, the plants that industrial nations care about do not have a way of taking nitrogen from the atmosphere, where it is in abundance, so they take it from the soil, where it will quickly be depleted. If you combine atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen using electricity and intense heat, you get the source of today’s chemical fertilizers. Haber basically simulated a lightning strike, which naturally fixes nitrogen and hydrogen together, creating a shower of fertility during a thunderstorm. Today’s process fixes nitrogen from the air, composed of 80 percent nitrogen, with hydrogen from the hydrocarbon chains found in petroleum.
Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, thinks this guy Haber created the single most important contribution to twentieth century societies. Haber is unknown today probably because he started rolling with the wrong crowd. He got into using nitrogen fixing to make lethal chemical compounds that the Germans used in WWI, and then the Nazis used in concentration camps. He was responsible for chemical warfare! His wife shot herself, he had to flee Germany because he was Jewish, and he died a miserable man in a hotel in Switzerland. It is so disturbing that the same process that allows us to eat cheap food was a tool for genocide. Take a moment…Ugh. At the same time, Smil estimates that two in five people (more than 2.5 billion people!) are alive today because of the food energy produced with the help of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. We can live without the automobile, the computer, and the internet, but we literally would not be alive without this invention, called the Haber-Bosch process because it was commercialized by Bosch. Post WWII global population growth has not been a natural acceleration. It has been powered by the fossil fuels that create synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
The mindset here is that we have the power to isolate the essential ingredients that create a “desirable” process and synthesize them with whatever we have a lot of. “I saw a ton of bat shit on the beach, maybe we could use that!” Forty years later it was, “Hey those big black pools ancient dead plants that are heating our homes might work!” Using these ingredients was truly clever, and there was a lot of bat shit and underground oil, but using every last bat turd should have been a lesson! Growth has limits. And then farmers needed to increase their fertilizer inputs to achieve the same yields and the captains of industry did not stop and think. The world’s natural processes operate as connected systems. If humans change one part of the system, the system reacts. In a local system, pumping petrochemicals into the soil to boost yields changes the food and the ecosystem. In the global system, putting 9 billion people on the planet will have enormous consequences.
The major crisis here is that as the oil runs out, so does the fertilizer, and thus the food. The resources needed to feed, shelter, clothe, and power the current human population is already destroying the earth’s life support systems. Current projections launch today’s more than 6 billion people to between 8 and 9 billion by 2050. A more nuanced look at human consumption patterns reveals that wealthy nations are consuming far more per capita than peripheral nations. The majority of the world’s poorest two-thirds are consuming resources at locally and globally sustainable levels. The wealthiest third is consuming two thirds of the resources. Herein lies the imperative of Descent Culture. As members of the superlative nation in all sorts of consumption categories we must first conserve, what many call the low-hanging-fruit of our future ecologically responsible economy, and develop creative solutions for localizing and cycling our resources.
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