The night gardener told me that the man who invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers—a German chemist called Fritz Haber—was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction, namely chlorine gas, which he poured into the trenches of the First World War. His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the poison boiled inside their lungs, drowning them in their own vomit and phlegm, while his fertilizer, which he harvested from the nitrogen present in the air itself, saved hundreds of millions from famine and fuelled our current overpopulation. Today
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