The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

by Thomas Hager

Finally, questions remain about how the flood of Haber-Bosch nitrogen is affecting human agriculture and global populations. The easy availability of synthetic fertilizer has resulted in an increase in massive-scale monoculture farming, with the additional corn and other grains making possible huge animal factories. Haber-Bosch is not the only reason for our current agricultural system—increasing mechanization and advances in plant genetics are important as well—but it plays a major role. Most humans have moved past the old traditional methods of crop rotation and manuring, severed the old ties between crops and domestic animals, increased average farm sizes and decreased crop varieties. These developments offer terrific benefits, feeding many more people much better than our ancestors thought possible—but they also carry clear risks for soil quality, plant disease, and decreased diversity. EVERY SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY is two-edged. We have been so successful at meeting Sir William Crookes’s challenge that humans now threaten to overrun the earth, just as nitrogen-eating algae and water plants overrun ponds and seas. Thanks to our recent access to endless fertilizer and the development of hardy, high-yield varieties of rice and wheat (the so-called Green Revolution of the late twentieth century) we are confronted with an abundance of food unprecedented in human history. Thomas Malthus has been confounded. Ours is an age marked not by mass starvation but by the easy availabil...