Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
This pretty well sums up the main environmental arguments against the use of chemical
fertilizers. Nor does Smil hide the fact that Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch, the
men who around 1910 developed the process which a century later is still used for extract-
ing nitrogen from the atmosphere, were all highly compromised characters.
Haber, who invented the process, was one of 93 scientists, including three future Nobel
prize-winners, who in 1914 signed Ludwig Fulda's pro-war manifesto
To The Civilized
World
, which claimed that 'were it not for German militarism, German civilization would
long since have been extirpated'. (Albert Einstein's pacifist proclamation attracted just four
signatures.) Haber's support for the war effort was not altogether surprising given that syn-
thetic nitrogen was more immediately useful for the production of explosives than for the
culture of wheat. Haber went on to develop chlorine gas weaponry - although it was clearly
outlawed by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 - and was directly responsible for
the fatal gassing of 5,000 French troops at Ypres on 22 April 1915. Two weeks later Haber
was preparing to leave Berlin to launch more gas attacks on the Eastern front when his wife
Clara, also a scientist, shot herself through the heart with his revolver. No one knows why,
but one can hazard a guess. After her suicide, Haber left for the Russian front, and later be-
came head of the Chemical Warfare Service. His downfall came when the Nazis discovered
he was a Jew: he was removed from his post, and died in 1934, too early to see the gas he
developed used against his own people in the concentration camps.
Carl Bosch, the engineer who put Haber's discovery into practice, was less overtly mil-
itaristic, and was actively opposed to the rise of fascism. Nonetheless, as chairman of the
chemical conglomerate I G Farben, he assisted the German war effort by developing a pro-
cess for producing a petrol substitute from Germany's inferior coal - which after 1944
provided the only source of German fuel. Bosch died in 1940, depressed and on a diet of
painkillers and alcohol. His protégé, Carl Krauch, who had assisted in the development of
synthetic nitrogen, was now chairman of I G Farben. Reversing an earlier company de-
cision, Krauch sanctioned the building of a synthetic rubber plant, 'not only impelling the
selection of a site near Auschwitz, but also instigating the use of concentration camp in-
mates as construction workers'.
As Smil acknowledges, synthetic nitrogen was a child of the military industrial complex
- as was the hydroelectric manufacture of aluminium in the 1940s ('making Flying Fort-
resses for Uncle Sam' in Woody Guthrie's words), and a few years later the development
of nuclear energy. In the 1930s and during the war, IG Farben also developed the use of or-
ganophosphate nerve gases such as Sarin, and the technology was adopted by US compan-
ies after the war to make pesticides. This is not a very encouraging pedigree, but it doesn't
prevent Smil from concluding that the industrial synthesis of nitrogen is the 'single most
important change affecting the world's population' in the 20th century.
The reasoning behind this accolade is best expressed in one particular graph, on page
147 of Smil's book. In the early 1960s China's population was about 660 million, its con-
