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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Food Security
  • Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2006 11:29:27 EST



>
> I saw this article on another list, and thought that since we were
> discussing food and hunger, it would be appropriate here, too.
>

Extremely well done article, Bev. The timeline is especially good. We have
been burning the resource candle at both ends and several places in the
middle. The era of the "Green Revolution" scarcely 35 years old, within the
lifetime of almost everyone on this list, and in that time we have depleated
the
very resources that put us in this state at an ever accelerating pace.

Yet the cornucopians, even when they fully face the facts outlined in the
article, always come back with, "Oh, sure if we continue as we have been
we'll
all starve, but we'll come up with something. After all, we put a man on the
moon!"



This same topic is on several other fora in which I participate and I wrote
this along those lines on one of them:



=============

"Reistance was Futile"



Was?? Yes, was. You were assimilated long ago. In fact, likely as not, you
are third or fourth generation Borg by now.



You are an artificial organism, although you mightn’t think it. You were made
by machines.



You see, 100 years ago the world’s population was about 1.6 billion and
unlikely to get much higher left to its own devices. Any number of things
might
limit human population, available water, arable land, amount of carbon
available,
amount of phosphorous available, etc. The thing that we ran up against about
100 years ago was available nitrogen. Although nitrogen is the most abundant
gas in the atmosphere, it is doggedly reluctant to combine to form compounds.
A
little of it is fixed (combines with other elements, notably hydrogen to form
ammonia) by lightening but for the past several hundred millions of years
most nitrogen was fixed by bacteria.



Once atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by bacteria, it can be absorbed by plants
and makes its way up the food chain where some of it eventually goes toward
producing human beings. As plants and animals die, some of the nitrogen (in
the
form of amino acids) is recycled by a marvelous chain of microorganisms. Some
take up the organic nitrogen and give off nitrites, others take up the
nitrites and give off nitrates, and then the plants absorb the nitrates and
the cycle
continues. But most is given off as atmospheric nitrogen or methane and thus
is lost to the biomass and must be continually replaced by the action of the
nitrogen fixing bacteria.



The amount of nitrogen that can be fixed by bacteria (and a few other
microorganisms) places a limit on how many human beings there can be on the
earth.
There’s no close agreement as to how many people that is, but some guess as
low
as 500 million. Just before the turn of the previous century agriculture was
greatly expanded by using mined fossil nitrates (especially from Chile) to
promote more plant growth and make more nitrogen available to make human
beings.



It might do well to note here that the idea behind mining fossil nitrates was
not to make more human beings but rather to make hungry human beings into
well fed ones. It didn’t work out that way, instead it made still more hungry
human beings. This is a sad dance that has been going on for a century now.
Every
“advance” in agriculture intended to feed the hungry has resulted only in
making a greater number of hungry.



Recognizing that the world now had a great many more hungry people and that
there was a limit to the amount of fossil nitrates to be had, a German
physicist, Fritz Haber developed a process to fix nitrogen by subjecting
atmospheric
nitrogen and hydrogen to very high temperatures and pressures to form
ammonia.
Another German physicist, Carl Bosch, developed a feasible industrial
apparatus based on the Haber’s model.



Mother Nature is not mocked with impunity. Much to Haber’s chagrin his
discovery was put to sinister use. At that time a nation contemplating going
to war
first assessed its supply of nitrates, potassium nitrate especially, in order
to insure its ability to make gunpowder and other explosives. The scarcity of
nitrates not only limited human population but also limited its ability to
blow each other up. With the Haber-Bosch process, not only could agricultural
fertilizer be made at will, so could explosives. Thus the rise of Nazi
militarism
in Germany was greatly facilitated by Haber’s discovery. If that were not
enough of a burden for Haber to bear, he also invented an insecticide he
called
the Cyclone. It was used during the first world war to manufacture military
poison gas and so its manufacture was banned after the war by international
agreement. He modified the formula to comply with the ban and called it the
B-Cyclone. Haber was Jewish and had to flee Germany in the 1930’s. Yet you
might now
recognize his infamous product; the German word for cyclone is Zyclon and it
was Haber’s invention, Zyclon-B, that gassed to death hundreds of thousands
in
the Nazi concentration camps.



Chemical fertilizers made by the Haber-Bosch process account for nearly all
the nitrogen that occurs in our food and therefore in our bodies. Unless you
were raised by neo-hippie parents on some remote homestead and ate only hand
grown biodynamic food, in a real sense you were manufactured by machines
using an
industrial process to fix the nitrogen of which you are composed.



Resistance was futile.



Now, the thing is this: the Haber-Bosch process uses natural gas to generate
the heat and pressure necessary to fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. The
world has six billion people walking around on it because they (or at least
their nitrogen) was manufactured from natural gas. And like oil, natural gas
is
a finite resource. Many say it is about to peak and others say it already has
peaked. The world is sucking down its remaining reserves of natural gas at an
alarming rate. The United States gets a great deal of its natural gas from
Canada and although the cornucopians say that there is a 25 year supply still
available, realists say it is closer to four or five years. Unimaginable
quantities of natural gas are being used to refine oil sands and oil shale
into
gasoline and even greater quantities go toward heating all those cavernous
McMansions built over the last half a decade 40% of which stand empty.



Once the natural gas is exhausted, or just becomes prohibitively scarce,
there will not be enough fixed nitrogen available to sustain the six billion
units
of the Borg-like nightmare we have created.



Resistance will be futile.




















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