Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> 
> 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.