Foreword
Everywhere and invisible, vital and toxic: Justus Liebig had the idea in the 1840s and
experimented with how to bring nitrogen from the air into the soil in a useful and
profitable way. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch succeeded in doing so at the beginning
of the twentieth century, convert the nitrogen into ammonia and thus into nitrogen
that can be used by plants. Liebig’s drive was to avoid starvation in a growing world
population that increasingly lived in cities. The corresponding increase in food was
his antidote, while Georg Büchner, who also briefly stayed in Gießen, declared war
on the palaces in the “Hessischer Landbote” and put the peasant revolution on the
agenda. In the meantime, the “Green Revolution”, which was initiated with the
Haber–Bosch process, has won. Just a few years ago, the United Nations believed it
could finally remove the problem of hunger from the list of the greatest concerns for
mankind. It cannot be deleted because the processing of nitrogen and the consequential problems that this has caused have caused massive ecological damage which
also threatens the food supply. Humanity has also reached planetary boundaries in
this area of scientific and technical progress and must take stock.
The blessing and the curse already existed in the First World War, when
ammonia was also used to produce tons of deadly explosives. A problem then
became especially the expansion of the nitrogen quantities in the circuits, exacerbated by the NOx problem, the burning of fossil and renewable raw materials.
Nitrate in the groundwater and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is familiar to every
layperson, the use of synthetic fertilizers has to be drastically restricted. And, there
we are almost back to Liebig’s initial problem: how to feed a still growing population, enriched by the existence of an important question, how to do it in a
sustainable and healthy way. There are technical compensation options, national
and European regulatory authorities exist, structures and organizational forms of
agricultural production that have become anachronistic and are kept alive by strong
but short-sighted lobby groups.
The nitrogen problem has long since reached planetary proportions and also
requires transnational, multilateral interventions. It is at the crossroads of almost all
environmental damage (water and air quality, greenhouse gases and species
extinction, ozone) and affects almost all of the United Nations’ sustainability goals.
v
Everywhere and invisible, vital and toxic: Justus Liebig had the idea in the 1840s and
experimented with how to bring nitrogen from the air into the soil in a useful and
profitable way. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch succeeded in doing so at the beginning
of the twentieth century, convert the nitrogen into ammonia and thus into nitrogen
that can be used by plants. Liebig’s drive was to avoid starvation in a growing world
population that increasingly lived in cities. The corresponding increase in food was
his antidote, while Georg Büchner, who also briefly stayed in Gießen, declared war
on the palaces in the “Hessischer Landbote” and put the peasant revolution on the
agenda. In the meantime, the “Green Revolution”, which was initiated with the
Haber–Bosch process, has won. Just a few years ago, the United Nations believed it
could finally remove the problem of hunger from the list of the greatest concerns for
mankind. It cannot be deleted because the processing of nitrogen and the consequential problems that this has caused have caused massive ecological damage which
also threatens the food supply. Humanity has also reached planetary boundaries in
this area of scientific and technical progress and must take stock.
The blessing and the curse already existed in the First World War, when
ammonia was also used to produce tons of deadly explosives. A problem then
became especially the expansion of the nitrogen quantities in the circuits, exacerbated by the NOx problem, the burning of fossil and renewable raw materials.
Nitrate in the groundwater and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is familiar to every
layperson, the use of synthetic fertilizers has to be drastically restricted. And, there
we are almost back to Liebig’s initial problem: how to feed a still growing population, enriched by the existence of an important question, how to do it in a
sustainable and healthy way. There are technical compensation options, national
and European regulatory authorities exist, structures and organizational forms of
agricultural production that have become anachronistic and are kept alive by strong
but short-sighted lobby groups.
The nitrogen problem has long since reached planetary proportions and also
requires transnational, multilateral interventions. It is at the crossroads of almost all
environmental damage (water and air quality, greenhouse gases and species
extinction, ozone) and affects almost all of the United Nations’ sustainability goals.
v