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| From: | Tanksleyd | 1/13/2009 7:44 am |
| To: | ALL |
(1 of 1) | | | | 46.1 | |
| What attracted me to The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager was my mis-trust of science. The book is about how the industrialist Carl Bosch and scientist Fritz Haber created a process to pull "formulated" nitrogen out of the air thus providing a fertilizer that exponentially increased the output of farms around the world and in strong theory prevented worldwide starvation. The writing was sufficient but not "poetic". When I sought out the book at the library, which only has one copy, I was hoping it would explain the damage done to the global "nitrogen cycle". While the book dedicated a half of a chapter to these consequences, it did so without conviction, listing these consequences (large nitrogen fed algae fields in the oceans starving the water of oxygen being one of these consequences) as little more than theory. What was most insightful about this book was how this nitrogen process while enriching it's inventors with money did not give them a complete satisfaction in their lives. Fritz Haber, a German Jew, lived to see the rise of Hitler and the end of his dreams of Jews being completely accepted. While for Carl Bosch his dream of the "Next Big Thing", namely synthetic gasoline (via coal), was washed away with the discovery of an oil field in Oklahoma. Beyond these human and ecological insights though is a detailed description of a mechanism that is a key part of our modern civilization and perhaps a good example of how fragile we are on this planet earth. |
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