A book review in the Washington Post book section yesterday caught my attention because of the way it recognized the incredible marriage of good and evil, dream and nightmare, intent and outcome....the dialectic in action.
The Alchemy of Air is a book chronicaling the careers of the two men on whom much of the artific of modern industrial agriculture is built: Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who won Nobel Prizes for their invention of a process of extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere (where it is abundant) and making it available for application to crop lands.
All this did not turn out well. In an unusual turn, the reviewer actually wishes the biographer had written more, not less!
In what is a truism to organic growers (of which I am one) the Haber-Bosch process is indeed the alchemy of air, and the witches brew, in that it first separated agriculture from natural (read: land based) processes and made it possible for food production to be industrialized, as Haber and Bosch made it possible for fertilizer production to be industrialized. That their later careers involved production of explosives and poison gases for war use is not that much a stretch for those of us who believe that the the alienation from basic natural processes is a slippery slope, and that when headed downhill one needs to keep one's eyes open and hands on the wheel lest we end up in a different country than that in which we were born....I think I am going to have to check out this book!
