Thomas Hager

I live in a college town. Like many college towns, mine is both enviably liveable and decidedly liberal. But even here, among a highly educated populace, I find that most people I talk with (outside of the university's scientists) have a hole in their understanding of modern culture: They know next to nothing about science. They do not know where or when it started. They do not know how it is done. They do not know who sets its priorities, or how it is paid for, or the full impact it has on our society.

In place of understanding, many people adopt fantasies about science. Call it the "Dr. Frankenstein" default: Scientists wield great power without great care. Scientists act more like computers than people. Scientists create monsters.

I know enough about the history of science to know that the lives of scientists and the effects science has on our world are much more nuanced, complex, interesting -- and far more important, often in unexpected ways -- than most people realize.

Science is an art, a craft, a business, a tool, an obsession, a route to fame and riches, a form of creativity, an expression of power. In short, it is a very human activity. And like any human activity -- business, art, leisure, religion, political activism, whatever -- it draws both good and bad people, and offers both great benefits and enormous dangers. The trick is to understand enough about it to use it wisely.

A few thoughts about why we're awash in food instead of starving to death (this grew out of research for my next book, The Alchemy of Air.)


Okay – who’s making us fat?

I don’t mean that we should try to wriggle out of personal responsibility – we are what we eat, folks, and nobody’s making us take seconds.

But here’s the puzzle: Where’s all the food coming from? Everything I ever read predicted that the world should be starving about now.

Global famine makes perfect sense. As the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus pointed out back in the 1700s, fast-growing populations outstrip their food supply. Do the math: population grows exponentially (two become four, four become eight, etc.) while food production grows, well, in fields, adding a few more acres, eking out a few more bushels, hoping for good weather, adding production a bit at a time. Population grows fast, food grows slow. The logical result, Malthus pointed out, is too many mouths with too little to eat.

I grew up a believer, reading books like The Population Bomb, joining groups like Zero Population Growth, and sharing a basic understanding (with millions of others) that the mushrooming number of humans on the planet meant that we were going to suffer mass starvation. Soon.

It did not happen as quickly as Malthus thought because of the opening of the vast grain-growing plains of the American West and the Russian steppes. But those were just temporary delays in the inevitable. In 1898 the physicist Sir William Crookes, then-head of Britain's leading scientific association, noted that there were no more vast plains to put under the plow and made worldwide headlines by trumpeting the coming starvation of the civilized world, starting no later than the 1940s.

What happened? Instead of running out of food, we invented antibiotics, lowered infant death rates, and extended our average lifespans. Our global population shot up at an ever more dizzying rate.

Surely now Malthus would be proven right. In the 1960s, with the population bomb ticking along, Paul Ehrlich and a new generation of eco-activists took up the cry: Mass famine was coming soon to a nation near you. This time it was supposed to start in India in the mid-1970s.

No again. Instead, everywhere you look, from Buffalo to Brussels to Beijing, it’s ballooning bellies. India is not starving; it is suffering an epidemic of fat-related diabetes. Obesity is on the rise in virtually every developed nation and many less-developed nations from Europe, Asia, and North America to South Africa and Latin America. The shocker for me was a recent academic study asserting that there are now more overweight people in the world than hungry ones.

One gung-ho expert calls it an "insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity . . . now engulfing the entire world."

Who -- or what -- is to blame? All the usual suspects are being trotted out: fast food, trans fat, high sugar, low exercise, television, weird blood molecules, computer potatoes (like couch potatoes only with a game controller in their hands), or that seemingly hardwired human instinct for sitting around eating salty, crunchy, sweet snacks instead of doing hard physical work.

But those are side issues. The heart of the problem is this:

Malthus was wrong. He was not wrong about population growth. He was wrong about food.

Food production has not only kept up with population growth, it has outstripped it. On average, humans are consuming more calories per person per day now than they were in Crookes' time a century ago, despite the fact that total population has quadrupled.

We are awash in food, and lots of food means cheap food, and cheap food means plenty of easily available, high-calorie fast food. We grow seas of grains that we fry in lakes of fat and frost with avalanches of sugar. We slaughter nations of cattle. We enjoy an abundance undreamed of a century ago.

Who unplugged the cornucopia? What is making it possible for us to buy cheap hamburgers by the bag and guzzle cheap, high-calorie soda by the gallon when we're supposed to be starving?

The answer is: a couple of guys you never heard of.

Back around the time Warren Harding was president these two -- a German Jewish genius and a future tycoon -- figured out a little trick that humans have been dining out on ever since.

They discovered how to make bread out of air.

That’s right. That’s what they called back in 1910 when Fritz Haber finally perfected the dangerous, complex chemistry needed to grab nitrogen out of the air (air is 80 percent nitrogen) and Carl Bosch, a young chemist, figured out how to cheaply turn that nitrogen into tons of synthetic fertilizer, the kind you get in a bag down at the local garden store. They flooded the world with fertilizer. The results were a couple of Nobel Prizes and the creation of the world's largest chemical company (the infamous IG Farben, which Bosch headed).

Today, Haber-Bosch factories the size of small cities, much refined and improved, are humming around the world, burning 1 percent of all the energy on earth, breathing in hundreds of thousand of tons of air, and pumping out hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizer that enriches the fields that grow the crops that become the sugars and oils and cattle that are cooked into the burritos and pizzas and snack cakes that make us fat.

If you doubt the importance of the work of these two scientists, consider that if all Haber-Bosch plants were shut down today, more than two billion people would starve to death within the next few years. Or that half the nitrogen in your body is synthetic, the product of one of their factories.

The good news is that the Haber-Bosch discovery (along with the “Green Revolution” of higher-yield grain types developed in the late twentieth century) has allowed humanity to sidestep the Malthusian trap.

The bad news is that starvation has not gone away. People still starve to death, tragically, in isolated pockets of the world. But the problem is not a lack of food to feed them; the problem is that the food cannot be moved quickly enough to where it is needed. Starvation today results almost always from distribution slowdowns due to local wars or government interference.

The really bad news is that the Haber-Bosch machines are flooding the world with fertilizer nitrogen, essentially doubling the amount of the element available to living things. This global injection of nitrogen adds up to a massive disruption of ecosystems, without a lot of monitoring or control. There is so much fixed nitrogen in the air now that rain in many places acts as a fertilizer, polluting rivers, throwing off the delicate nutrient balance in forests and tundra, and forming dead zones in oceans and lakes.

But the best news for humans is this: If everything goes right, we are not going to suffer global famine. Ever.

According to the UN, some time in the next few decades birth rates worldwide will dip below replacement levels. What that means is that the mushrooming increase in world population will begin to slow, then grind to a halt after the Babyboomers and the Baby Boomlet, their kids, die off. The human tide will crest, then ebb. Thanks to that trend, and Haber-Bosch (and the Green Revolution), it is within humanity’s grasp to avoid mass starvation forever.