Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Justus von Liebig was now bringing extra nitrogen into the mix from halfway around the world, but since his fertilizers came from natural sources, they, too, were limited by the biological food chain. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the easy pickings on Peruvian islands were already exhausted, and new guano wasn’t being produced as fast as new human babies. The next nitrogen source to be exploited was saltpeter: sodium nitrate crystals that occur in abundance only in very dry environments such as Death Valley, California, and Chile’s Atacama Desert. Then, in 1913, agricultural technology broke through nature’s ceiling. Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who figured out how to grab nitrogen out of the air and feed it to plants in quantities far beyond what von Liebig had ever imagined, were also Germans. Each would be awarded a Nobel Prize for his separate contribution to what became known as the Haber-Bosch process, which has transformed the world like no other. And each would be undone by his German nationality.

  Fritz Haber was born to a Prussian Hasidic Jewish merchant family in 1868. He studied chemistry under Robert Bunsen, whose eponymous burner considerably enhanced laboratory research. In 1905, while teaching at the University of Karlsruhe and researching thermodynamics, Haber discovered that by passing nitrogen and hydrogen over an iron catalyst at 1,000°C, he could produce small amounts of ammonia. Later, adding high pressure, he accomplished this at half the temperature.

  After he published his findings, his process was acquired by the German dye manufacturer BASF. They assigned a young engineer, Carl Bosch, to scale Haber’s ammonia lab experiment up to industrial levels. Bosch spent four years designing double-chambered pipes that wouldn’t explode under pressure, a purified iron catalyst, and blast furnaces that could handle both high pressures and temperatures.

  In 1913, BASF opened its first synthetic ammonia plant. Ammonia was the feedstock for ammonium sulfate—nitrogen fertilizer. The dye manufacturer was now in a completely new business: agro-industry. Within a few years their new artificial nutrient was already making history, as an Allied blockade cut Germany’s access to Chilean saltpeter during World War I. Not only could Germany now keep feeding itself, but ammonium sulfate could be converted into synthetic saltpeter, from which BASF was soon manufacturing gunpowder and explosives. Without the Haber-Bosch process, World War I would have been far shorter.

  Fritz Haber’s discovery of how to synthesize fertilizer was so enormous that a Nobel Prize in chemistry should have been no surprise. But coming in 1918 just as the war ended, it was controversial. During the war, Haber achieved the rank of captain for first proposing, and then directing, Germany’s use of chemical weapons against enemy trenches. When his wife, also a chemist, learned he was responsible for chlorine and mustard gas attacks, she committed suicide. (Later, their chemist son would also take his life, for the same reason.)

  Haber’s knack for developing agricultural chemistry that could be turned to darker purposes didn’t end there. A pesticide fumigant he created to use in grain storage, cyanide-based Zyklon A, was later refined by Nazi chemists into the more potent Zyklon B gas used in extermination camps. Although born Jewish, Haber was not a direct victim of his own invention. For converting to Lutheranism as a student and for his substantial military contribution, he was assured in 1933 that orders from the new Nazi government that cost a dozen Jews in his laboratory their jobs didn’t apply to him. When he quit in protest over their firing, he was shocked to find that his only choice was exile. A patriot who’d had no qualms about applying his genius to chemical warfare, outside of Germany he became a broken man. Within a year he died—en route to Palestine, where Zionist and future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann had invited him to head the research institute that today bears Weizmann’s name.

  Carl Bosch, named director of I. G. Farben, the conglomerate that bought BASF, became one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany. His own Nobel Prize, in 1931, was for his high-pressure chemistry achievements, which also included inventing steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen. Alarmed by the Third Reich, at one point he met with Hitler to try to discourage him from leading their country into another war. The Fürher wasn’t swayed, except to arrange for Bosch’s dismissal from I. G. Farben, which later produced Zyklon B. Despondent and alcoholic, Bosch died in 1940.

  Between the two wars that their work helped to prolong so horribly, Haber and Bosch’s synthetic fertilizer process spread around the world, eventually revolutionizing agriculture. Creating artificial fertilizers requires high temperature and pressure, meaning intense energy inputs (now 1 percent of the world’s total). Because fertilizers also need natural gas for their hydrogen component, they are doubly dependent on fossil fuels. Our supply of artificial nitrogen, therefore, will last only as long as they do. But as long as we have it, artificial nitrogen practically doubles the amount of that plant nutrient that nature can provide, and nearly half of us could not be here without it.

  Before artificial nitrogen fertilizer became widely available, the world’s population was around 2 billion. When we no longer have it—or if we ever decide to stop using it—that may be a number to which our own naturally gravitates.

  iii. Hunger

  In August 1954, twenty-nine-year-old Bill Wasson was reassured that God existed. Raised in a devout, charitable Catholic family in Phoenix, Arizona, he’d never had cause to doubt—until, while preparing to be a missionary, the Benedictines expelled him during his final year of seminary. Emergency surgery to remove half of his thyroid, they ruled, had left him too weak for the priesthood.

  Crushed, he’d returned home. His family convinced their sorely depressed son to enter graduate school. He earned a master’s degree in law and sociology, but remained underweight and moody. A Mexican vacation almost turned disastrous when he relapsed, until a Mexico City doctor determined that he’d been unwittingly overdosing himself with his daily thyroid medication. Suddenly Wasson felt better than he had in years. Grateful to have found a physician he trusted, he stayed and took a position teaching psychology and criminology at the University of the Americas.

  Still, he mourned his lost dream to be a priest to the needy. He finally went to a psychoanalyst, who was also a Catholic priest. “You’re not crazy,” he told Wasson. Instead of psychotherapy, he prescribed a meeting with the new bishop of Cuernavaca, an hour south of Mexico City. In his first year, 1953, Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo had already scandalized wealthy parishioners, and endeared himself to the poor, by adding street mariachis to the cathedral’s Sunday Mass. After two hours of grilling the gangly, fair-haired American, he told Wasson to get ready. “In four months, I’m ordaining you.”

  He gave him Tepetates, the Cuernavaca marketplace church. Wasson loved it. He turned half his quarters into a free clinic and soup kitchen. When a thief who’d been pilfering the poor box turned out to be a homeless orphan, he refused to let the police jail him. “He’s not a criminal,” Wasson said. “He’s just hungry.”

  Instead, he took the boy in. The next day came a knock on his door. It was the police, with eight more orphans from their lockup. “Since you think they’re just innocent waifs, you can have these, too.”

  Wasson scrambled fast. By that night, he’d found a vacant beer warehouse they could all sleep in. The word soon got around: a gringo priest was taking in abandoned boys. Within a month, he had thirty. Within three months, eighty-three. He was amazed that there were so many out there. He wanted to find them all.

  In 1954, Mexico’s population had just passed 25 million. Surging twice as fast as the planet’s population, it would more than quadruple in just the next half-century. Many of his boys, Wasson soon learned, had more than ten siblings. Some even had more than twenty, if they counted half-siblings in casas chicas—the families their fathers kept on the side. When women died—all too often from the exhaustion of raising so many, mainly by themselves—men frequently disappeared.

  One night he returned to find the boys huddled around his radio, listening to reports of a hurricane
in Veracruz. Orphaned children were reported wandering the flooded streets. “Padre, you have to go save them,” they insisted.

  They were living on donated food, and on blankets on the floor. “We barely have enough beans and tortillas and blankets for ourselves—” he started to protest.

  But they’d already decided. “We’ll share.”

  He came back with thirty more. Fortunately, people who’d learned what he was doing, and who kept telling him he couldn’t keep taking them all, also kept helping him find food and money when he ignored them. When he realized that several new boys from the ravaged Gulf Coast were worrying about brothers they’d left behind, he returned to find them. His family numbered nearly two hundred when the bishop’s secretary quit her job to help him, because the boys had sisters, too.

  By 1975, Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, Our Little Brothers and Sisters, population twelve hundred, was the biggest orphanage in the world. Mexico City was the biggest city in the world, and Mexico itself, population 60 million, was the planet’s fastest-growing country—so fast that the government that year defied the Catholic Church and began a national family-planning program. Mule-back riders were soon climbing mountains and descending canyons, their polystyrene saddlebags bearing condoms and birth control pills—and also polio and diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccines. Women, it turned out, were willing to hike to a village clinic for pills to avoid pregnancy as long as their living children would be vaccinated against diseases that might otherwise kill them.

  Within a decade, Mexico’s doubling rate slowed from every fifteen years to every twenty-four years. Had it not continued to lower, theoretically by the twenty-second century there might have been a billion Mexicans—a physical impossibility that long before would have overwhelmed both its environment and whatever fence its neighbor to the north might have built to keep them out. Today, Mexico’s average family is just 2.2 children: almost replacement rate. Even so, the sheer momentum of population growth means Mexico will keep growing in coming decades, as the ones already born add children of their own.

  Father Bill Wasson already had more than he could feed. More than half the time he was off raising funds to keep them alive, clothed, and schooled. In the late 1970s, he moved his huge family south of Cuernavaca to a donated former sugarcane hacienda that Emiliano Zapata’s troops had sacked during the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The plan was to grow enough corn, beans, and vegetables to feed all the children. To assist came Dr. Edwin Wellhausen, recently retired from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT.2 Founded by the Rockefeller Foundation near the famous Teotihuacán pyramids northeast of Mexico City, CIMMYT is considered today the birthplace of the so-called Green Revolution. Its late director, Dr. Norman Borlaug, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for developing a disease-resistant, high-yield strain of dwarf wheat (dwarf, because normal wheat plants would fall over from the weight of the extra grains Borlaug’s genetically selected strains produced).

  Edwin Wellhausen was CIMMYT’s corn-breeding specialist. He had developed a high-lysine amino acid corn variety that would significantly raise protein levels in the tortillas that the Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos children ate at every meal. A tall, thin, bespectacled man in a straw sombrero, Wellhausen arrived with a trailer truck loaded with hundreds of white sacks. Some contained donated seed. Others were ammonium nitrate and urea: nitrogen fertilizers. The rest were pesticides and fungicides: Green Revolution laboratory-bred hybrids, forced quickly through generations to emphasize certain desired traits, lacked resistance to various bugs that grains like corn, a native to Mexico, had acquired over thousands of years of evolution.

  By now, Father Wasson had a sizable staff, including many of his grown children who were helping to raise and teach the next generation of Little Brothers and Sisters. The appearance of all these chemicals, several of them poisonous, provoked a discussion about potential threats to the children and to the soils of their donated hacienda. Another concern was cost. This truckload was a gift, but after a quarter-century, the orphanage had learned that an act of charity rarely keeps giving forever.

  It was a short discussion. They had too many mouths to feed. They would worry about it later.

  At one point during the twenty-five-mile drive from Mexico City to CIMMYT, the highway briefly passes through something startling: empty land. The bleak salt marsh is what remains of Lago Texcoco, the largest of five lakes that filled this high basin in central Mexico when Hernán Cortez’s Spanish troops first saw it. The Aztec capital, called Tenochtitlán, was on an island, connected to the shore by causeways. After the conquest, the Spaniards drained the lakes; eventually, the basin refilled and overflowed—with people. Today, 24 million live in one of the Earth’s greatest expanses of continuous concrete and asphalt, covering Mexico’s Distrito Federal and parts of five surrounding states. The sheer weight of the city atop its overpumped aquifer has sunk it so low that sewage canals no longer flow outward. Especially when it rains, Mexico City is in danger of drowning in its own wastes, requiring construction of the world’s longest sewer pipe: twenty-three feet across and thirty-seven miles long, tunneling nearly five hundred feet down to drain into a valley below.

  Past the gray thorn scrub of the dry lake bed and some low hills composed entirely of automobile carcasses, urbanity resumes until the road reaches fields of wheat and maize surrounding the agricultural research center. A billboard near the entrance shows Norman Borlaug, who died in 2009 at ninety-five, in khaki shirt and pants, waist-high in dwarf wheat, notebook in hand. His many international awards are noted above the green and white CIMMYT logo, including the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Only five years earlier, Borlaug and his team had put the hybrids they’d developed in Mexico to the test in India and Pakistan. Both were nearing famine, despite massive grain imports from the United States. By 1970, harvests in both countries doubled and imminent disaster was averted. Green Revolution crops and breeding techniques began to spread around the world. In 2007, the United States awarded Borlaug its Congressional Gold Medal for having saved more lives than anyone in history.

  He was also widely credited for having scuttled the dour predictions of Thomas Robert Malthus, a British economist and Anglican vicar. Malthus’s 1798 magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, warned that population growth would always outstrip food availability. This, Malthus concluded, doomed the masses to misery as their burgeoning numbers divided ever further what little pie was allotted to them. Many scientists, most notably Charles Darwin, were directly influenced by his work. Most economists, however, bridled at the suggestion that growth—especially, in Malthus’s time, growth of the labor force—was anything but wonderful. Malthus’s pronouncements seemed so inherently dismal, so contrary to the natural impulse to add more life to the world, that his scholarly essay became universally notorious. More than two centuries later, both its unsettling power and notoriety continue, and his name has entered the language, usually as a pejorative: Malthusian.

  In 1968, Malthus’s ominous caveat was resurrected by a Stanford University ecologist, Paul Ehrlich, in a book titled The Population Bomb. By then, we had reached 3.5 billion—half of today’s count. Ehrlich, an entomologist who studied population dynamics in butterflies, had begun to lecture and write about human population following a trip to India with his wife and collaborator, Anne. Their book3 predicted widespread famines and accompanying disasters, beginning in the 1970s.

  The year The Population Bomb appeared was also the same year that humans first got far enough away from Earth to turn around and take its picture. A photograph by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders of the Earth rising over the moon’s horizon, so vividly alive compared to the surrounding black void, helped ignite a popular environmental movement that had been smoldering since Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal book on pesticides sixteen years earlier. The following year, the United Nations declared the first Earth Day. By 1970, Earth Day was a worldwide movement.

 
With the Ehrlich book, population joined pesticides and pollution as a headliner on the environmental agenda. The Population Bomb sold millions of copies. In the United States, Paul Ehrlich became a celebrity, appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than twenty times. Like Malthus’s name, his book’s title entered and remains in the popular vernacular in many languages—even after its most urgent argument apparently proved wrong. The famines that it predicted would leave hundreds of millions Asians dead within a decade never happened. The Ehrlichs had not foreseen Norman Borlaug’s astonishing Green Revolutionary boost to the world’s food supply.

  In the decades that followed, Ehrlich’s and Borlaug’s names became routinely linked, usually by the former’s detractors. “Ehrlich was sure that ‘the battle to feed humanity is over.’ He insisted that India would be unable to provide sustenance for the two-hundred-million-person growth in its population by 1980,” wrote Duke University engineering professor Daniel Vallero in a 2007 textbook titled Biomedical Ethics for Engineers. “He was wrong—thanks to biotechnologists like Norman Borlaug.” This was a typical jeer: While the doomsayer Ehrlich prophesized starvation in India and Pakistan, Borlaug was bringing both countries to self-sufficiency in wheat production by the mid-1970s.

  Through “technical optimism,” Vallero added, “engineers ‘mess up’ the Malthusian curve by finding ways to accomplish this (e.g., Borlaug spoiling Ehrlich’s predictions).” This was a typical conclusion: by enabling millions more to eat and live, Norman Borlaug had refuted Ehrlich and Malthus’s panic-mongering about overpopulation.