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TODAY Tuesday 19 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Not Dirty, but Bad

One of the benefits of a Roman Catholic education in the late 1950s and early 1960s is that a student absorbed no more science than the average person, which is to say virtually nothing. We learned some Latin, we knew how to diagram sentences, but only an elite few were instructed in any detail about the post-Ptolemaic universe. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 inspired no curriculum changes at St. Augustine's School. I never took courses in physics or calculus or biology, and only passed high school chemistry because of the teacher's devotion to the football team.

These credentials qualify me for the role of Everyman when it comes to appreciating the scientific bases of ecological anxieties. Like John and Mary Citizen, I can't critique the computer modeling on climate change. I am unable to weigh the science of Theo Colborne against the science of Bruce Ames when it comes to the dangers of synthetic estrogen. Don't ask about pesticide residues, fuel cells, or mutant viruses (unless you clearly know absolutely nothing, in which case you might want to settle in for an extended harangue).

I can grasp only three useful eco-scientific principles. One, things are connected, and so you have to examine natural phenomena in their inter-relatedness, as systems. Two, changes in the quantity of an entity will not always bring changes in consequence that can be plotted on a straight line. Three, therefore there can be too much of a good thing.

In global warming, for example, it's not that carbon dioxide is dirty or toxic, it's just that there's too much of it (or too much of it being introduced too quickly for the adaptive capabilities of too many species). Now we're learning that the same thing might be said about nitrogen, which already constitutes almost 80% of the earth's atmosphere. Over the past fifty years, it seems, forms of nitrogen introduced by humans are changing the earth.

The story is well told by Peter Montague in the 31 July issue of Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly (subscribe via erf@rachel.clark.net). It is from Peter that I learn that there's nitrogen and then there's fixed nitrogen. Nitrogen gets fixed when it combines with hydrogen or oxygen and becomes biologically active. Before 1945, virtually all fixed nitrogen on land was produced by lightning (10%) and microbes commonly found on the roots of legumes and algae (90%). Fixed nitrogen promotes growth in certain plants, among them most of the world's cereals, fruits, and vegetables. So humans after 1945 manufactured it and applied it to the soil in the form of chemical fertilizers, to such an extent that more than half of the land's fixed nitrogen is now synthetic. All projections say that the human share will climb steeply as developing countries boost food production to keep pace with population growth.

The bad part is that when you have some forms of life that thrive on nitrogen you're necessarily going to have other forms of life that get muscled aside by the nitrogen-lovers. Take Chesapeake Bay, for example, or any of the other shallow inlets of the Atlantic Ocean. Nitrogen runoffs from farms and lawns feed algae blooms which reduce oxygen available to other marine species, e.g. crabs and fishes. The same dynamic adopts different local manifestations, but the overall tendency is to disrupt ecosystems and endanger biodiversity. Throw in acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming (all exacerbated by nitric oxide) and we got ourselves a serious problem.

At last, however, we seem to have a problem that isn't involved much with the automobile. We can confine our nitrogen worries to the re-invention of modern agriculture and the sustenance of nine billion of our descendants..

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Long before Iron John, Deborah Tannen, and Women from Venus, our own Fred Hapgood was into the business of investigating nature and sex roles. Back in the early '80s, when Ronald Reagan was an unpopular President, Fred produced a great little book entitled "Why Males Exist." Among other reasons, he said, males exist because it can serve the survival of a given species to have a big fraction of its population available to be eaten. Ten years later he wrote "Up The Infinite Corridor," an unauthorized but sympathetic history of MIT. He traced the development of the place from a New England school which taught mechanics and engineering to a global institution that taught conceptualization and theory (some things gained, some things lost).

Anyway, when a guy this smart wants to tell you about the most interesting places on the Internet -- which he does in the Explore With Fred feature of the On The Web section -- well, you owe yourself a look.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/18: Thirty Glorious Years
8/15: We Span the Energy Globe
8/14: Up in Flames
8/13: Environmentalism for Grown-Ups
8/12: Right to No
8/11: Cleavage
8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization
8/04: More Crime, Please

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