WHAT'S FEATURE SO BAD • BUILT ABOUT FROM • NITROGEN SCRATCH
nitrogen? W H AT ’ S S O B A D A B O U T
The most abundant element on Earth does a whole lot of good. Except when there’s too much of it and it’s in the wrong place. So how do we solve a problem like nitrogen? Story by Leslie Garrett Photos by Claire Callagy
7
N Nitrogen 14.007
T
here was a time when this Canadian was forced by her high school chemistry teacher to memorize the entire periodic table of elements. Nitrogen was easy. It came early, at No. 7. It was the most abundant element on Earth, our teacher told us, crucial to life, found in soils and plants, in our water, in our air. And, some classmate snickered and said under his breath, in our pee. At that point in the early 1980s, there was no U.N. International Nitrogen Management System to tackle the problem of global nitrogen pollution. That
wouldn’t happen until December 2016. While a very few scientists began sounding the alarm about the impact of nitrogen on coastal water systems in the early 20th century, and the chorus grew in size and volume in the ’80s and ’90s, according to a scientific paper pub lished in 2006, most scientists were debating whether phosphorus or carbon was the larger culprit. In the meantime, the world continued to blithely douse farmland with fertilizers made largely of nitrogen, and flush our urine, with its 10 percent nitrogen, into ponds and rivers and lakes and oceans. Continued on page 22
M A R T H A’ S V I N E YA R D / S P R I N G 2 0 2 1
21
