Practical Doomsday

16 Nourishment

It’s a fascinating and little-known fact that about half of all the nitrogen in our bodies comes not from biological sources, but from the industrial Haber-Bosch process, which combines atmospheric gases with hydrogen to produce ammonia; the ammonia, in turn, serves as the feedstock for synthetic fertilizers used to grow much of our food.¹

Because nitrogen-containing molecules are essential to all life, and because the element can’t be absorbed from air by plants or animals, the Haber-Bosch process can be seen as one of humanity’s greatest triumphs: it removed a fundamental agricultural bottleneck and allowed us to significantly ...