The Haber Effect: III

What distinguishes Fritz Haber’s work from that of Einstein is that the implementation or application of the idea, far from being seen as a human tragedy, is celebrated as a great victory. A recent example of this celebratory tone was published in the New York Times on Saturday’s Op/Ed page (10/14). In a piece by John Tierney titled “The Kids Are All Right,” Tierney ridiculed those who, in the 1960s, tried to warn the world of the dangers of over-population. Now, while the global population has increased from 3.5 billion in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, to its current figure of 6.5 billion, Tierney apparently sees no crisis. Tierney smugly points out that Ehrlich et al. were in error in predicting food riots in the streets within decades of their predictions. We have, by this index, averted the Malthusian catastrophe. If Michael Pollan is right, that catastrophe was averted largely through the application of Haber’s work, that is, enough ammonium nitrate was infused into the earth’s surface to give us more people chow (aka corn) than we ever dreamed of to keep every belly full. Back to that “greater good” notion. In a way, I am surprised that the Times published Tierney’s piece at all. There has for decades now been a conspiracy of silence with regard to population growth. In the years before Paul Ehrlich wrote his book, public service announcements about the dangers of over-population were ubiquitous. When is the last time you saw one of those? Of course, 1968, the year Ehrlich’s work was published, is the year the world ended—at least the world as we knew it once. Hippies, riots, Vietnam, revolution everywhere—and the pill. Good lord, you could have sex and not worry about getting pregnant. Free at last, free at last. Too free, obviously, for some’s taste; some like the Catholic Church, (which had a long history of campaigning against birth control and family planning even before the pill came on the market), and just about any organized group on the planet that saw in freeing men and women from the wages of sin the opening of the door to larger, ever-increasing freedoms. The full panoply of weapons was used in the battle to suppress this dangerous possibility. The Church unleashed its propagandists, used what political power it had, the dangers of the pill were writ large, (and out of all proportion to the actual risks), the poor were told that they were being made sly victims of genocide, China’s one birth policy offered as proof of the totalitarian nature of all such tampering with nature. And then, after millions and millions chowed down on all that corn, we had (to borrow a felicitous metaphor from John Tierney) 13 billion hands to work at sewing machines for the entrepreneurs of the new global empire. Now, no one talks about the dangers of over-population. Or, if they do, it's hard, very hard, to hear what they are saying in the din of all those sewing machines.