Playing God with nitrogen

The dark side of nitrogen fertilisers

The devastating and little-known health and environmental effects of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, whose intensive use over the past half-century has totally overturned world-wide agriculture, turning an essential nutrient into a deadly pollutant. A threat that many scientists believe is as serious as global warming itself or the collapse of biodiversity, and a threat on which the general public has very little, if any, information, except when the explosion of a forgotten stockpile of ammonium nitrate, the main constituent of ammonitrates the most widely used nitrogen fertilizers, tragically devastates an entire capital, Beirut, and claims many victims.