Always Two Sides to a Story

The story of humanity is almost always filled with them. 

Fritz Haber, awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, was and still is hardly a household name. He was reputedly credited by historians then and  now (still), as the man responsible for the death of millions and the savior of billions  of people in the history of mankind - "detonator of the population explosion", as alternatively described by sympathetic historians. Nevertheless, the average person  has no clue who he was.

Fritz Haber was a brilliant German chemist, credited for his invention of a process to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen gasses. Ammonium nitrate is a major component in the  production of fertilizer. On the other hand, it is also the same compound used to make explosives.  There lies the two sides of what Haber had accomplished. 

There are many other similarly themed stories, of course, but this is  interesting and truly a fascinating one. As sometimes the case, it is about one side of a story which can lead to the opposite of the other. 

Let's back up for just a bit. I am convinced that what Haber had accomplished was a significant story from which so much is owed by  all of humanity today,  if by that we mean sustaining the life of 7 billion people and rising.   Before we get to the other side of Haber's story, let's examine how and why historians think that what he accomplished triggered the population explosion. As such, it is how world population got up to the 7 billion mark and growing, instead of one curtailed to perhaps a mere 2 billion due to recurring famines in many places around the world, had Haber not come up with a solution.

For millions and millions of years the natural order of the earth's ecosystem begins and ends with nitrogen.  99% of the earth's atmosphere is mostly made up of just two elements - 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen; the remaining 1% is made up of .93% Argon., .04 % carbon dioxide, and a miniscule amount of six other trace elements.  And water vapor in the form of clouds.  A simplified illustration explains it in brief.

All animals, which include us, need more than just oxygen to survive. We need protein to grow and maintain good health. Protein must have nitrogen in it in the form of amino acids.  NH2 is a derivative of ammonia. How do we get it?  Note from the illustration that the upper left arc of the cycle is lightning. It takes the energy of lightning to break the bonds of a nitrogen molecule, allowing for individual nitrogen atoms to combine with  hydrogen to make ammonia (NH3). Hydrogen by weight is miniscule as part of atmosphere but because it is the lightest element, there is plenty of it in terms of number, especially as in water vapor  in the clouds.  Lightning produces tons of ammonia which is then brought down by rain onto the soil below.  From there it is processed by bacteria into a form that is absorbed by plants.  We eat vegetables, fruit and meat from livestock that eat plants and grasses.   Nitrogen as in bat guano, and other animal manure, gets recycled into direct fertilization of the soil where plants grow. That's how we get nitrogen into our system.

The nitrogen cycle worked for millennia with nary a hitch. Nitrogen finds its way back to the atmosphere as a product of other microbial activities in the ground. 

That cycle worked for much of history.  Until that time when humans  broke the nitrogen cycle.  Yes, because we consumed but no longer returned the nitrogen to the ground. When people settled down to form enclaves, then towns and cities that grew into large population centers, sanitation soon forced waste to the sewers and garbage dumps for otherwise compostable waste matter, thus breaking the nitrogen cycle. The cycle still happens in the wild but as cities and nations grew in size and population, farmers who are still expected to grow food and raise livestock needed fertilizers to keep the cycle going.

Fritz Haber found the solution in  a process he pioneered together with another chemist, Max Born, to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.  Haber's collaboration with Bosch, now a large chemical company called BASF, raised the production of fertilizer into  an unprecedented  industrial scale. Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918.

"The ability to produce much larger quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizers in turn supported much greater agricultural yields and prevented billions of people from starving to death."

What is the other side of Haber's story?

"Haber is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I, especially his actions during the Second Battle of Ypres."

The genius of one man's story had two sides when his synthesis for producing ammonium nitrate also enabled cheaper method to produce explosives. In 1995 a Federal building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a devastating explosion - a horrific case of domestic terrorism that killed 167 and injured over a thousand people.  The explosive used that was in a parked truck was from a combination of liquid fertilizer and diesel fuel.

Whether in the larger picture of global history or politics, or in the micro world of our individual lives, there are often two sides to a story and sometimes a chosen  path can lead to unforeseen trajectories.  

Alfred Nobel became a very wealthy man from his invention of TNT. But he gave up quite a bit of his wealth  to fund what later became the annual event that is the Nobel Prize upon realizing that TNT that he envisioned was the answer to speed up construction of roads, earth moving capability to reshape mountains and to tunnel through them so as to connect from one side to the other, mining for minerals that were not easily accessible, dam building, etc., also became a weapon of war.  

Computers, smart phones, live streaming and social media in general have had one side of technology make life easier, enabled more efficiency on all aspects of modern life and allowed for connectivity among people from across town, provinces, states and across the globe -  instantaneously. That is one side of its story.  The other side, of course, has reflected and magnified the darker side of the human character.  Technology is also a tool for scam artists; to bully and inflict psychological distress among the youth, etc. and a very long list of so many others that two decades ago were never deemed possible as a means to cause havoc on society.

Every ruined relationship, a marriage broken up, governments failing to manage a nation, companies going bankrupt, wars erupting, etc. all have at least two sides to the story. However, it does seem to defy at times whether one is more right or more justified than another. It is also obvious at other times when one side is clearly the bad story.  What defies explanation, however, is why?

Is it perhaps because all of these  are "all baked in", so to speak, to the nature of duality in the universe? By duality, to mean light and darkness, pain and relief, sadness and happiness, and a lot more examples of two sides to a story, and then we get to the most profound duality of all - good and evil.

Religious leaders, theologians, philosophers and, yes, politicians, have much to say. What, as individuals, have we to say?

The two sides to a story can also mean that on every road we travel on, many times in a lifetime that road of life  always takes us to a fork, an intersection, a cross road, and our choices are what will determine in the end where our individual journey takes us.  

We are fully equipped to make those decisions.  But whatever you do, don't take the advice from the ever memorably lovable Yogi Berra, who said, 

And, unlike in baseball where a batting average of .250 is pretty good, and .300 makes you a superstar, we all need to do better than .900 when batting for life.  Arguable, but, hey, we don't aim for a below-average life, do we?