The Problem with Fertilizer

Too much of a good thing is bad.  Just as too much food leads to obesity and tight pants, too much fertilizer contaminates the land and water we depend upon for food even while aiding the production of that food. The main environmental problem associated with fertilizer abuse is contamination of water with nitrates and phosphates, and the main problem with stories like this is that the technical explanation often goes in one ear and dribbles out the other. I’ll try to simplify the story here.

Only a fraction of nitrogen-based fertilizer is absorbed into plant matter. The rest accumulates in the soil where it is eventually converted by bacteria to nitrates, or is lost as run-off.  Nitrates are highly water-soluble, and leach into ground water or wash out of the soil into streams and rivers. High nitrate levels in drinking water are dangerous to human health. Because nitrogen is odorless and colorless, only testing can determine whether contamination has occurred. In January 2013, the California State Water Resources Control Board reported that more than 400 private wells and more than 200 water systems in the state were contaminated with nitrates.

When babies and the elderly drink water with high nitrogen levels, they can develop symptoms such as gastrointestinal swelling and irritation, diarrhea, and protein digestion problems—a condition called methemoglobinemia, or "blue baby syndrome." Infants whose skin tissues are low in oxygen appear to be blue or purplish in color. This occurs when nitrates mix with iron in red blood cells, leaving the blood unable to transport oxygen to the body's cells. Nitrates are dangerous enough; now let’s take a look at phosphates.

Although phosphorus itself is not washed out of soil, it combines with soil particles and travels with them to shallow water.  Phosphorus is not dangerous by itself, but in slow-moving water, it stimulates the growth of algae. Algae is not dangerous either – until it dies and decomposes removing oxygen from the water.  This kills fish and many other organisms. Scientists, never at a loss for unpronounceable obscure words, call this process eutrophication.

The lethal combination of excess nitrates and phosphates constitutes pollution that should be mitigated, but fertilizer is not the sole culprit. Other sources of these pollutants include industrial waste, sewage, detergents and manures. The problem of high nitrate levels in groundwater was actually recorded as early as 1860, long before synthetic fertilizer was invented.

A Little History…

In the 1910s and 1920s, Fritz Haber, a bespectacled German chemist, devised a way to manufacture ammonia from methane gas (NH₃) and molecular nitrogen (N₂). The ammonia from the Haber process, a process still used today, was then converted into nitric acid which led to the development of synthetic fertilizer—and significantly aided the German war effort. The synthetic supply of nitric acid was explosively useful in the manufacture of munitions.

Even more significantly than its destructive capabilities, The Haber process supported global population growth. It has been estimated that almost half the people on the planet are fed as a result of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use. Ramped up to an industrial scale, ammonia synthesis has enabled widespread fertilization of croplands ever since. As a direct result, the world's population skyrocketed from 1.6 billion to six billion during the 20th century.

But Haber's nourishing discovery has a dark side. The surfeit of fertilizer has come at a high price for the environment.  And the story gets even better…

 Dead zone along coast of Maryland

Fertilizer’s Dark Side

Earth’s surging population demands ever increasing amounts of energy, and the burning of fossil fuels threatens the planet with catastrophic climate change as a warming blanket of greenhouse gases warms the oceans and melts arctic ice. In order to mitigate this problem, alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming more attractive. Biofuels perhaps?

Biofuels production in the US consists of ethanol manufactured from corn. Cornell University environmental biologist Robert Horwath who also chairs the International Scope Biofuels Project says, “The production of ethanol from corn in the US is a disaster in terms of fertilizer flowing down the Mississippi River.”  

He is undoubtedly concerned about the seasonal dead zone spreading from the Louisiana coast to Texas—covering approximately 5,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Connecticut. The eutrophication in this dead zone is formed by nutrients that flush into the Gulf's waters -- largely agricultural fertilizer and wastewater from the Mississippi River. The resulting algae blooms suck up the oxygen in deep water, according to NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Marine life struggles to find enough oxygen to survive within the zone.

As if this scenario weren’t scary enough already, fertilizers release significant quantities of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with 300 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide (CO2). Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and his colleagues worry that cultivation of current biofuel crops, corn included, will wipe out any CO2 savings by releasing higher emissions of nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxide. The latter destroys the so-called “good” ozone, which shelters us from damaging ultraviolet radiation. It also contributes to ground level ozone, the main constituent in smog, widely known to exacerbate human respiratory ailments. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, millions of Americans live in areas that exceed the national standards for ozone exposure.

What Can We Do?

Despite the dangers posed by over-use of fertilizers, they enhance the growth of our food crops and beautify our landscapes—so they have value.  However, there are things we can do to alleviate the effects of fertilizer pollution, and small steps taken by many people can make a big difference.

•        Before fertilizing, have your soil tested; then test every three years or so to determine the pH of your soil since crops require difference acidity levels.
•          Follow package label instructions carefully and mix the fertilizer accurately.
•          Do not allow excess water to run into streets or gutters, and leave a buffer zone when near a body of water.
•          Apply fertilizer 4 to 6 inches into the soil using a coring device or a spike, and clean up all spilled fertilizer.  
•          Because plant clippings contain phosphorus, debris should be removed and not directed into the street.
•          Allow soil to replenish its nutrients naturally by giving it a break from crop production and by rotating crops.
•          Avoid using fertilizer during the rain, and never apply it to frozen ground.
•          Use organic fertilizers that consist of manures and animal wastes when practical.

 Further Reading

UNESCO has a web site worth exploring.   Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment
Discover Buzzle at  http://www.buzzle.com/articles/how-do-fertilizers-affect-the-environment.html
Visit NOAA at  http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/estuaries/media/supp_estuar09b_eutro.html

Even more http://www.fertilizer101.org/

Dam Trouble

 

Hoover Dam

It can be said that large dams like Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River boosted the United States to superpower status by enabling its industrial might to spur the Allies to victory in World War II.  Hydroelectric power from these two dams powered the industrial plants in Los Angeles and Seattle that built warplanes and ships, the military hardware that won the war.  Cheap electric power also fueled the American Dream as every household either filled their homes with labor saving electric appliances or dreamed of doing so.

The American Dream according to GE

Indeed, imagine Las Vegas which is only 30 miles from Hoover Dam if the dam had never been built.  Not only is Sin City or The Entertainment Capital of the World, if you prefer, dependent upon the dam’s hydroelectric output, but roughly 90% of its water comes from Lake Mead cached behind the dam. 

The spectacular success and phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, Southern California and Las Vegas have fueled the conventional wisdom that these dams were well worth the investments in them – in dollars spent, lives lost during construction, and ecosystems destroyed in their path.  Both of these dams were built in the 1930s.  Large dam construction peaked in the early 1970s.


During that 40 year span, the best dam sites were built upon and the world began to experience the massive destructiveness of large dams.  Nevertheless, there are more than 45,000 dams spanning 60% of the world’s major river basins, and the water backed up behind them covers more land than the State of California. Yet, nary a year passes without new dam proposals to ponder.

The World Bank Ignores Itself

It should be emphasized that dams are much more destructive than their proponents would have us believe.  A curious flip-flop unfolded in the early 2000s as the World Bank created the World Commission on Dams to blunt criticism of its lending policies to third world countries who were buying dams at their behest – at great expense and dubious benefit.  The Commission aired its long awaited report in November of 2000 with a special keynote speech by Nelson Mandela.  The report was titled Dams and Development:  A New Framework for Decision-Making.  Among its findings, which the World Bank has chosen to ignore:  

·         Environmental impacts of large dams are more negative than positive; have, in many cases, led to irreversible loss of species and ecosystems;

·         Irrigation dams typically do not recover their costs, did not produce the volume of water forecast and are not as profitable as forecast;

·         Large dams have led to the impoverishment and suffering of millions;

·         Large dams tend to sustain schedule delays and significant cost overruns; and

·         Large dams, particularly shallow tropical dams, contribute to global warming by emitting greenhouse gases released by vegetation rotting in reservoirs and carbon inflows from watersheds.

International Rivers Network

To understand the technical, scientific pitfalls presented by dams one should visit www.internationalrivers.org.  Some of the problems they describe with great clarity are:

·         Dams prevent nutrients from flowing to the deltas, the floodplains, where they benefit the soil, fisheries and marine life in general;

·         Dams trap all the free flowing silt that is carried by a river’s turbulence;

·         Salt once carried to the ocean by undammed waterways is deposited in concentrated form on irrigated lands-- slowly poisoning the soil; and

·         Dams diminish the ocean’s ability to absorb CO² by curtailing the nutrient plume that fertilizes phytoplankton that therefore die and sink to the ocean floor encapsulating the carbon for the long-term.

Dams Are Not Forever

Both the World Commission on Dams and the International Rivers Network state that dams contribute to global warming.  This conflicts with conventional wisdom which assumes that fossil

fuels are the only culprit in climate change, and that hydroelectric power is clean.  Clean or not, it has

been reported that 30 – 70% of California’s Sierra snow pack will disappear this century. California’s 1000 dams will face greater pressure from flooding as glaciers melt, making them potential hazards to millions of people living downstream.  On the other hand, once the snowpack

Snowpack in Sierra Nevada

vanishes, the dams will be obsolete anyway.

Dams and levees can never be fail-proof, and when they fail, they do so spectacularly and sometimes catastrophically.  They also provide a false sense of security that encourages risky development on vulnerable floodplains.  Think of New Orleans in 2005.

The alternative to relying on dams for flood control is flood risk management which assumes that floods will happen and that we need to learn to live with them as best we can.  Effective flood risk management reduces their speed, size and duration where possible, while it protects our most valuable assets, and situates them out of a flood’s destructive path.  Flood risk management assumes that all flood protection infrastructure can fail and creates plans for recovery. This alternative recognizes that all floods are not inherently bad – and indeed that floods are essential for the health of riverine ecosystems.

In the end all dams will die.  They are not permanent or eternal.  They topple over, are dismantled, fill with sediment or lose their financial rationale.  Assessing the cost of erecting a dam should include the cost of safely decommissioning it to prevent catastrophic destruction downstream if they fail. That cost must also include funds to maintain aging dams whose maintenance costs rise as time passes.

Alternatives to Damming the Planet

At the top of the list is conservation.  Conserving water speaks for itself.  Although the amount of precipitation can vary from year to year, the earth has a finite amount of water which cannot be increased.  A very brief and painless internet search will yield over 100 tips on how to save water so I won't belabor the point here.  Every little bit helps.

Reducing the impact of our use of energy also reduces our reliance on hydroelectric power.  While our sources of energy must be made cleaner, our first priority must be to use energy more efficiently.  Efficiency turns out to be cheaper, cleaner and faster to install than any other energy option.  Efficiency is not only cheaper than all other energy options, it also leads to growth in personal income, because lower energy bills free up money that can be spent elsewhere.

Up to 75% of the electricity used in the US today could be saved with efficiency measures.  Developing countries, which will account for 80% of global energy demand growth to 2020, could cut their demand by more than half using existing technologies to improve energy efficiency, according to the McKinley Global Institute.  “This would leave energy consumption some 22% lower than it would otherwise have been – an abatement equivalent to the entire energy consumption of China today,” the institute states.

                                                   Read more at www.internationalrivers.org.

A very good read . . .

Deep Water, The Epic Struggle over Dams, Displaced People and the Environment by Jacques Leslie, Copyright ©2005   Farrar, Straus and Giroux