The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability

"Noelle: The Story of N is written by a historian at Michigan Tech, who works in environmental history. It tells the story of societies developing through the lens of nitrogen. It starts in prehistoric times and brings you all the way up to the present, covering the history of agriculture and the creation of agricultural societies, the industrialization of agriculture, the processes that created fertilizer, but also some air pollution issues that come into play with nitrogen chemistry and the emerging environmental problems that come from the human alterations of the nitrogen cycle. Gorman looks at that process and talks about how societies have addressed ecological limits with technologies and policies. “The relationship between humans and elements is very, very complex” Henrik: Given that it’s written by a historian, it’s a chronological story, that goes through the nitrogen cycle before humans and then after humans became a major force on planet Earth. It documents the very major changes that humans have made to the nitrogen cycle, especially over the last 200 years. One of the things that I really like about this book is that it does this in the context of sustainability. That’s one of the connections between The Story of N and our book, Mercury Stories , that it’s very much written in the context of understanding and advancing sustainability. It’s not just The Story of N for the sake of The Story of N , but about what it means for advancing human wellbeing and sustainability now and in the future. So if one is interested in the elements, in environmental history, and relationships between elements and societal development and sustainability, then I think that this is a really good book. Noelle: One of the things that struck me about it was that it’s so different from a scientist approaching the nitrogen cycle. As a scientist, you learn about global cycling and the technological processes that alter the global cycle. One of the things that Gorman stresses in this book is that a lot of this is explained by institutions, by markets and by the progress of science. That’s a very different lens than just looking at the technological or scientific developments in isolation. Noelle: As a scientist who models the transport of substances, and when I think about ecological transport, I think about mobilizing material from the oceans to the atmosphere, for example. But one of the examples that Gorman gives is that nitrogen was also moved in large quantities by trade, by human actions. A large-scale import of guano from Peru was moving from South America to Europe for production of nitrogen-based fertilizer. That was a major source of the nitrogen fueling increases in agricultural production. And it was a resource that was present and then was exploited and moved—before the development of technologies for fixing nitrogen in fertilizer."