Phil. Inquirer: An easy-to-read explainer and reflection on nitrogen, the good and the bad
In yesterday’s Inquirer science and enviro writer Sandy Bauers presents about as easily read and memorable an example one might like on how to chop a somewhat technical and obscure chemical pollution problem into manageable bites. She starts it off with personal recognition of the exasperations of worryng over carbon footprints. She then says there’s another for her, and you too dear reader: the nitrogen footprint. She mixes local references to why it ought to matter with a few big-picture asides – such as reference to something The Tracker did not have on the radar, the International Nitrogen Initiative. She inflicts nothing like that diagram to the upper right. But she mentions overfertilized lawns, ag runoff, NOx and other airborne fertilizing species that rain onto the landscape from the collective exhaust of coal and other fossil fuel combustion, and eutrophic impacts in waterways. A few things that disturb The Tracker aren’t in here so much, such as the shifts from wildflowers to grasses as that airborne stuff we make settles into the soil. But nearby crabs in a tailspin are. Nitrogen, she writes, is a good thing. But if it runs amok, “…it turns evil.”
Readers who know the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway may wonder how it is we can mess things up much by distributing a bit more of it. So a sentence or two mentioning the difference between relatively inert N2 gas, and more problematic, N-rich molecules like ammonia, oxides of nitrogen, etc., would have been good. It’s a column – a format with only so much room.
Grist for the Mill: Int’l Nitrogen Initiative ;
Speaking of Philly, another (blog) on the Inquirer‘s site provides a different way to handle an enviro issue. Bauers uses a style akin to a friendly chat across the backyard fence. But in his Attytood column blogger Will Bunch, on the same day has a more in-your-face assault against forces resistant to eco regulations. He takes on a Rush Limbaugh, and salutes Paul Krugman‘s furious column the other day in the NY Times. Its theme: “Treason against the planet.” Wonder which column will change more minds?
Pic – source ;
-CP
