...he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantages of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.
-- Fritz Haber (chapter 1)

Importance: In a letter to his dead wife, Fritz Haber expresses an intense guilt—not for his role in the creation of chemical weapons, but for his invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which allows for the withdrawal of nitrogen directly from the air. Haber fears that the process, key to the development of nitrogen-based fertilizers, will lead to an unchecked botanical explosion that could ultimately destroy all planetary life. In many ways, Haber’s fear of the “terrible verdure” mirrors Labatut’s larger...