Aha! My creation is nearly finished!

I listen to NPR. I know, I know. I, along with all the other liberals, will soon be banished from Sunday school. But alas, I listen.

To be honest, I listen to Family Life Radio on the actual radio. NPR is reserved for podcasts. My all-time favorite--The Diane Rehm Show.

The first time I heard her voice I thought she was dying. I kind of thought it was a joke--no radio station would knowingly give a radio show--that is, an audio, voice-driven show--to someone who required two and a half minutes just to say "Good morning." But I kept tuning in because she did ask good questions and seemed to know her stuff. Plus her guests could not be more interesting.

Which brings me to today. A guest host was interviewing Thomas Hager. (Side note: I've noticed a lot of guest hosts over the years. At first I thought it was because she was perhaps in the hospital or such, but alas, she always returns. I really should try to learn more about her.) Hager wrote, and just released last month, his book, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, A Doomed Tycoon, and the Discovery That Changed the Course of History. It's about the discovery (or should I say invention?) of synthetic nitrogen.

Turns out the world was coming to an end about a century ago. A British scientific group back in the 1890's warned the world that the food supply could not keep up with the population growth (see the ridiculous, though well-read, Thomas Malthus). A solution must be sought, they warned, or close to 2 billion people would starve to death. This solution, not surprisingly, would also prove to be very profitable.

As a result, scientists (and inventive people of all skill-sets, I am sure) began racing to develop synthetic nitrogen--the element most needed to grow the food necessary to feed the growing population. A German scientist, Fritz Haber, took home the prize. By developing and patenting the method of turning air into liquid nitrogen, Haber had single-handedly created the science necessary to solve world hunger, ensuring fame and profit for him and his German nation.

Haber partnered with a young Jewish man and they set up nitrogen factories immediately. A new set of Rockefellers were posed to take over the world, using Germany as their stage. With their manufactured scientific element for life, synthetic nitrogen, the future looked fearless.

Then World War I hit.

(While world hunger was apparently solved, the greed and pride of world leaders led to the death of 40 million people in the greatest war ever before seen on earth.)

And interestingly, it was this same German invention of synthetic nitrogen that propelled the German ammunition and in fact enabled Germany to fight in the last years of the war. Synthetic nitrogen not only the most popular way to grow mass quantities of food on soil that should be resting, it is also one the most powerful raw material for explosives in the world. Haber was awared the Nobel Prize in secret (the only time that happened in history) because of the rioting surrounding his very controversial discovery. Our efforts to help fix mother nature's "problem" didn't work out as well as had been hoped. But the story for us doesn't end there.

See, World War I then propelled World War II with its own list of atrocities that no man should have ever had to witness much less experience. Then the economic policies following World War II propelled consumerism spirituality (see http://www.storyofstuff.com/), which (along with a laundry list of other issues, e.g., prayer out of school, Roe v. Wade, etc.) has brought us to today: a confused, post-modern, hardly sustainable world.

Just this last summer, I was listening to NPR in the car while on vacation and sat up straight as I heard the radio announcer. He was describing our current global food crisis. Over a century after the Brits' warning, it seems the crisis was destined to find us. It isn't a food shortage this time, rather it's food costs, but still the irony can't go without being noted.

Here in America we struggle with obesity (Kudos, consumerism spirituality! We didn't need Jesus after all.) and cancer, while the rest of the world starves, unable to purchase and unwilling to distribute food to the masses. While they die for food, Americans are experiencing our own set of economic difficulties and struggling to fight the cancer that strikes harder in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world--a major health concern that can most definitely be traced back to the synthetic fertilizers.

Might it be time we stop trying to "fix" mother nature's "problems?" I have a sneaky suspicion that even our most profitable solutions can't fix a world that isn't broken (see Genesis 1). When will science get back to the basics? When will we take seriously our choices in light of the living God? I fear what we are sowing, knowing that even our soil is manufactured by the single most raw explosive material in the world. What are we doing to ourselves?