{"id":456,"date":"2008-07-15T07:34:09","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T07:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astraea.net\/blog\/?p=456"},"modified":"2008-07-15T07:34:09","modified_gmt":"2008-07-15T07:34:09","slug":"nitrogen-is-destroying-the-biosphere-as-much-as-carbon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/nitrogen-is-destroying-the-biosphere-as-much-as-carbon\/","title":{"rendered":"Nitrogen is destroying the biosphere as much as carbon."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is rarely mentioned in the media yet, but production of reactive nitrogen is already at catastrophic levels.\u00a0 Its main contributors are vehicles and farming for the gross quantities of fuel they consume.\u00a0 The consequence of emitting massive excesses is destruction of habitats and food chains.\u00a0 As with other identifiable culprits of planetary destruction, the ultimate cause is human consumption and the solution is for people to eat less, and for there to be less people.\u00a0 While the second solution will take a generation at minimum (if it happens at all) the option of consuming less is available to us all &#8211; eat less, and eat less meat.<\/p>\n<p>While these choices seem drastic and unpalatable, they do exist.\u00a0 It will not be long before we do not have the choice to change behaviour to fix the planet because biospherical homeostasis will have been excessively disrupted.\u00a0 Optimistically, humanity has become addicted to excessive consumption only in the past 100 years with the advent of the &#8220;oil age&#8221;, the ballooning of armaments in the Second World War and subsequent conversion of munitions production to agricultural additives and a consequent disconnect between humanity and nature.\u00a0\u00a0 So presumably we can wean ourselves from these <a href=\"http:\/\/astraea.net\/blog\/?p=313\">addictions<\/a> in a short space of time, if we indiviually choose to do so.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/7496036.stm\">This report from the BBC discusses the science behind nitrogen pollution and references research published in Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is rarely mentioned in the media yet, but production of reactive nitrogen is already at catastrophic levels.\u00a0 Its main contributors are vehicles and farming for the gross quantities of fuel they consume.\u00a0 The consequence of emitting massive excesses is destruction of habitats and food chains.\u00a0 As with other identifiable culprits of planetary destruction, the &hellip;<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/nitrogen-is-destroying-the-biosphere-as-much-as-carbon\/\" class=\"more-link pen_button pen_element_default pen_icon_arrow_double\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Nitrogen is destroying the biosphere as much as carbon.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-living"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-7m","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}