When I grow up I want to be a nitrogen farmer. According to Donald Hey of the Loop-based Wetlands Initiative, the most efficient way to control the nitrate pollution that Illinois and other midwestern farm states send to the Gulf of Mexico would be to restore about 24 million acres of wetlands and “farm” them (Restoration Ecology, March). “Nitrogen farming involves flooding land with nutrient-rich water for a period of time sufficient to achieve denitrification–about six to eight days,” during which time “wetland microbes would strip and consume the oxygen atoms from the nitrate molecule, releasing nitrogen gas [harmlessly] to the atmosphere.” The businesses, cities, and corn and soybean farmers who generate nitrate pollution would buy “nitrogen credits” from the nitrogen farmers to pay for the cleanup. “A modicum of government regulation is necessary” to set precise nitrate standards and to establish a credit marketplace, he concludes, but “market forces would define the methods, location, and scale of nitrogen farming.”
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Leap before you look. “While there are risks in technological innovation, there are also risks in technological stagnation,” writes Ronald Bailey in the Heartland Institute’s “Environment & Climate News” (March). “In fact, history clearly shows the balance of risks favors technological innovation over the harm-prevention strategy embodied in the precautionary principle. Since the advent of modern chemicals–and whatever risks they pose–in the 1920s, the average American’s life expectancy has increased by 20 years.”
