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Review: Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production By Vaclav Smil Reviewed by Rosemary A. Streatfeild Washington State University, USA Vaclav Smil. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. 338 pp. ISBN 0-262-19449-X (hardcover). US$34.95. Alkaline paper. Vaclav Smil admits in the postscript of this book that he had planned originally to write a biography of Fritz Haber. He does in fact include a summary of both Haber's and Carl Bosch's lives in the postscript, but the book itself is dedicated to the discovery, marketing, and consequences of the synthesis of ammonia. The book is interdisciplinary; with individual chapters being of interest to specific groups, but with its historical overview will appeal to a wide group of readers. Enriching the Earth follows Smil's previous books that address the world's energy needs, ecology, and food production. The goal of his previous work, Feeding the Earth: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000), is to examine the problem of feeding the ten billion people estimated to inhabit the earth by the mid-21st century. Here, Smil argues against Paul Ehrlich's and Lester Brown's claims for global catastrophe regarding world population and survival rates, surmising that by 2050 the world's human population will cease to grow for reasons other than food production. In Enriching the Earth, Smil examines the effects of higher food production efficiency worldwide. The main focus of the book is on the discovery of ammonia synthesis in 1908 by Fritz Haber, and the commercialization of it by Carl Bosch and BASF (the Haber-Bosch process). With their emphasis on the nitrogen needs of plants, specifically food crops, the first chapters take the reader through an historical survey of what is known about nitrogen. Smil explains the nitrogen cycle and its sources (old and new). He then focuses on Haber's discovery of the synthesis of ammonia, the creation of the ammonia industry, the innovations that developed from the first synthesis, and the production of synthetic fertilizers. The concluding chapters concentrate on how dependent civilization has become on nitrogen and addresses some of the problems that this dependence has created. Smil acknowledges that the abundance of fixed nitrogen has had many undesirable consequences, and outlines them throughout the text. It is illuminating to discover that the level of reactive nitrogen in the global