In this three-part series, we’re giving some of the most misunderstood characters on the periodic table a fuller story. We dive into the fascinating double lives of these elements that are both the makers and unmakers of our world.
In part one, reporter Olga Loginova travels to Cape Cod to meet nitrogen. In this episode: we trudge through the marsh, avoid great white sharks, and find out how we harnessed the power of nitrogen, why that power turned against us, and what we can do about it.
CREDITS
This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and Olga Loginova. Olga also reported the story. This story was edited by Jack Rodolico. Editing help from me, Eve Abrams, and Michael McEwan. The episode was fact-checked by Philip Kiefer. Sound design by Dennis Funk, and our theme music is by John Batiste. I'm the executive producer. Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. And to help others find our podcast, hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation. We'll be back with another element in two weeks.
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TRANSCRIPT
I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change.
In any story, the best bad guys are the ones who are complicated. Like not just a force of pure evil, but someone with an internal struggle, maybe a backstory that explains where they’re coming from.
Lately I’ve started thinking that’s my problem with stories about … essential elements. Yep, I’m talking about that stuff from the periodic table. Here’s the connection. We only talk about carbon because it’s heating up our planet. We only talk about phosphorus when it’s polluting our waterways and we can’t go to the beach. One dimensional villains.
But the truth is, these elements are also heroes. They’re both, really as complex as a character can be.
So today we’re starting a three-part series. Fleshing out the true nature of a few elements that we hear about a lot on the coast.
First up: nitrogen.
Olga: Nitrogen is in essence an agent of life. Everywhere it ends up, it propels life and everything starts blooming and living and breathing. How cool is that?
That's Olga Loginova, a science journalist who I asked to go out and learn everything she could about nitrogen in all its complexity.
Olga: While I was reporting, I had to do a complete 180 on my thought process. And at first, like, you know, I was going in thinking about nitrogen is almost a dirty word that's this menace to the environment.
NEWSREEL WATERFALL
So that's the bad stuff Olga had in mind.
But then she interviewed all these amazing scientists who basically told her ... no, no, no ... nitrogen is so much more. Here's one of those scientists, a professor at Yale named Damanveer Grewal, or Daman. He says while we might not think about it, there would be no life without nitrogen, just like there would be no life without water." .
Damanveer Grewal: Nitrogen is life. If we have to find life elsewhere in the universe, it is all linked to nitrogen, carbon, and water.
Daman is a hotshot scientist and just recently, he made this huge discovery about the origins of nitrogen.
Olga: What Damon did, he changed the way we think about it. For quite some time, the main scientific theory was that nitrogen—it was really an alien element.
An alien element. See, the theory was that nitrogen was from deep space. It rode here on meteorites and then scattered across Earth as stardust. But here's what Damon discovered. The stardust thing is true, but it's also true that there was always nitrogen here. Nitrogen was part of the gas and dust cloud our planet was born in 4.5 billion years ago
Olga: So what Damon discovered is that while some nitrogen is indeed alien, some of it was actually part of our planet's DNA.
Carly: So it's really so elemental to our origin story.
Olga: It is part of our origin story. Indeed.
Damanveer Grewal: Think about all the lucky things that have to happen for a planet surface to have life. Everything has to be absolutely, absolutely, absolutely fine tuned. And then from these rocks, eventually life forms. And then it is the universe asking itself through us, why are we here?
Carly: That's so beautiful. What, what does that say to you?
Olga: I think every one of us, at least once in their life, asks this big question, why are we here. And in a way, nitrogen might be a small part of the answer … of why we do what we do, of why we are those searching beings trying to find answers to the biggest possible questions of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. And all that—all that is connected really to nitrogen.
THEME/BILLBOARD
In this episode … how we harnessed the power of nitrogen, why that power turned against us, and what we can do about it. Coming up, nitrogen goes from the agent of life to an agent of death.
MIDROLL
Last spring, journalist Olga Loginova traveled to Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Olga was there for a science journalism fellowship at the prestigious Marine Biology Laboratory.
The whole point of her fellowship was to learn about nitrogen and nitrogen pollution from leading scientists … and to figure out how to translate this critical science to the public, so we can all benefit from it. Olga takes it from here.
MIDROLL
I was stoked to go to Cape Cod. I had never been, but I’d heard of the seaside views … fresh seafood … cute villages … and perhaps too many warnings about the great white sharks for my liking—at least three of my New York friends told me not to get into the water.
But all that fun stuff was a bonus.
Cape Cod is where you’ll find some of the world’s leading ecologists and nitrogen experts. If nitrogen is something you want to know about — which I do — these are the people to talk to.
Anne Giblin: When we mess around with a natural cycle—the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle—when we globally disrupt these basic cycles, we do so at our peril, because it's not so easy to put the genie back in the box.
That’s Anne Giblin, Director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Lab. I sat with Anne in her spacious corner office filled with books and notebooks, and research papers.
Before I tell you how humans disrupted the nitrogen cycle so badly, it’s important to understand how the nitrogen cycle works in the first place.
A quick Chemistry 101 primer. Nitrogen is an odorless, colorless, tasteless gas that makes up nearly 80 percent of our atmosphere.
Anne Giblin: So nitrogen in the air is nitrogen, but it's two nitrogens bound together. They're bound very strongly. And it's relatively inert. Most organisms can't use that form of nitrogen.
So when Earth was young, and looked very different—scorching hot, radioactive and covered in erupting volcanoes—nitrogen helped spark life on a lifeless planet. And for that to happen, that inert nitrogen just hanging out up in the sky, not doing a dang thing, had to be put to work.
How did it happen? Bacteria!
Bacteria were among the first lifeforms on our planet. And Anne says a certain type of ancient, hungry, lonely bacteria figured out how to split N2. N2 became their source of energy.
Anne Giblin: There's only a few bacteria that can break that nitrogen apart and use it, and that kind of started off the whole cycle on the planet. They're called nitrogen fixers.
Nitrogen fixation is a critically important process. It means transforming nitrogen that most life can’t use into nitrogen most life can. Nitrogen fixers essentially make fertilizer.
Nitrogen-fixing bacteria kicked off the nitrogen cycle —and they sustain that cycle today. This is how: Bacteria break N2 apart, convert it into ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. Basically, natural fertilizer. It leads to this explosion of life. Then when plants and animals decompose … there are other bacteria that convert nitrates back to N2 and send it into the atmosphere. And that’s the whole cycle that enables life on Earth.
How cool are bacteria?
For a couple of eons, the nitrogen cycle did its thing. Here’s when things changed.
About a hundred years ago, humans figured out how to do what bacteria had been doing all along. Scientists split - N2- in a lab …and invented commercial fertilizer.
For humanity, this was an extraordinary discovery.
Anne Giblin: The Green Revolution, all this fertilizer—I mean, we wouldn't support 8 billion people on the planet without having invented fertilizer.
But now we use way too much chemical fertilizer.
And when it washes into the ocean … I mean, it’s fertilizer! So it makes things grow!
Scientists have a word for when we dump excessive nutrients into the water: Eutrophication. Eutrophication leads to huge algal blooms.
Anne Giblin: All the plant matter in the water eventually dies, falls to the bottom, decomposes, and there it uses up a lot of oxygen. The problem comes in when the algae dies and you start using up all the oxygen and then you kill the fish and everything else.
Anne’s talking about dead zones. Dead zones pop up all over the globe—anywhere along densely populated coasts where fertilizer runs off. The biggest dead zones in the world are in the Baltic and Arabian seas. The next biggest is in the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer it was the size of Connecticut.
NEWSREEL ABOUT THE DEAD ZONE IN THE GULF
The planet is at this strange point. For billions of years, the unlikely superstars—a small set of bacteria—were THE biggest nitrogen fixers. Those bacteria are still doing that job. But so are we. Because of us, there’s twice as much nitrogen available as there was just a century ago.
Anne Giblin: So it's this human interference that took this very important natural system and made it go a little haywire. And now it's kind of coming back to hurt us and we have to figure out how to sort of get things back under control.
To see this haywire in action, I don’t have to go far. So I am putting on my rubber boots and heading to the nearest marsh to find some answers. That’s coming up.
BREAK
The Cape is defined by water — it is a peninsula with 560 miles of coastline, but also about 900 freshwater ponds. And most of its bodies of water— are severely affected by nitrogen pollution. Estuaries and ponds and certain beaches wind up clogged with algae, and empty of fish and shellfish. It’s a huge threat to the environment here — but also the economy. Cape Cod has a more than billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, which - like nitrogen pollution - peaks in the summer.
Jim McClelland: We're entering the marshy zone right here. Right? This is —don't touch any of that poison ivy!
My search for nitrogen pollution on the Cape begins with sludging through a local marsh with Jim McClelland. He’s tall and lanky, wearing a grey windbreaker, knee-high rubber boots, and a beany. Jim is a rockstar of an ecologist, and a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Lab. He’s studied nitrogen pollution all over the world.
Jim McClelland: Just about everywhere you look in coastal areas, there is extra nitrogen and there are, there's fertilization of the coastal ocean as a result. And there's, there are all the, the, the knock-on effects of that.
Now Cape Cod’s particular nitrogen problem isn’t from farms — there aren’t many here. Instead, it’s mostly all due to septic tanks.
The Cape has lots of houses, and most houses here flush their toilets into a backyard septic tank. The problem is, septic tanks leak, and nitrogen trickles through the sandy soil, and eventually into the water.
As a matter of fact, it was Jim McClelland who, about 30 years ago, was the first to scientifically link Cape Cod’s nitrogen pollution to the source of the problem.
Jim McClelland: I went out and sampled septic plumes. I went to sewage treatment plant and sampled the septic waste. It wasn't the best smelling. It was a fun time though.
I’m here in the marsh with Jim so he can show me and some other folks from my fellowship exactly how he does that science — how he definitively traces an algae bloom all the way back to septic tanks.
Just a couple of days ago, Jim’s team got word of a thick mat of blooming algae floating down a nearby river. It’s time for some detective work.
So the plan is to first sample groundwater here in the marsh.
Jim McClelland: This is a, it's called a dry point piezometer, basically it's just a water sampling device. It's got these little holes in the bottom. We'll drive this in.
We drive the device, and then hand pump it until groundwater flows into the jug.
Jim McClelland: So it always starts out looking like that kind of mucky and sandy and then hey, it gets pretty clear, right? Because the sand itself is filtering the water. Just like a filter in a swimming pool.
We gather lots of samples. Then … we schlep everything back to Jim's lab. We filter the water samples, add reagents and test for nutrient concentrations.
Jim McClelland: We also wanna look for evidence of nitrogen in organisms.
We collected algae and critters—now we sort them, shove them into the oven to dry, then pulverize them—by hand—with a mortar and pestle.
Jim McClelland: The whole idea is just to make it homogenous.
Olga: Why not do it in like a coffee grinder?
Jim McClelland: This is the, this is the most effective.
Effective, and stinky. If I had to describe it, ground up worms smell like iodine mixed with sun-dried crickets—not my favorite.
After we’ve run a myriad of tests on mass spectrometers and analyzers, we get our a-ha moment: some of our samples—specifically the ones from the river, where the algae bloom was—have high nitrogen levels. Bingo.
But where did it all come from?
Jim’s lab has this cool instrument—an isotope ratio mass spectrometer—that by ways of complicated science analyzes our samples at the nano-level, and creates unique isotopic signatures—kind of like fingerprints. And with those fingerprints you can link the nitrogen with its source.
Jim McClelland: even though rational thinking would tell you that waste water's the problem, being able to point at it, it makes all the difference in the world when you're trying to get people to do something.
Nitrogen pollution is a solvable problem. So why haven’t we solved it?
On the federal level, we’ve had rules on the books for decades that regulate nitrogen pollution. Despite that, we still have a ton of it —maybe because a lot of those regulations are voluntary. AND on top of that … the Trump administration is in the midst of slashing all types of environmental rules, including rules about nitrogen.
However, on the local level, there’s some real change underway.
The state of Massachusetts has a regulation in place specifically targeting Cape Cod towns that sit in the most polluted watersheds. It mandates that residents need to either update their septic tanks, which comes with a hefty price tag of over $30 thousand per septic before a tax credit, or to buy into a sewer — and towns here are getting staggering estimates for those, we are talking at dozens of millions of dollars
With such expensive options, I was curious about another solution on Cape Cod. Not one that’s likely to totally fix everything — but it certainly sounds … non-traditional.?!?
Jim McClelland: One of the things that on the cape that's been going on in recent years is this, this movement called urine diversion. Where, where, instead of peeing in the toilet, you pee into receptacles that … I don't know, someone hauls away and does something with…
Yep, you’ve heard that right: “urine diversion movement.” A passionate group of pee-cyclers. Obviously, that’s my next stop.
Hilda Maingay: Pickles, canned Asian pears, jams, green beans. All the food that we have is all grown on our urine that we have collected in our toilets.
This is Hilda Maingay, one half of an environmentalist power couple behind Cape Cod’s pee-cycling movement. All the fruits and vegetables on the shelves of their pantry are grown with their own recycled urine that they use as fertilizer. This is Hilda’s husband, Earle Barnhart.
Earle Barnhart: Instead of into the stock market, we put our money into solar panels and in land for gardens. And we produce a lot of our own food.
Hilda and Earle are not some hippies living in the middle of nowhere. The couple runs The Green Center — an environmental education and sustainability nonprofit.
In fact, sustainability is a core belief system for them … especially for Hilda, who survived a concentration camp in Indonesia during WWII.
Hilda Maingay: I see waste as an awful thing. And during those years, everything was eaten. So that whole philosophy was so ingrained.
When Hilda and Earle first considered installing an eco-toilet, they simply wanted to conserve water. But then they learned about the real impact they could have on local water pollution. After all, urine makes up 80% of nitrogen in the wastewater. So what if urine never gets in the system in the first place?
Hilda Maingay: We are now entering the bathroom. It's beautifully bright, gorgeous view to the gardens.
Hilda gave me this very cool tour of her bathroom, and explained pee-cycling. I was surprised by how normal the compostable toilet looked on the outside. Just your regular white throne.
Hilda Maingay: The toilet fixture is contemporary looking, very slick. And the only difference with a regular toilet would be that it's a split bowl.
Basically, poop goes one way, pee another way.
Hilda Maingay: And the urine compartment has a tube underneath which leads to a storage tank in the basement. The storage tank for the urine could also be outside.
And if you prefer to do your business while you stand, they’ve got a portable urinal—white jug with a red funnel, called a Cubie.
Hilda Maingay: And it can be then carried away to a bigger container outside for storage or for reuse in the garden.
I got to see that garden in the summer, and she is a beauty! There are flower and vegetable beds, grapes, zucchini, tomatoes, fruit trees—my Eastern European heart melted.
Now, Hilda and Earle live in the town of Falmouth, which has the highest levels of nitrogen pollution on the Cape. Last year, Falmouth approved construction of a $60 million sewer project
The discussion of this development was in the air for over a decade. And the price tag sometimes climbed into hundreds of millions of dollars. So a couple years ago, Hilda and Earle got a blessing from the local board of health to run an experiment. For two months, 41 households, instead of flushing down their number 1, conserved it, and then got it hauled away. The results were promising.
By their estimates, if the whole town peed in the cubies, it would remove more nitrogen than this sewer treatment plant. And to state the obvious, peeing in a jug costs much less than building a sewer.
Earle Bernhardt: We get officials, town officials, planners, and selectmen from all the towns on the Cape coming to learn if it's about it because it would save them hundreds of millions of dollars if you did this.
The town authorities ran another pilot study on the use of eco-toilets in the community, but it didn’t take place despite significant financial incentives. It seems most people just don’t want to pee in a bucket.
Even if the whole population of Cape Cod started pee-cycling today, it would take years to clean up all the excess nitrogen. But Hilda and Earle believe it’s the best path forward to fix the decades-long problem. And they are undeterred, preaching the gospel of pee-cycling. As a bonus, their pantry is always stocked with the most delicious produce.
Hilda Maingay: Pasta sauce, canned jar full of dried zucchini, peppers, onions, which we can rehydrate for soups. Garlic, …sweet potatoes and potatoes.
At the end of my tour of Hilda and Earle’s house, I thought about the role we, humans, played in the nitrogen cycle throughout history—from peeing in the bushes, all the way to pumping tons of synthetic fertilizer on our fields, and into our waterways.
In the end, it’s not nitrogen that has gone rogue, but rather us, and our unbridled appetites, and the waste we leave behind. And nitrogen, that magic stardust that billions of years ago accidentally sparked life on our lifeless planet, just keeps doing what it has done for 4.5 eons—making things live, breathe and grow.
And this, as the cosmochemist Daman Grewal puts it, is the universe’s way of reminding us where we come from and who we are.
Daman Grewal: There are more than a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. And then there are more than a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. And then we have this planet. This blue ball that is floating around in space. And we disregard it. Everything is just connected to these, this, this, this very fine balance, which we as humans are disturbing right now.
