Original Research

Moral Economies of Life and Death: Agricultural Improvement, Imperialism, and Chemical Kinships with Reactive Nitrogen

Emma Cardwell

Lancaster University
e.j.cardwell@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract

What does it mean to think of chemicals as kin? Building on the concepts of chemical kinships and pollution as colonialism, I use a feminist storytelling methodology grounded in relational ontology to explore my kinship relationships with reactive nitrogen, and the way it both hurts me and gives me life. Agriculture and organic chemistry are close kin to imperialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction, and, as a white British woman, I argue these are also my own more-than-human family: my close kin. To take the call to kinship seriously, I argue for approaching kinship personally, and accepting clear positionality in relation: exploring my relation to how these kin both abuse and support me, our ancestral entanglement, and my own complicity and responsibility in enabling their abuse.

Keywords

agriculture, nitrogen, chemistry, imperialism, kinship

Introduction

This paper aims to bring a new engagement with the “chemical turn” in feminist technoscience by storying a kinship with a chemical element that intrinsically disrupts the dominant toxicity narrative of our epistemological relationship to chemicals. It also aims to engage with the political ontologies of the “decolonial turn” through discussion of the conflicts and syntheses between chemical and Indigenous ontologies of relationality. Utilizing the feminist storytelling methodology adopted by Donna Haraway (2016) and drawing on the ontology-methodology of Lauren Tynan (2020), I tell the story of reactive nitrogen compounds as kin—in particular, my kin—and story my understanding of this element in relation to my other close kin as a white British woman: the imperial state, capitalism, and colonialism.

Angeliki Balayannis and Emma Garnett describe chemical kinship as “a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. Emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, this particular notion of kinship involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad; they can be both enabling and harmful” (2020, 2). In this piece, I take this idea further, adopting chemical kinship as a practice, telling a story about a chemical in a method modeled on the way my kinship relations are made and remade by storytelling within the family group.

This practice of feminist storytelling and kin recognition adopted in this paper is directly influenced by Haraway (2016) and Tynan (2020, 2021) and recognizes its origin in both wider Indigenous ontologies and my own non-academic community learning. Here, a kinship ontology-methodology (see Tynan 2020) is based on the recognition that, one, reality is relational, rather than individual; two, that relationships require accountability and responsibility; and, three, that I cannot achieve accountability and responsibility without self-awareness and an explicit recognition of my own role in relation. Thinking with kinship requires that I recognize not just relation but importantly myself in relation. Kinship is not abstract. It concerns the relations that formed me, how they formed me, and how this formation performs certain conditions of possibility for those I relate to, and vice versa. Points one and two above draw directly on Tynan (2020). Point three, though implicit in Tynan's work, has an emphasis of my own, which comes from my understanding of relationality as a white, British woman. This approach engages with broader conversations on colonialism and ontology from a perspective that is neither (or both) “Indigenous” nor (and) “white settler”—the dichotomy that usually structures conversations on colonialism and ontology, which are mostly written in territories subject to settler colonialism (e.g., Liboiron 2021; Moreton-Robinson 2015). I therefore hope to bring an additional geographical—and therefore ontological, if we recognize land and territory as important contributors to the co-construction of reality—engagement with the feminist literature on colonialism and chemistry by telling a story about my situated relationship with the reactive nitrogen family of compounds.

Chemicals as Kin

Kinship is relational: a common term for those we share kinship with is “our relations.” Taking a kinship approach to a chemical element is therefore personal. Through storytelling I make sense of a relation, react to it, change it, and am changed. In a family, stories are passed down, through oral testimony and physical affect, to make sense of collective identity (Datta 2018). My stories are not limited to direct experience: I have stories about my great-great-grandmother that help me understand who I am, even though I was not there. Just as kinship stories are necessarily subjective (my sister's story of my mother converges with mine, but is not exactly the same), so a kinship story about a chemical element is partial. Yet as hearing my grandmother's understanding of my mother enrichens both kin relationships, my kinship storytelling of reactive nitrogen will hopefully, for the reader, perform the same function.

In order to understand my storytelling, you should understand how I understand myself. I am a white British woman from a rural environment in northern England. I was constituted by my relationship with that environment, as were my ancestors—for something between 1,300 years (the oldest written record of my family) and 10,000 years (the estimated settling of the British Isles). I was also constituted by a relationship with the wider world: the colonial and postcolonial spoils of the British Empire; and the murder, exploitation, and oppression of faraway people and environments. The place I come from, where my maternal family have been as far back as written records go, is a rural area that was described as “partial waste” in the Domesday Book, meaning it is likely some of my ancestors were slaughtered or starved before being dispossessed when England was invaded in 1066. For generations after this, as members of the English working classes, my family were likely indentured agricultural laborers, toiling on land they had a deep relation to, and at one point did not consider property. They were expelled from this land entirely during the parliamentary enclosures of the nineteenth century.

My paternal great-grandparents lived in the slums of Manchester and Wigan after the enclosures removed them from their land—a process driven by a demand for internal economic expansion, created by the wealth from slavery and imperialism. In the mills, they processed the cotton picked by generations of kidnapped and abused slaves, on the violently appropriated lands of Native Americans—people they did not build accountability to or relationships with, though their hands touched the same fibres, untied knots in bundles of cotton that thousands of miles away, never-met others tied. Since being granted the right to vote in the early twentieth century, my family enjoyed relative stability and material plenty courtesy of the postwar consensus, the spoils of imperialism, and white privilege. This economic stability came from the wages of jobs in coal mines and oil fields, digging out the carbon to create climate change and destroy the lifeworlds of thousands of webs of sentient life. My local human-kinship group is regularly characterized by outsiders as having a “strong sense of community” and having been “left behind” by capitalism since the end of British heavy industry and the postwar consensus in the 1980s. This economic shift was a violent process, both structurally and physically, via the incursion of a militarized police force into our communities, events that dominated my childhood. These are the kinship relations, abusive and caring, that created my life.

I was formally educated in the dominant Western tradition of organic chemistry, continental theory, and linear history, though I was the first in my family (many of whom are skeptical of “book learning”) to go to university. I have a professional academic job and am therefore materially provided for through, and deeply complicit in reproducing, the political economic structure of colonial capitalism. I exist in a world characterized by environmental harms, social injustice, and—for me personally—plentiful access to food, loving relationships with human kin, a privileged position in an imagined racial and cultural hierarchy, and an absence of hunger. I am surrounded by a wilful societal refusal to own or recognize much of the above. I find the cultures of academia to lack humanity and accountability. This is the root of a deep ambivalence to the academy, where I often feel like an outsider in a system I cannot fully adapt to, because I do not fully approve of it, though I recognize it both allows for my material sustenance and, like my whiteness, provides me with immense privilege. I cannot disown the violent and brutal more-than-human patriarchs that have both traumatized and protected me, which continue to steer and uphold my everyday practices, and that sustain and advantage me: in this sense, with capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and climate change, I am close kin.

I am also, as the story will lay out below, close kin with reactive nitrogen. This story is not the full story of reactive nitrogen, but the story of how I understand it, which is characteristic of its relationship with me, and therefore my other more-than-human kin. It tells you as much about me as it does about it; and was formed, as family stories are, through stories from others I have relations with, piecemeal, added together to create a narrative that tells me something about myself.

Reactive Nitrogen: Kin That Brings Death and Allows Life

Reactive nitrogen (or N_r) is the collective term for a family of nitrogenous compounds including ammonia (NH₃), ammonium (NH₄), nitrite (NO₂) and nitrate (NO₃), nitric oxide (NO) and nitrous oxide (N₂) which are interrelated and are constantly in flux in the environment (May and Rector 2011). A key characteristic of N_r species is that they support growth; N_r is thus one of the most important chemical compounds in agriculture. I was told my first stories about N_r a family of invisible shape-shifting elements, by environmental science—a topic I was driven to study at university due to a generalized sense of care about “the world” informed by media narratives of inequality, development, and environmental collapse (Vogelaar, Hale, and Peat 2018). Within this context, as someone who grew up in a rural environment, the ecological impacts of fertilizer had a particular resonance for me. This interest led to me working in a postdoctoral position looking at nutrient pollution from British farms (see Cardwell and Waterton 2019). From here, environmental stories about N_r led me to care about its relations and effected a desire to be response-able (Haraway 2016).

Environmental science taught me that, over the twentieth century, the metabolisms of Earth's nitrogen cycle have doubled, an increase largely due to the invention of the industrial means to fix (or make reactive) inert nitrogen. This industrial innovation is understood as both a good and bad thing: ready availability of N_r is the most important aspect of the reported successes of the “green revolution” that is considered to have supported human population growth and well-being since World War II. The key role of N_r in the “great acceleration”, Vaclav Smil (2004) argues, makes industrial N fixation the most significant invention of the twentieth century, way beyond the internet, television, or atom bomb.

But N_r overloading also has deleterious effects on marine ecosystems, leading to “dead zones” and killing coral reefs, destroying biodiversity, and accelerating species loss. Reactive nitrogen species are one of the most serious causes of air pollution, the biggest damager of stratospheric ozone since chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) (Solomon 2021); and nitrous oxide, one species of N_r is one of the three main chemical compounds implicated in climate change, with 298 times the atmospheric heat-trapping ability of CO2 (IPCC 2007).

Reactive nitrogen is thus a significant pollutant: yet it feeds us. Plants cannot grow without it and animals cannot live without it. It is not inherently toxic, but vital to life. Even in the body, medical scientists call the effects of N_r paradoxical, both cancerous and curative (Galadari et al. 2017). The industrial production of N_r further subverts the idea of chemicals as unnatural: industrially produced N_r in the form of ammonia, is materially identical to its organic counterpart. The energy used in its production, however, is a significant contributor to climate change. The vast quantities of N_r circulating the earth now make this one of the biggest anthropogenic impacts on Earth's metabolisms. In absolute terms, anthropogenic emissions of carbon from fossil fuel combustion are less than 10 percent of the annual carbon uptake by photosynthesis. In comparison, human activities convert more nitrogen into reactive forms than all Earth's terrestrial processes combined (Rockström et al. 2009). As a chemical pollutant, N_r species cannot be socially categorized as simply “unnatural” in the way microplastics or endocrine disruptors are (see critiques from Liboiron 2021; Shadaan and Murphy 2020). As such, N_r is impossible to categorize as either good or bad, natural or unnatural. Both its benefits and harms are products of its easy relatability, and its effects are entirely dependent on where it is, and what it is relating to.

Reactive nitrogen defies ontologies of individualism and can only be understood in relation. The reactivity that makes it either a pollutant or a nutrient is relationally determined. The fundamental characteristic of the N_r family is the way it relates. Most of the air around us is nitrogen—about 80 percent of the composition, N2. Atmospheric nitrogen, however, is stable and unreactive, its chemical bonds are remarkably strong. We breathe it in and breathe it straight out. We pass through it, and it passes through us. It is so inert its early names—azote, mephitic air—literally mean “no life.” It does not react (does relation require reaction, the response in response-ability?). And yet, in its reactive forms—the various nitrogen species in which those strong atmospheric bonds have been broken, and new compounds created that are ready to interrelate with other chemicals to make something new—nitrogen is life. It is key to development and growth in living organisms, a building block of protein and DNA. It provides the energy for plants and animals to grow, but is also a powerful explosive, and has played a vital role in human warfare and state-sanctioned murder for centuries.

The process by which nitrogen is made reactive and relatable is called fixation. In “nature,” nitrogen can only be fixed from inert “dead air” to a lively form that nurtures growth by lightning or by cyanobacteria. Including, importantly, rhizobium bacteria, which fix nitrogen in symbiosis with the roots of certain plants. Other plants and animals then rely on the nitrogen fixed by this symbiosis for growth. The most common nitrogen-fixing rhizomatic symbiosis is in the roots of legumes such as beans and clover: this is the reason for the traditional “three sisters” model, the cornerstone of agriculture for Indigenous communities across Mesoamerica. Reactive nitrogen is a vital relational element in the interdependencies of the living web of life. According to environmental scientists, N_r is “the stuff of life” (Galloway and Cowling 2002, 64), just as inert nitrogen is “no life” (Holland 2020, 4919). Across ancient civilizations, anywhere humans have adopted agriculture, whether given a name or not, the inherent vitality of N_r means that people have sought it out—either by encouraging rhizobia and other cyanobacteria by inserting themselves into this multi-symbiosis, planting legumes or leaving ground “fallow” (Kimmerer 2013); or through the recycling of nutrients from animal—including human—waste. As the supply of N_r most commonly limits agricultural productivity, environmental scientist Jeffrey Leigh (2004) argues that, from the Romans to the Maya to the dynasties of Ancient China, the supply of N_r has determined the level of population and the quality of human life throughout history.

Unlike other key nutrients in plant growth, such as phosphorous and potash, which can be (and now primarily are) mined, N_r is very hard to come by “naturally.” It cannot be provided via extractivism for mass application when linear productivity, rather than circular reciprocity, is the focus of agricultural methods, such as in capitalist plantation systems. It is always ephemeral. Where potash and phosphorous can accumulate in soil, N_r enters other relationships easily, making it quickly unavailable, so supply must be continuously replenished or land is exhausted. Therefore, when new frontiers of agricultural accumulation are not readily available, N_r is a fertilization priority. This ephemerality of easy relation is why so much nitrogen is industrially produced, and the nitrogen cycle so disrupted.

Justus von Liebig is often credited as the father of organic chemistry and thus the father of the industrial agricultural system (Brock 2002). Liebig's key contribution to the world food system was the identification of chemicals, particularly nitrogen, as the most important limiting factor in crop growth: this knowledge has shaped agricultural science and practice immeasurably since the 1840s, and the recent interest in soil in science and technology studies—from scholars such as Bruno Latour (2014), and María Puig de la Bellacasa (2015)—can best be understood as a reaction to the dominance of Liebig's “chemical” model of plant nutrition, and the subsequent dismissal of the importance of humus. Shortly after Liebig isolated the role of chemicals in plant growth, the first ever scientific “field trial” was set up in 1856 to test Liebig's claims, particularly about nitrogen, at the Rothamsted research station in England (Aulie 1974)—an important benchmark in the development of science. Rothamsted's research paved the way for the industrial fixation of nitrogen in Germany in 1913. These are the foundations of agricultural science and its close kin, industrial agriculture. In the current global food system, these are the relations that feed me and give me life, while having deleterious effects on people and planet. These relations also shape my experience of the English countryside and connection to place. The “improvement” of the land, through applications of various fertilizers and crop rotations, was the political justification for the enclosure that left my ancestors unable to feed themselves autonomously and reliant on capital and the state for their lives.

Saltpetre, Sovereignty, and State Power in England

In my efforts to get to know N_r many environmental science sources mention as an aside the other primary use of N_r beyond fertilization: as an explosive. These ostensibly separate uses, though rarely entangled by disciplinary science, cannot be disconnected if I want to relate to nitrogen as kin, rather than transactionally, focusing purely on the way it serves a particular need. To investigate, I left the environmental realm to get to know nitrogen as guns as well as butter. And as both guns and butter, nitrogen is entangled within the production of my life.

Even though nitrogen wasn't isolated and named (made individual in the model of mechanist capitalist ontology) until the eighteenth century, and its importance for life and growth wasn't isolated until Liebig in the nineteenth, the relational affinities of materials that were primarily composed of what would later be called N_r were prized as fertilizer and weapons before the emergence of those chemical ontologies. One of these phenomena, a species of the sociomaterial assemblage that is N_r is saltpetre, also called “niter,” a form of crystallized, efflorescent potassium nitrate deposits, which form when decaying organic material (such as dung or corpses) accumulate in a dry enough place that the N_r does not too readily relate and change, therefore remaining available to make new life. Under these conditions, this niter can either form naturally, if undisturbed over long periods of time, or be given a helping hand to purify through various acts of processing. For centuries, the death and dung of niter was the most concentrated form in which N_r could be found in Britain (Robertson 2016).

Niter, or saltpetre, as I'll refer to it from now on, has been generally ignored in human-focused history, but has been written about extensively by David Cressy. Cressy (2013) describes how in the early modern period, saltpetre was prized for fertilization and explosive properties, but no one understood how it was made. “I cannot tell how to be resolved, to say what thing properly it is,” said Elizabethan theorist Peter Whitehorne, “except it seemeth it have the sovereignty and quality of every element” (quoted in Cressy 2013, 14). For early scientists, N_r messed with the ontological order. Saltpetre was thus associated with the divine, and Francis Bacon called it the “spirit of the earth.” “It is vegetable, animal and mineral,” puzzled Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century. It was considered to have “hermaphroditical” qualities, impossible to classify, “universally diffused through all the elements” (Cressy 2013, 14).

The mystical element-that-is-all-the-elements, with its queer properties of life and death, was prized for fertilization, but most important was making gunpowder. Gunpowder is mostly saltpetre, with a small mix of brimstone (which is sulphur) and coal. And in the early modern period of colonization, war and statecraft, gunpowder was very important, which made saltpetre the philosopher's stone of power. Historians' controversial “military revolution” was a period of radical change in military organization and technology that was attributed as necessitating major changes in government: the rise of the use of firearms led to changes in military organization, which enabled, and required, a concentration of power. To borrow from historian Michael Roberts (1956), the modern art of war made possible—and necessary—the creation of the modern state. There's a big interest in gunpowder in military history because of its significance for statecraft, but very little about the practical materialities it entailed. As Cressy points out, “Military historians' arguments about the timing, content and consequences of the 'military revolution' that produced the modern nation state, address the cost and performance of cannonry, siegecraft and gun-equipped armies, but tend to take the logistics of firepower for granted” (2011, 77).

Historians only talk about gunpowder as a driver of changed military tactics. Not about how it's made, or where these nascent states got the raw materials from. And the gunpowder that led to the formation of the modern state was made from N_r in the form of saltpetre. At the time, no one really understood what saltpetre was, but they knew where to find it: dry and dirty ground, dusty places of old life, such as caves or tombs. It could accumulate naturally over time in very arid areas, or be forced from earth where the dung and urine of beasts (or people) has accumulated in a dry and sheltered spot. At this time in England, a wet land where the keeping of animals in the home was common, and water-based sewage systems were not used, these conditions were easier to find than they might be today, but only in the most intimate of domestic spaces.

The huge strategic importance of gunpowder in early modern England meant sovereigns needed N_r in the form of saltpetre, which led to the state designation of “saltpetre men”: soldiers who had the universal right to invade any property, home, or even church (though this caused some controversy) to dig up dried-up old urine, bones, and dung. Historical records show that for approximately two hundred years between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, English people were plagued in their homes by saltpetre gathering, and this “grief and discontentment” and “great grievance and disturbance” was a significant problem for those in power, who needed “to provide for her majesty's stores by all means possible” regardless of “damage, intrusion, discommodity, and distress” (Cressy 2013, 68, 68, 66, 66). According to a report on the king's saltpetre men published in 1630, they dug “in all places without distinction, as in parlours, bedchambers, threshing floors and malting houses and shops; yea, God's own house they have not forborne, but have digged in churches, hallowed chapels and churchyards, tearing men's bones and ashes out of their graves to make gunpowder of” (quoted in Cressy 2013, 102-103). They respected not season, digging in breeding time in dove houses, working sometimes a month together, without respect to harvest time, in barns and in malting houses, when green malt is on the floor; and in bedchambers, “placing their tubs by bedsides of the old and sick, impotent and diseased, of women with their children sucking at their breasts, and even of women in childbed and of sick persons lying on their deathbeds” (quoted in Cressy 2013, 103).

I do not know if my ancestors, who at this time must have been tenant peasantry, were personally visited by the saltpetre men in the early modern period: the significance of gunpowder for the English war machine, and the sheer volumes of niter necessary, suggest it's likely. The distress and disruption caused by collection was so high that it was suggested only houses of “inferior persons” be raided, so “the better sort not be meddled with” (contemporaneous source, quoted in Cressy, 2013, 67). I see here the lives of the poor bound up in the increasing power of an intrusive state, as mine still is; a relationship that is key to the stories and values I have been given, and the patterns and phenomena of my everyday life. Cressy's story of N_r's relationship with gunpowder tells me something new and important about the intimacy and oppression of my ancestral relation with the state, and how these historic palimpsests affect my other relations, with science, capital, and power.

In the introduction to biopower in The Will to Knowledge, Michel Foucault states, “for a long time, one of the characteristics of sovereign power was the right to decide life or death...the sovereign evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (1978, 135). On the introduction of gunpowder into western Europe, sovereign rights to saltpetre extraction were quickly established—giving the state ultimate power over N_r. Power in this instance, as Foucault describes, was a right of seizure: of things, times, bodies; and at the root of it was the threat of death. Not only did the state have “sovereign right” over saltpetre, this power extended to the right to procure it anywhere, regardless of the privacy or personal boundaries of the lower classes; thus the oppressive intrusions of the saltpetre men. Foucault's sovereign right over death, then, had a material as well as a judicial aspect, which focused on gunpowder.

My attempt to understand nitrogen as my kin brings intimate bodily materialities and practices to Foucault's theories. It is a spatial and relational account of Foucault's analysis of power: the saltpetre men at the door, digging up the bedroom floor around the laboring mother, disturbing the household doves, stealing your grandmother's shit. A resentment of the intrusion of the state into the most intimate of domestic spaces, much like the resentment at the intrusive practices of state policing during the 1984 miners' strike that marked the atmospheres of my childhood (J. Gilmore 2019), which existed alongside very real awareness of dependency on that same intrusive state, after the jobs in the mines were gone. This combination of threat, intrusion, and dependency are the spatial and material practices of state power in England, during both my childhood and the saltpetre-gathering era of the witch trials, when many of the old and sick and “women with their children sucking at their breasts” (Cressy 2013, 103) were executed based on unfounded accusations of unnatural power (Federici 2004).

Nitrogen and Imperial Power

The quest for reactive nitrogen, for fertilization and gunpowder, played a huge role in the expansive activities of the sovereign. Reactive nitrogen was key in the imperative for, and means of, empire. As well as military uses, gunpowder was consumed in large quantities in the practices of colonialism. By miners and engineers, hunters and fur traders, slave traders and settler-farmers clearing land. Its trade was expansive, and saltpetre was one of the first globalized commodities. European prospectors explored the world looking for saltpetre in the Americas, Africa, and the East.

The intimate invasions of the saltpetre men in England only stopped after saltpetre began to be imported in huge quantities from India in the seventeenth century, which dwarfed the domestic supply and transformed the saltpetre economy. The India trade created a boom in nitrogen availability comparable to that of anthropogenically created N_r in the twentieth century. The import and export of this saltpetre was key in the development of the East India Company, and its political relationships in both India and Europe. As India became the most important source of N_r access to N_r became the key to “the strength of war” and necessary for “the defence and safety of the realm” (Frey 2009, 509). In the words of historian James Frey, “the British takeover of Bengal in 1757 secured [East India] Company control and permitted the monopolization of the saltpeter trade. The significance of these events cannot be underestimated. By seizing Bengal, the British exerted mastery over 70 percent of the world's saltpeter production during the latter part of the eighteenth century” (509). The British state had acquired a monopoly over the biggest known N_rstores in the world, which literally provided the material means—the firepower—for imperial expansion; an expansion that both dispossessed and enriched my family and tied us into an abusive web of relations with millions around the world.

Nitrogen and Biopower

As my relational genealogy of nitrogen comes into the nineteenth century, I will return to Foucault and the birth of biopower. Foucault writes about the shift in power at this time towards biopolitics; from the ability to “take life or let live” to that to “foster or disallow life”: “the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (1978, 139). Foucault situates this transformation in the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of biopower” (139). Biopower is broken down into, first, the discipling and optimization of the body as a machine—the increase in its usefulness, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls—and second, the regulation of the species body, the population—births and mortality, interventions in life expectancy.

In the nineteenth century, there was a marked and corresponding shift in the discursive preoccupations with N_r: with increased interest in controlling access to N_r not as weaponry, but as fertilizer, and its role in the constitution both of ideal bodies and ideal populations. Parish records show how, during this era, my ancestors begin to be “improved” by state education, just as the land they once resided on is being “improved” by agricultural inputs. They are still poor, though now many are living in urban slums and working in mills and on railway construction, rather than in agriculture. Now the men can write their names on their marriage certificates, even as many of the women still mark with an X. At this time, the main source of N_r to fertilize British fields and increase yield to feed the landless shifts from India to South America, leading to imperialism and “nitrate wars” over desert deposits and dry bird shit in Chile and Peru (Clark and Foster 2009).

Influenced by the role of nitrogen in growth as identified by Liebig in the 1840s, and no doubt influenced by its role in imperial expansion, nitrogen, as a protein, begins to be presented as a key constitutive of the optimal, useful, and morally right human body in the late nineteenth century. Arnaud Page (2018), a historian of the British Empire, shows how N_r and access to it, was used to rank and categorize the peoples of the imperial world. Lots of nitrogen in your diet and body made you savage, wild, and turbulent; a lack of it led to mild, tractable, and lethargic temperament. The “wheat- and meat-” eating nations of western Europe were considered highly nitrogenous and therefore vigorous, whereas “rice eaters” were weak and indolent, because they lacked the life given by nitrogen. The logics of white supremacy, and their dynamics in my life, are elucidated by this relationship between science, state, and empire. The bread of my mill-working paternal ancestors in Manchester, the land worked by my agricultural laborer maternal ancestors on the farms of Yorkshire, the nutrients that formed my body were supplied by the imperial forces of white supremacy, debt peonage, war, and death in India, Chile, and Peru.

Fertilization was so closely tied to science, racism, and colonialism that in 1898 William Crookes, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, argued in his inaugural address that access to N_r was the key to the survival of the “great Caucasian race” (Page, 2016, 386) because “civilized nations” relied on wheat for their staple food and were threatened with starvation by rising population and shrinking arable land. This perception of scarcity was a massive preoccupation among British elites at the time. The productivity of land had to be increased by finding new sources of nitrogen that, ideally, did not rely on international trade, and therefore competition and war. For the British elite, “in the fight between the West and the rest of the world, the only salvation for the 'bread-eaters of the world' was nitrogen” (Page 2016, 386).

Nitrogen and the Age of Industrial Farming

After centuries of obsession with acquiring “naturally” produced N_r the industrial fixation of nitrogen from air, through the hugely energy intensive Haber-Bosch process, was invented in Germany in 1913, under the imperative of war. This imperative was both the power to create life, through fertilization that wasn't dependent on limited resources in the Global South, and power to force death, through the ready production of munitions. It was celebrated as “the greatest victory which the chemist has won in the fight...against Nature” (Page 2016, 390). It also created the technoscientific foundations for chemical warfare and Nazi genocide, and formed the basis for the gas that asphyxiated multiple members of Jewish Haber's family (Charles 2011). Haber's ability to fix N_r gave life and took life. He won the Nobel Prize, and his wife committed suicide in protest over her husband's chemical interventions.

The anthropogenic fixation of nitrogen is a huge industrial process, and in the war-torn early years of the twentieth century, was adopted enthusiastically by states worldwide for its vital importance in weaponry: the great acceleration of nitrogenous geoengineering. When peacetime came, government priorities were developing non-military uses of all the N_r these industrial facilities had the capacity to produce, to keep them working in case of another war. This meant a switch from weaponry to fertilizer. The incentivization, through promise and force, of the uptake of this new commodity of life and death was imperative to the green revolution, which remade agricultural systems worldwide: moving us away from a life built by Haraway's beloved compost (see Page 2019), and towards a strictly chemical, high-input, industrial-capitalist relation with the world—what Vandana Shiva (1991) calls the violence of the green revolution. Shiva (2004) describes how the combined industrialization, chemicalization, and capital restructuring of green-revolution agriculture led to thousands of farmer suicides in India. One of the most popular forms of suicide among farmers across the Global South is the ingestion of Paraquat, an N_rbased herbicide (see Widger 2018). Miles away from India, in a small village in Yorkshire, one of my own kin uses the compensation from an industrial accident to return to the land he was dispossessed from, buying himself a farm. Unable to stay afloat, he took his life by drinking the Paraquat he'd bought to make it more productive.

Ontological Politics and Kinship Relations

How do all these connected stories frame how I understand nitrogen as my kin, and what does this mean for how I understand myself? Science suggests the agricultural system is killing the planet. Massive increases in nitrogen are leading to ecological devastation, especially considering, as Matt Huber (2017) points out, how resource, energy, and emission intensive the nitrogen fertilizer industry is. But the “nitrogen problem” isn't just a problem, it's also a solution. It keeps food cheap and readily available, and it helps keep us alive, operating within a particular high-chemical-input, low-labor-input agricultural system that suits capitalism and private property. Smil (2004) estimates that without industrial nitrogen, our food production would drop so significantly that 50 percent of the world's population would not be alive today, as they could not be fed. Taking these scientific generalizations otherwise, this means 50 percent of the protein in my body is made up from war, imperialism, and climate change. Yet organic N_r and chemical N_r are not materially discrete, beyond the method of their production. They behave exactly alike in the environment. There's no meaningful distinction between the synthetic and the natural. Reactive nitrogen isn't a toxicant. It kills some, and it gives life to others. This is not simply about death, but too much life. Who gets to live and who doesn't? Who eats and who suffers? It's important to recognize that this nitrogen sustains me as it kills its victims.

As discussed above, the definition of kinship used in this paper draws on the work of Tynan (2020, 2021), but I also want to reference here Kim TallBear (2019). According to TallBear, kinship is an ontology and mode of being in relation, based on “material connectedness among many generations: those whose bodies may now/still exist within organismically defined understandings of life, those entities that do not meet that definition, and other bodies whose materiality has been transferred back to the earth and out into that web of relation, or whose bodies are not yet formed of already existing matter” (25-26).

TallBear's definition speaks closely to the web of life and death these N_r stories describe, the connectedness across time and space, and the mattering of nitrogenous kin. It is this relationality that trying to understand N_r evokes for me. But what does it mean for me, personally, to draw on these relationships? Meaningful critiques have been made of the appropriation of “kinship” by white or settler academics, with these terms often used interchangeably. Max Liboiron, for example, describes white-settler academics talking about kinship as “hella creepy” (2021, 110), and Zoe Todd warns that “when anthropologists and other assembled social scientists sashay in and start cherry-picking parts of Indigenous thought that appeal to them without engaging directly in (or unambiguously acknowledging) the political situation, agency, legal orders and relationality of both Indigenous people and scholars, we immediately become complicit in colonial violence” (2016, 18).

As a “working-class” white British woman, when I read work by Indigenous scholars and recognize aspects of my own belief system and experience, it is difficult to know how to approach the politics of my recognition. I cannot distance myself from whiteness and the unearned privilege it bestows, which I greatly benefit from, but I also do not fit completely into the identity of whiteness that settler-colonial territorial literatures describe. This is particularly true when it comes to kinship ontologies, which I recognize as a significant part of my own relational becoming before my socialization into the dominant ontologies of the academy. As capitalism and colonialism progressed “abroad,” a subsection of British people was dispossessed of land and political rights “at home” through enclosures and the strengthening of state power (Greer 2012). Many of them used the escape hatch of colonialism to flee their dispossession by becoming the foot soldiers of imperialism: this ready supply of desperate (and I would add, traumatized) settlers is, according to historian James Hawes, the key to the success of Britain's empire: though France “was no less keen on empire...it never had large numbers of landless peasants so desperate that they would risk their lives in barely-discovered countries on the far side of the world” (2020, 123). Yet some of the dispossessed stayed put, creating a group that, though racially white, were historically denied the personhood granted under British capitalism by property ownership and recognition by the state (MacPherson 2010; Moreton-Robinson 2015). A key collective response to this denial was to find value not in property, but in relationships (Skeggs 2011); meaning, as the ethnographic work of Beverley Skeggs describes, many in the working class of England—including those who are white—have a fundamentally different political ontology than that of liberal capitalism, based on relationality rather than individualism, and placing the highest value on loyalty, care, affection, respect, and reciprocity, rather than individual property or achievement (Skeggs and Loveday 2012). Although these political subjects were later granted the privileging property of whiteness, and are deeply complicit in racism, intersectional aspects of identity mean that for many a relational ontology remains, although it is as distinct from Indigenous thought as it is from dominant Western individualism.

Thinking with kinship is a familiar register to me, though one that exists within the context of relationships that I recognize as toxic and abusive, both for myself and for others. Although capitalism and poverty are as deeply racialized in England as they are elsewhere around the world (see Edmiston, Begum and Kataria 2022), the poverty rate for whites in the UK (19%) is much closer to that of African Americans (19.5%) than whites (8.2%) in the US (Edmiston, Begum, and Kataria 2022; Shrider et al. 2021). There are “significant overlap in everyday lived experiences” of “the 'white working class' and 'ethnic or migrant working class'” in England (Snoussi and Mompelat 2019, 4). As Faiza Shaheen describes, “The British Empire meant that a global working class was put to work. From the indentured labourers working in sugar cane fields in Fiji, to those working in the mills in Wigan, and all of those enslaved across the Empire—all contributed to the wealth of the landed gentry and indeed all were oppressed by a system of power that privileged a handful at the top” (quoted in Snoussi and Mompelat 2019, 3).

Like the chemicals described by Balayannis and Garnett (2020), the British white working class can never be “entirely good nor bad.” We are tools of colonialism, beneficiaries and victims. We benefit from our whiteness, but our ways of being do not entirely align with the disciplinary logics of white supremacy. This paradox is something I feel deeply as an interlocutor in academia, a social system that was not designed for my participation (Crew 2021; Ricket and Morris 2021). The “intellectual elite” are most associated by the kin I grew up with as actors in state power and oppression, authoritative people that serve the interest of the establishment, who cannot be trusted to relate to others with openness, equality, and respect. The close historical relationship between dispossession, capital, and science in English history is a key factor in the development of that perception, and a likely driver of my interest in the critiques made by feminist technoscience and my identification with anti-colonial critique.

Kinship, Science, and the State

My kinships mean that for me, the role of chemistry, and dominant science (Liboiron 2021) as my primary means of being-with an ephemeral element, also trouble my wider relations. I can call these phenomena “nitrogen” and describe their harms statistically, because of the same colonial and oppressive structures that created those harms. What does that relationship mean? On one hand, thinking with chemistry demands a process oriented and relational ontology that is promising as a pragmatic epistemology for relating to, and being within, the world—such as found in the work of Isabelle Stengers (2016). Yet as queer theorist Jordy Rosenberg (2014) points out, in chemical materialism, the atomic can become a depoliticized “sublime miniature” at which an “ontological wonder” can bloom without threat to neoliberal settler colonialism or financialized capital accumulation. At the level of the molecular, Rosenberg argues that vital materialism becomes a radical bewilderment without radicality, a fanaticism without political affect.

In a historicized sense, there are two sides to this chemical-molecular coin. On one side, it acts as a radical rejoinder to the non-relational, individuated autonomy of object-oriented ontologies (OOO), a logic closely tied to algorithmic late capitalism, as pointed out by Alexander Galloway (2013), who reminds us in his scathing critique of OOO that any ontology is political. Following Latour, Galloway asks, “What would an object-oriented democracy look like?...These democracies already exist. Their ugly sheen covers our beaches and deltas. Their object-oriented infrastructure skims off unpaid surplus-value from living networks. They provide the communications channels in and out of the maquiladoras” (363). Chemical ontologies move us beyond this form of relation by taking as true that relations of discursivity and materiality are circular and intra-active (Barad 2007). And yet...it is perhaps in the focus on the chemical that this “ontological turn” differs most sharply from the Indigenous philosophies it borrows so heavily from (Todd 2016).

So much of the environmental crisis compels us, as ordinary citizens, to “think chemically”—understanding our carbon footprint, invisible leaching from microplastics, endocrine disruptors people pee out with their contraceptive pill, the ozone effects of the CFCs humming away in our fridges. The earth-conscious citizen is the chemically conscious citizen. The official line is that to “tackle” the end of the world as we know it, everyone must become a chemical subject, and our awareness must get more molecular. But did I relate better to land as kin before I knew about Liebig's chemicals, even if I had less of a grasp on the scientific principles of maximizing yield?

Academic science and industrial agriculture cannot be separated. And though I can do interesting ontological things with chemicals, if my prime aim in knowledge generation is “saving the world,” my wider web of relations means I'm not entirely convinced I should. As someone who moved relatively late into the academic order of knowledge and power, after having only a very rudimentary basis of “book” education for the first twenty-six years of my life, it's hard for me to separate the relations between agricultural science and my other problems with close-yet-abusive kin: capital, colonialism, and the state.

As such, my exploration of my relationship with nitrogen leaves me philosophically drawn to the Native American epistemologies laid out by Brian Yazzie Burkhart (2004), which stress that there's a moral act in accepting that people should not speak or act regarding certain things, and cannot speak or act regarding others—that knowledge is not prepositional, and if the world rests on the back of a turtle, the most ethical option is maybe just to embrace that it's turtles all the way down. If I'm going to get chemical in my kinships, perhaps I should face an uncomfortable truth: so far, the master's tools have not worked so well at breaking down the master's house (Lorde 2003)—even in the hands of the master's children. Maybe there are other, better ways to be kin with the life-and-death force now called “nitrogen” than through chemistry.

So how can I live with, and understand, my kin? As someone who cannot deny my relationships, and how they both provide for me and abuse myself and others; as an academic concerned with relations with the social, the ethical, and the philosophical, how can I understand the chemical kin I'm living with and living through, as political and economic agents, and be reflexive of my practical, intra-personal and intergenerational relationships with them? The truth is, I don't (yet) know.

With this contribution, I am following Ruth Wilson Gilmore's instruction that we recognize “quantum physics' key insight that the observer and the observed are in the same critical field” (2022, 96). I am trying to make sense of the complex phenomena that are my many and varied relations, and my role in them. It is from this ontological position that I understand my relationship with colonialism and science; and my other relationships shape my understanding of, and storytelling about, N_ras my kin. I'm therefore making two related interventions: one is about nitrogen, and relationships between humans and chemicals. The other is about positionality in relationality, and how I make sense of the interdependencies of stories, and therefore the co-construction of my own realities with those of others. What are the different emancipatory and ethical potentials of how these are woven together? I wanted to share a story about nitrogen, to affect how you relate to it. But through telling that story I inevitably invite you to relate to me. Maybe, in response, you could tell a story of your own? Any experience or thought this story might resonate with, criticisms that you have, lights shone on my blind spots. Then, through telling and listening, we will better understand ourselves and each other. Carefully, sometimes painfully, we will participate in a process of relation, and see how life unfolds as we co-produce our world.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Anne Pollock, Joanne Muzak and two anonymous peer reviewers for their contributions to this article. I'd also like to thank Claire Waterton for reading and commenting on an earlier version, and for lots of generative discussions about fertilizer and nutrients. And John Law, for similar fertilizing-fertilizer talk. I thank my colleagues at LEC and NTU for making my academic life a comfortable one, as well as Sarah Hughes, Deborah Dixon, and Heather McLean. I thank my family and all the people who have imparted wisdom that has influenced me—particularly Laurie Fisher, Sarah Kozaczek, Eve Harden, Warren Draper, Arshad Isakjee, Julia McClure, Anna Chadwick, Nate Millington, Esther Hitchen, Becca Harrison, Natalia Szarek, Kate Keller, Cath Muller, Francis Adu, Emma Burtt, Michael Whitson, Michael Lomotey, José Herrero, Levi Gahman, Kyle Lonsdale, Sara/h Pickles, and Emma Gittens. I thank the land and woods I was lucky enough to grow up in, and the community I live in now. Any mistakes are mine and not attributed to those mentioned here.

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Author Bio

Emma Cardwell is a lecturer in economic geography at Lancaster University.