TEAR up the textbooks. Send the soil scientists back to school. Our
understanding of how the world’s plants absorb and release nitrogen turns out to
be completely wrong. Instead of measuring the workings of undisturbed
ecosystems, a hundred years’ worth of botany studies have been recording the
effects of man-made pollution.
For over a century, researchers thought they had the nitrogen cycle licked.
They measured how plants absorbed and released inorganic nitrogen into soils and
streams, and used this information to build models of how life on Earth works.
The dogma was that plants grow by naturally absorbing inorganic nitrogen.…
