In an environmental sense, the Haber Bosch process has vastly increased not only the total output but also the efficiency of farmland, meaning that less land was now needed per person to fulfill their caloric needs. Today, this allows for only fifteen percent of Earth’s ice free land to satisfy humanity’s caloric needs, as compared to about fifty percent that would be needed without Haber’s invention (Smil, 2015, p.10).

On the other hand, the anthropogenic output of nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process is presently approaching that of all terrestrial life on earth, while the complexities of nitrogen’s natural absorption mechanisms make it hardly avoidable that only about half of applied fertilizers will be used up by food crops (Smil, 2004, p.177).

Put together, the two above factors all but guarantee that large quantities of reactive nitrogen leach into the environment and disrupt various natural processes through mechanisms such as eutrophication (Smil, 2004, p.192).