Narratives of Nettle: Austerity, Nitrophiles, and the Weed Garden as a Locus of Resistance

It is not merely a Shakespearean botanical metaphor that journalist Clyde Farnsworth invokes in the title of his postwar history of Europe, Out of This Nettle (1974), echoing Hotspur's concession that "out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety" from Henry IV (1801, 247, originally c. 1597). In many senses, as this chapter will argue, the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) embodies the history of excess and austerity-of global capitalism and environmental destruction-since the mid-twentieth century. In the decades following World War II, chemical fertilizers and pesticides instigated the broadscale expansion of industrial agriculture around the globe. The postwar era heralded an unprecedented movement away from dwersp, small-scale, and regionalized farming practices and toward monocultural, intensive, and internationalized crop regimes (Smil2000, 57). Encouraged by Western subsidies, the worldwide use of synthetic fertilizers grew 8 percent per annum during the 1950s and peaked in 1988 (Giovanni 2005, 53-55). Between 1982 and 1998, additionally, pesticide consumption climbed at a steady rate of 3 percent each year. Of all chemical agents facilitating this agricultural transformation, nitrogen has proved especially integral. In the 1950s in Europe and North America, nitrogen production escalated, thanks to the increased consumption of animal products, the introduction of corn varieties with higher fertilizer requirements, and other factors (Smil 2001, 116). Since the mid-twentieth century, however, the expanding market for nitrogen-based fertilizers has precipitated a multitude of adverse ecological effects (Smil 2001, 133). As a case in point, during the 1970s, nitrate concentrations rose sharply in surface and underground water sources, resulting in eutrophication where high nutrient levels in water bodies cause oxygen depletion and trigger the mass decline of aquatic organisms (Smil 2000, 189). The trend toward nitrogenization continued until the early 1990s when the first significant global abatement in ammonia production since World War II occurred (Smil 2001, 109).