And when you get down to it, all natural products like paper and wood, cotton and wool, leather and honey are just as much chemicals as plastic and ink, fertilizer and drugs- that is, they are all made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, iron and other elements. When you really get down to it, oranges and apples, rabbits and horses, you and I are made of chemicals. We are chemicals. And just as more knowledge of chemicals in the biosphere can lead to ways of preventing any more Minamatas, so too it can lead to a multiplication of Black Earths. We didn't explain that example yet.
Good news takes longer to make interesting.
To understand Black Earth, we need to start with the air. We can survive a few weeks without food, a few days without water, but only a few minutes without that mixture of chemicals we call air. Air also has very small quantities of other chemicals, some put there through natural processes and some put there through human initiated processes. Each of the four major gases in the air is absolutely essential to the life of the biosphere and each one is in continual movement into and out of living creatures. Oxygen, for instance.