Even a part of the technosphere as close to nature as the farm suffers from the same sort of clash with the environment. As man-made object, the farm is designed for the sole purpose of producing crops. Guided by that purpose, after World War, agronomists urged the increasingly heavy application of chemical nitrogen fertilizer. Yields rose, but not in proportion to the rate of fertilizer application; year by year less and less of the applied fertilizer was aken up by he crop and progressive more drained through the soil into groundwater, in the form of nitrate that contaminated rivers, lakes, and water supplies. Nitrogen fertilizer is commodity sold with the narrow purpose of raising yields and manufactured with the even narrower purpose of increasing the chemical industry's profits. When inorganic nitrogen fertilizer was introduced in the 1950s, little or no attention was paid to its ecological behavior in the soil/water system or to the harmful effects of elevated nitrate levels in drinking water.

The second law of ecology—"Everything has to go somewhere"—together with the first, expresses the fundamental importance of cycles in the ecosphere. In the aquatic ecosystem, for example, the participating chemical elements move through closed cyclical processes. As they respire, fish produce carbon dioxide, which in turn is absorbed by aquatic plants and is used, photosynthetically, to produce oxygen, which the fish respire. The fish excrete nitrogen-containing organic compounds in their waste; when the waste is metabolized by aquatic bacteria and molds, the organic nitrogen is converted to nitrate; this, in turn, is an essential nutrient for the aquatic algae; these, ingested by the fish contribute to their organic waste, and the cycle is complete. In such a closed, circular system, there is no such mthing as "waste"; everything that is produced in one part of the cycle "goes somewhere" and is used in later step.