"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it... It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled."
--Hard Times, Charles Dickens


At the moment, a bill promoting "Coal-to-Liquid" (CTL) is quietly making its way through Congress. As its name suggests, CTL uses a chemical process to convert coal into a liquid, which can then be further converted into fuel for cars and planes. In an age when alternatives to petroleum are being hotly pursued, coal seems to make sense--especially given the huge reserves in this country. But it doesn't.

Coal production is twice as polluting as petroleum production, and accounts for more than half of the nation's deadly greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, to build the 5-10 proposed new plants necessary for CTL conversion would cost more than $3 billion per plant. Add to that the proposed daily output of 50,000 barrels of liquified coal--in a country that currently burns 9 million barrels of gasoline per day--and you have math so stunning you feel like you should look over your shoulder to see if you're on Candid Camera.

Paradoxically, CTL fans argue that the process can be a "green" alternative, thanks to carbon sequestration (also known as carbon capture and storage-CCS). This entails capturing the CO2 as it's emitted and storing it underground via a long injection tube or some other costly method. But here too, there are major drawbacks: the costs dramatically outweigh the gains, and there isn't enough data to determine whether carbon sequestration is harmful or not. One of the few such large-scale operations in the world is Norway's Sleipner West project in the North Sea, which has only been around since 1996-not even an embryo in science years.

CTL supporters the world over insist that safe, nearly impenetrable areas can be found underground or undersea that would hold the CO2 for "at least" few thousand years. The tricky word here is "nearly." What happens if there's a fluke earthquake? A rogue missile? If a hole is punched in the protective layer above the sequestered CO2, we'll be right back where we started: dying from an excess of greenhouse gases.

How dumb do coal proponents in the government think we are? Pretty dumb, clearly, since we're not supposed to notice that three of the bill's co-sponsors in the Senate come from among the top five states in coal reserves: West Virgina (Byrd-D), Wyoming (Enzi-R & Thomas-R), and Illinois (Obama-D). Essentially, we'd be throwing money and effort at CTL to avoid shutting down the coal industry--a decision some fearmongers say could cause a global economic disaster.

Well, I think that's silly and I'll tell you why: we can adapt. We built a country on our ability to adapt, and we can do it again. We can try proven, economically responsible alternatives like solar, wind, biomass, and biofuel, and easily avoid disaster while reducing our CO2 emissions at the same time. We just need to give these cleaner alternatives a fighting chance. Truly "green" energy-usage percentages are low because the government hasn't thrown its weight behind these alternatives. So what's it going to be: spend even more of the money we don't have on wildly expensive, untested, low-output systems, or spend much, much less on proven, efficient, lasting systems? The answer may mean no less than the fate of the world.

I can't go in my lake. Apart from being man-made, it is continually man-damaged.

A few days ago I sat looking out over the lake and saw two men in a small motorboat approaching the bank by my dock. The man driving the boat sat behind a small 3-walled plexiglass enclosure while the other man stood in the bow. The bow-man was covered, head-to-toe, in a toned-down version of a biohazard suit, complete with hood and booties. Over his nose and mouth he wore a small contractor's mask and over his entire face wore a clear, welder-like plastic protector. In his rubber-gloved hands he held a hose, held it out at arm's length, so the stream of liquid that came from it spewed out and far away from the boat. From even my 50 yard distance I could see that the liquid was thick - viscous and brown – and streaming all up in my bank.

Later, I was told by a friend that the liquid was being sprayed on all the banks of the lake to kill the tall, unruly grass that had grown through the winter. "It blocks the view," said my friend, and added that if I was "really worried," I should check to see how much runoff from the neighboring golf course was making it's way into the lake. "THAT'S the stuff that'll kill ya," she said a few days later, as we walked her dog past a mother who's kids were splashing around in the water on the first hot day of this year.

* * * * *

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, author of the seminal and controversial work on the destruction of the environment, Silent Spring. To get some perspective on the meaning of this day and Ms. Carson's legacy, I sought out her biographer, Linda Lear:

"Silent Spring has been called many things over the past 45 years. For many, it was the book that began the environmental movement, the book which sounded the alarm over human kind's carelessness. To others it was a polemic which overstated the case for the damage caused by the use of synthetic chemical pesticides like DDT. The production of DDT was banned in the US in 1972, but it has always been manufactured and exported all over the world ever since."
-Linda Lear, Rachel Carson biographer

In her forward to the 2002 First Mariner Books edition of Silent Spring, Lear also wrote that one of Carson's greatest achievements was that she made clear to an unschooled populace the radical point that humans' biology was vulnerable. "Like the rest of nature... we too are permeable."

"Rachel Carson was a nature writer and ecologist whose lyric writing made science understandable to the general public during the Cold War years. She was accorded international fame for her 1951 book "The Sea Around Us" and because of it, the public listened to her as a voice of reason when, in 1962, she called for a re-examination of our misuse of chemical pesticides. Silent Spring was a book about death, our own and potentially all of nature's by a woman who was committed to the continuation of all life."
-Linda Lear

Long before the groundbreaking book was published, Carson knew what was coming. She felt it in her bones, and proved it with hard science, leaving all the generations to come with a road-map for how to stop it. Looking out over the lake that I will never swim in, no matter how hot the days get, I realize how pained she must have been, and how sad she would be today looking out at a world melting. Still, as Ms. Lear points out, she'd have enough hope to stand up and say something about it, as she did in 1963 when she testified before President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee about the dangers of pesticides. The resulting report by the committee supported Carson's assertions and set the stage for the establishment of the EPA. Rachel Carson's was a voice for the ages the impact of which has never dimmed.

In New York City Eve Mosher is drawing a line – literally – on the streets of the city to indicate how far the rising water from melting polar ice caps will reach and what will be gone as a result. People she meets along the way ask her, desperately: "Here? Here too?" "Yes," she says, before explaining what they can do to help.

"Carson hoped that technology, eg. pesticides, would be used responsibility. She believed that the obligation to endure gave us the right to question government and the scientific establishment, and to ask not just whether a thing could be done, but whether it should be done. Her desire to perpetuate life is Carson's greatest legacy and it is the one we celebrate on her 100th birthday."
-Linda Lear

If she were alive, I know Rachel Carson would want me to do something about the crap that's being sprayed in my lake. And so today I'm on my way to the neighborhood association building. I'm dropping off a letter requesting a meeting about the state of the lake. My life is at stake. All of our lives are. We'll see what happens.

Documentary filmmaker Rob van Hattum's latest effort, Waste = Food, explores the concept of "cradle-to-cradle" environmentalism. First developed by celebrated environmental architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, this pioneering design philosophy envisions endless use and reuse of raw materials. Since Van Hattum's film recently premiered on Sundance Channel's The Green, this seemed like the perfect moment to have a chat with him.

Netscape: When did you first become interested in environmentalism?

Van Hattum: Quite a long time ago, actually. In 1972, when I was 17, there was a report released by a nongovernmental think tank called the Club of Rome. They argued that we would soon have a very polluted environment, and problems with energy and natural resources. We discussed the report at school and it got me rather worried. It was the first moment my mind was turned towards the environment and the impact man has on the planet.

The year after that, there was an oil embargo by the OPEC countries. As a result, we experienced government-mandated car-free Sundays in the Netherlands. I talked about the environment a lot, about our impact on the planet, and you could say I was kind of a nerd in the eyes of my friends. They always tried to convince me that science and technology were the cause of all the environmental evil. I tried to convince them that mankind itself was the problem, at least those who believe that you can use the oceans and the air as a sewage system for harmful products.