Through the years, Hodges' knack for making things grow in oddenvironments has been on display at the Land Pavilion in the Epcottheme park at Walt Disney World in Florida and the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

Here in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, he's thinking muchbigger.

Earth's ice sheets are melting. Scientists predict that rising seascould swallow some low-lying areas, displacing millions of people.

Hodges sees opportunity. Why not divert the flow inland to createwealth and jobs instead of disaster?

He wants to channel the ocean into man-made "rivers" to nourishcommercial aquaculture operations, mangrove forests and crops thatproduce food and fuel. This greening of desert coastlines, he said,could add millions of acres of productive farmland and sequestervast quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary culprit in globalwarming. Hodges contends that it also could neutralize sea-levelrise, in part by using exhausted freshwater aquifers as giganticnatural storage tanks for ocean water.

Three Mississippis Analyzing recent projections of ice melt occurring in the Antarcticand Greenland, Hodges calculates that diverting the equivalent ofthree Mississippi Rivers inland would do the trick. He figures thatwould require 50 good-sized seawater farms that could be builtwithin a decade if the world gets cracking.

"The only way we can stop [sea-level rise] is if people believe wecan," Hodges said. "This is the big idea" that humanity has beenwaiting for, he believes.

With his trademark floppy hat, an iPhone wired perpetually to his head and a propensity to assignenvironmental reading homework to complete strangers, Hodges mightbe dismissed by some as an eccentric who has spent too much time inthe Mexican sun.

"When I first met Carl, I thought he was a philosopher," saidSheen, a longtime friend.

Still, experts including Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 's Langley Research Center, say seawater agriculture could prove tobe an important weapon against climate change.

Hodges already has built such a farm in Africa. Political upheavalthere shut much of it down in 2003. That's why he's determined toconstruct a showcase project in North America to demonstrate what'spossible.

Enter salicornia All he needs now is $35 million. That's where salicornia comes in.

A so-called halophyte or salt-loving plant, the briny succulentthrives in hellish heat and pitiful soil on a little more than aregular dousing of ocean water. Several countries are experimentingwith salicornia and other saltwater-tolerant species as sources offood. Known in some restaurants as sea asparagus, salicornia can beeaten fresh or steamed, squeezed into cooking oil or ground intohigh-protein meal.

Hodges, who heads the nonprofit Seawater Foundation, pluggedsalicornia for years as the plant to help end world hunger.Do-gooders applauded. The private sector yawned.

Then oil prices exploded. Hodges saw his shot to lift his fleshy,leafless shrub from obscurity.

That's because salicornia has another nifty quality: It can beconverted into biofuel. And, unlike grain-based ethanol, it doesn'tneed rain or prime farmland, and it doesn't distort global foodmarkets. NASA has estimated that halophytes planted over an areathe size of the Sahara could supply more than 90 percent of theworld's energy needs.

Last year, Hodges formed a for-profit company called GlobalSeawater Inc. to produce salicornia biofuel in liquid and solidversions.

Seed for venture The enterprise recently planted 1,000 acres of salicornia here inrural Sonora, where Hodges has been doing preparatory research fordecades. That crop will provide seed for a major venture planned 50miles north in the coastal city of Bahia Kino. Global Seawater isattempting to lease or buy 12,000 acres there for what it envisionswill be the world's largest seawater farm.

The plan is to cut an ocean canal into the desert to nourishcommercial ponds of shrimp and fish. Instead of dumping theeffluent back into the ocean, the company would channel it furtherinland to fertilize fields of salicornia for biofuel. Theseawater's next stop would be man-made wetlands. These mangroveforests could be "sold" to polluters to meet emissions cutsmandated by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

"Nothing is wasted," Hodges said.

Global Seawater already has a small refinery to process salicorniaoil into liquid biodiesel, which Hodges believes can be producedfor at least one-third less than the current market price of crudeoil. Leftover plant material would be converted into solid biofuel"logs" that he said burn cleaner than coal or wood.

Some environmentalists are dubious. Wheat and cotton flourishedhere until farmers pumped aquifers nearly dry. Shrimp aquacultureoperations have fouled the Sea of Cortez with waste.

Channeling millions of gallons of seawater inland could havesimilar unintended consequences for fragile deserts, said biologistExequiel Ezcurra, former head of Mexico's National EcologyInstitute.


Marla Dickerson writes for the Los Angeles Times.

Tag : Salicornia