I was recently in the lobby of a hotel in Washington, D.C., at the National Association of Counties' Legislative Conference. The sessions were over for the day, so I sat down at a computer table, plugged in my brick, fired up the laptop, paid for a day's worth of hotel wifi, ordered a beer and set to work. At some point I stopped to look around and everyone else was working on tablets or smart phones. With black cords snaking around the table top, and a computer bag, mouse, earphones, tape recorder, extra computer battery, Daytimer, file folders and a paperback book,  I felt like a WWII radio operator set down in some post-war dream of the future, where cars flew and dishes washed themselves.

It's as if I had a house without electricity and was stringing extension cords from a gasoline generator through the house to run the refrigerator and TV. That was me, and I didn't like it.

Up until that point I felt pretty good. I had a self-contained office in my shoulder bag. Everything I could do at the office, I could do in the hotel lobby. Except drink free coffee.

The only advantage I had over the mobile people was a big QWERTY keyboard -- I have a keyboard and I know how to use it. One thing writers learn is that after a while, your fingers do the thinking and typing, and since the fingers belong to you, you claim the writing as well. So the feel of the fingers on the keyboard is important. The well-muscled fingers of the Underwood manual typist have given way to thin runway-model fingers that tap instead of work, but they still continue to think, so that's reassuring. However, tapping on the glass face of an iPhone or a Kindle or an iPad is not the same as keys that move and give a nice little clack when you hit them. The cheery tapping of the keyboard is also music to one's editor who assumes it signifies progress toward the completion of an assignment several days past due. And so, grasping for some shred of dignity, I came upon the idea that I was a creator, not a consumer, of information. I felt a little better.

Still, surrounded by wires, I felt like an anachronism. Like in the mid 1970s -- when @ meant "at"  as in "2 bushels of millet @ 80¢ per hundredweight" (and typewriters had a key for "cent") -- I rode my bicycle out to the Oregon coast for a writer's conference toting a portable typewriter, manuscript folders and carbon paper along with my camping equipment. Or, when in the early 1990s, I carried a Macintosh Plus in a backpack the size of a hotel room refrigerator. Bigger was better than nothing.

But now, in a time when you can't tell the Bluetooth users from the homeless -- they're all talking to invisible people -- in a time where tailgaters send text messages and lone drivers LOL; in a time when people walk the streets with blue lights blinking from their heads; in this future time, I too must embrace my inner wireless and join the parade of progress. I now have an iPhone that tells me where to go, and a Kindle that will reportedly carry 3,000 books without any weight gain. My wife bought them for me, so I blame her.

But I cannot tell a lie. I love my mobile devices. My folders are all "e" now, and backed up in Dropbox. My calendar tells me when a story is overdue, my mother calls me on Skype, I'm reading books like never before. The only paper at my desk is a photo, and some Post-it Notes with passwords on them. Some things never change.

The "Breaking Bad" television program has brought a new awareness of the problem of methamphetamine abuse in the United States. The drug is a highly addictive concoction made of a nasty brew of chemicals including gasoline, drain cleaner, lye, battery acid and over-the-counter medications such as Sudafed that contain pseudoephedrine. Most of the ingredients are easily obtained, and cold medications containing pseudoephedrine can be found in nearly any drug store.

In attempts to cut meth use, some areas have restricted the amount of pseudoephedrine-containing medications a person can buy. So gangs of people team up, and go to drug stores, purchasing the maximum amount individually and pool the take -- a practice known as "smurfing." Shoplifting of the stuff has become so bad, drug stores now keep it behind the counter.

In addition to the harm caused by addiction to the drug, the labs are highly toxic and sometimes explode. A police bust of a meth lab or even the ingredients carried in an automobile requires thousands of dollars of time and effort to neutralize the chemicals and dispose of them. Meth labs are now increasingly mobile, carried in vehicles, RVs and the like.

According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, "Long-term methamphetamine abuse has many negative health consequences, including extreme weight loss, severe dental problems (“meth mouth”), anxiety, confusion, insomnia, mood disturbances, and violent behavior. Chronic methamphetamine abusers can also display a number of psychotic features, including paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, and delusions (for example, the sensation of insects crawling under the skin)."

So what went right? In 2006 Oregon made over-the-counter medications that contain the key ingredient in meth -- pseudoephedrine -- available only by prescription. The results? By 2009 Oregon's violent crime rate took the biggest drop in the nation. Law enforcement officials attributed the drop to the prescription only law. Today in Oregon, meth lab busts are down 96 percent since the law was enacted. Mississippi passed a similar law last year and meth busts have since dropped 60 percent.

Not everybody is happy about this. Over-the-counter remedies for allergy and colds are a $4 billion business, and making these drugs available by prescription only has been fought by the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) a pharmaceutical industry group, which is pushing an electronic tracking system.

I'm seeing more news items about scientists converting urine to drinkable water, converting raw sewage into food products, sources of useful bacteria, and so on. Unfortunately scientists seem to think that the American public -- who are already paying for bottled drinking water in lieu of drinking free or at least less expensive tap water -- will consent to this.

We've already heard about the increase in pharmaceutical waste products in tap water. People take old pharmaceuticals and dump them in the toilet or -- to be delicate about it -- "excrete" them. Turns out water treatment plants can't deal with things like anti-depressants. Water treatment plants can filter the water to remove sticks, rocks and fish, pour in the chlorine to kill the bacteria, and then it's bottoms up.

I'm not ungrateful. Water treatment is a well-established technology that has worked well for a long time, and for the most part American tap water is safe to drink. I've lived in several countries where you couldn't drink the water, because it was teeming with bacteria, parasites and such things as laundry detergent and human waste. I carried a small camping stove at all times and learned to drink nothing but well-boiled tea that tasted slightly of soap. Or bottled beer that came from far away. In Oregon, I drank well water for six years before learning it contained a relatively high concentration of arsenic.

In Mexico City, the sewer system is so bad, that used toilet paper is not flushed, but put in the waste basket. And while we're on the subject, we used an outhouse when I was a kid and that tends to squash any slightest interest in doing anything scientific with human waste.

Humans could not urbanize successfully without separating waste and poisons from air and drinking water, which eliminated a host of deadly diseases. The Romans were the first to do it successfully. Keeping water pure took a lot of work. And we've been separating sewage and potable water more or less successfully since the Industrial Revolution. Now, however, we're being told that drinking processed "graywater" or even sewage is perfectly acceptable given the miracles of modern chemistry.

I'd suggest that the only people who will benefit from this idea, are those who have invested in the companies that bottle drinking water. I'm about to invest myself, even though for years I've ridiculed the idea of paying for a bottled tasteless liquid.

The Earth is covered mostly with ocean water and while lots of waste runs down into it, it is big enough and salty enough to -- so far -- remain fairly clean. So let's take sea water and distill it. The best and cheapest way to distill water is in hot climates using solar energy. Fortunately, hot places need fresh water the most. So far so good. The salt, chemicals, spilled oil and fish droppings remain in the sea, drinkable water ends up in the pipes, and the sun does the work.

I would also recommend that we use our research prowess to make sewage treatment plants much more effective, so that water coming from them is pure as the driven snow, and is disposed of somewhere other than in our drinking glasses. A separate household graywater system to flush toilets seems like a good idea, even rainwater catchment tanks for watering plants and washing the car.

At Boy Scout camp, filling someone else's canteen with urine was a favorite joke. Unfortunately, if we accept the idea that sewage should be recycled for consumption, the joke's on us.

The key to sustainability is not settling for less. Some spartan types think putting a home together from used wooden pallets or metal shipping containers is cool because -- well, we have lots of them around and this counts as green recycling in the great carbon ledger in the sky. Settling for less -- like a nine-square-foot house -- is just wrong. A few architects and designers have managed to come up with attractive shipping container and other homes from recycled materials, but they must overcome an inherent design problem: shipping containers are long narrow metal boxes, a lot like family-sized coffins.

The New York Times looked at the idea of smaller homes for the economic downturn. During the recent good times, said the Times, colonnades, cathedral ceilings and observation towers -- embedded in thousands of square feet -- were all the rage. But now, let's get sensible and buy what one builder calles a "Home for the New Economy," meaning small. The Japanese have taken their homes down to sardine-can proportions, building in what would be considered a parking space here in the U.S.

Some people -- let's call them the "think small" people -- just don't like anybody to have things, and have given sustainability a bad name attacking the pollution of cars, the wasted space of large homes, the greed of the capitalist and touting the humble lifestyle of the homeless who recycle water bottles, urinate in the doorways of the affluent and get plenty of exercise and sunshine.

So here's an idea: Let's have it all. Take energy, for example. The sun shines a lot everywhere except Oregon, the wind blows a lot, especially in Wyoming, water always runs downhill and the earth has a lot of heat that's not doing anything.

Instead of burning wood -- which is, by the way, renewable because it grows on trees -- and putting wood smoke into the air, let's get some geothermal action going. The idea is that the center of the Earth is molten, and even just a few hundred feet under the soil, the temperature is a consistent 70 degrees or so. The Chilean miners were working in free geothermal heat. Drill a hole into the ground, pipe water down into it, run it around a bit so it gets warm, then up to the surface, to run through a heat exchanger and warm up a house. When it is 10 degrees F outside you get 60 degrees of heating courtesy of the earth. Or, when it's 100 degrees outside, pipe that 70 degree water through the heat exchanger and get 30 degrees of cooling. You need a little electricity to run the pump and a fan or two and there's the initial expense of setting it up. Otherwise you have it all: Cheap heating and cooling, no carbon footprint and the earth's heat should last a few million years at least. Plus, nobody charges for it. The rest is just common sense: install good insulation, keep the doors shut and the flies out.

There are some very "have it all" types running around innovating because they are smart, and also want a big house, and nice car, money for their kids' college, etc. etc. Some of these HIA people are building electric cars that anybody would want. Like the Tesla, the Fisker, and even the big automakers like the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf.

The "think small people" want less, so if you dislike people and love weeds, then follow them. It's not sustainable -- sustainability and survival require abundance. If however, you want it all, then follow the innovators, the bright idea people who will help us have it all -- beautiful cars, aesthetic homes, clean air and water, cities that are easy to walk or bike, flourishing plant and animal life, and abundant opportunities for anyone with a bright idea to keep the game getting better and better.

Generation after generation, the idea of a bridge or tunnel across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia has been proposed, discussed and mostly dismissed as a fantasy. A bridge would have to cross many miles of open ocean and withstand sea ice that rumbles through the gap, to say nothing of the cold and weather at that latitude.

Even worse, once the bridge or tunnel was built, say the skeptics, there are few roads or resources in that part of Alaska on the American side, or Siberia on the Russian side, so it would be another "bridge to nowhere,"  and a "boondoggle," those most chilling of political epithets reserved for "stupid and expensive" ideas that use public funds and then dribble away to nothing.

But there's something about big projects that awakens excitement within the breast of engineers, builders and visionaries, and goads the critics into a frenzy. The Interstate Highway system of the 1950s, the Panama Canal, the Trans Continental Railroad, putting a man on the moon -- all had their critics and all had tremendous obstacles to overcome in terms of geography, finance, engineering and more. When we take a look back we see these accomplishments as high points of our culture, catalysts of scientific advancement, and engines of our economic growth.

But take a look forward and many see only obstacles. Take for example, California's high-speed rail non-project. Even infused with billions of federal dollars, the thing just doesn't seem to have the ability to get moving. OK, so the economy is recovering ever so slowly, and we've all heard the obstacles: money, land, environmental concerns, boondoggle, boondoggle, "train to nowhere," etc. etc. Other rail projects are also languishing, and even NASA has let its space program expire.

In a time of uncertainty, with a soft economy, high unemployment, and a shrinking stake in world affairs, America must start looking forward again. Looking back at past glories gets Greece nowhere as it teeters on economic collapse. And the glories of ancient Rome -- the marvelous engineering of roads and aqueducts that still surpass those of many countries today -- have crumbled away over the millennia. And while our political leaders grouse about the growing power of China and mock the new cities it is building that as yet lack residents, we continue to exhaust valuable resources on debt service to that country, while our cities deteriorate and squatters move into abandoned houses.

The Russians -- we must now hitch rides with them to get to the International Space Station -- announced yesterday that they are ready to build a tunnel under the Bering Strait to connect Russia and America. They've said that many times before, all the way back to the czars. Americans have also posited the idea from time to time. But this time, who knows?

Somebody is going to do it one of these days. Somebody who can visualize the benefits, deal with the obstacles, round up the finances, create so many solutions that nobody can shoot them down fast enough. And as for obstacles, the Russians are solving one. They are already working on the next link of a rail line that by 2030 will extend 2,360 miles to the northeastern tip of Siberia. China, by the by, is also investing in a rail line across that country, so it too, could be positioned to connect to a link between Asia and North America.

So what good is such a line? It's the economy. Building cities along the lines, development of new ideas, new opportunities, new problems to push against. Ride your motorcycle from New York City to London via Denver, Seattle, Anchorage, Kamchatka, hang a left to Beijing and Shanghai. It wouldn't be easy, but that's part of the deal. Imagine, Chinese and Russian license plates in California, Americans buying a little summer place along the beach on the Sea of Okhotsk. And if global warming really heats up, the property values would skyrocket north of the Arctic Circle. It could happen -- this month, for example, a ship reached the North Pole.

So a project like this could be a real "Bridge to Somewhere." If the Russians actually do it, will we be ready?