JIM LEHRER: And, finally tonight, in praise of working with your hands. Jeffrey Brown has our Labor Day book conversation.

JEFFREY BROWN: Motorcycle maintenance, Martin Heidegger, and how we live as consumers and workers, it all comes together in a new book by Matthew Crawford, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work."

Crawford runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Before that, he briefly headed a think tank in Washington. And he got a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. Matthew Crawford joins me now. Welcome to you.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD, author, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work": Thanks.

JEFFREY BROWN: One thing that are you doing here is, as you say early in the book, speaking up for an ideal that is timeless, but finds little accommodation today, manual competence. What does that mean?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Simply the ability to -- to make things and fix things, and also the inclination to do so. So, the book is in part an attempt to speak up for the honor of the manual trades and to suggest that that could be a life that's worth choosing. I think we have developed a kind of educational monoculture in this country, where anyone with even halfway decent test scores is getting hustled into a certain track, were you end up working in an office.

And that's fine -- or would be, except that I think a lot of people, including some who are very smart, would rather be learning to build things or fix things.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you're suggesting that, once, there was this value, through shop class, for example, that many, myself, many people remember having at one time, but they don't have any more.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Well, shop class -- it is a complicated story, but the simple version is that it was pretty widely dismantled in the 1990s to make room for computer class. And we had this idea -- maybe we still do -- that, somehow, we're going to be gliding around in a pure information economy, everybody in front of their screens. And I think that vision was tied to a set of notions about what kind of work is valuable and important.

JEFFREY BROWN: Put it in -- I mean, in the book, you put it in personal terms a little bit, telling your own story. You -- a degree in philosophy, Ph.D., an office job as a so-called knowledge worker.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Yes.

JEFFREY BROWN: ... and then turning away and turning to motorcycle repair. Now, is that because that kind of work is more fulfilling? Is that the word? Or what is it that happens in the shop?

Knowledge work vs. manual work

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Well, I guess what's appealing to me is a job that involves using your own judgment. And I find that that is very much the case in fixing motorcycles.

I think we have had this dichotomy of knowledge work vs. manual work, as though they are two very different things. But that is a distinction that just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, say you were trying to diagnose why a car doesn't idle properly. It's not a trivial problem. And I think, you know, the -- it's easy to assume that if the work is dirty, it must be stupid. And, conversely, I think we sometimes romanticize some kind of white-collar work by presuming that it has more intellectual content than it may actually turn out to.

JEFFREY BROWN: But...

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Go ahead.

JEFFREY BROWN: No, but -- I'm sorry -- but the ability -- you're talking about the ability to control -- the notion of agency is the way you put it in the book, the ability to control your own outcomes you find in the shop. Can I not find that in the office as well?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Well, there's a -- obviously a great diversity in different kinds of work that take place in an office, and some of them much better than others. I had a job that sounded great initially. It was writing summaries of articles in academic journal articles. And I thought I would learn a lot. The problem was that there was a quota of writing 28 of these per day, which was flatly impossible to actually do. But the job was conceived in such a way that -- in fact, the training in the first week was -- offered me these instructions for doing it as though it could be done in a sort of rote, routine way. And so the job was actually quite dumbed down, and it only paid $23,000 a year.

Now, the irony is that I got that job because I had a master's degree. And, so, I thought I had to use it and wear a tie and become a knowledge worker. And the further irony is that I had previously worked as an unlicensed electrician making about twice as much money, and using my own judgment every day, and, as a result, feeling like my actions were genuinely my own. And I think that's what we want...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you are making a case here for the individual's fulfillment or sense of control over one's work life.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Yes.

'The spirit of self-reliance'

JEFFREY BROWN: But you also, I think, are trying to say something larger about our culture, about that we have lost something. What is that something? And what -- what would you like to see regained?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: I guess the spirit of self-reliance. I think it's become more difficult to be self-reliant, in part because of changes in material culture.

So, for example, if you lift the hood on some cars now, there is essentially another hood under the hood. And I don't know what the thinking is, maybe that the sight of an alternator might offend us.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean to protect us from having to...

JEFFREY BROWN: But I'm speaking as someone who can barely change -- check the oil. That's how most of us are, right?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Well, in fact, some high-end cars now don't even have a dip stick, so you couldn't check your oil level if you wanted to. And I take that -- I mean, I can't be the only person who is a little bit creeped out by that. And I take it as an index of a broader shift in our relationship to our own things. I think there's fewer occasions to be responsible for your own physical environment. And, with that, I think comes less expectation of responsibility.

JEFFREY BROWN: You talk about -- you say work -- that you are writing on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. You are repairing motorcycles. That's useful to the person who rides a motorcycle.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Right.

JEFFREY BROWN: But riding motorcycles isn't necessarily useful. So, what do you mean useful for -- useful for society? Useful in what way?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Just in some very low-to-the-ground, narrow sense that, for example, fixing someone's motorcycle is. I mean, if you follow that logic far enough, that's probably every -- everything we do is useless, in that it doesn't serve really essential needs, unless you are a farmer, I guess. But we can't all be farmers.

JEFFREY BROWN: But you are going back to the shop to work?

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Yes, I have got a lot of motorcycles waiting for repair.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, the book is "Shop Class as Soulcraft." Matthew Crawford, thanks very much.

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: Thank you.

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JIM LEHRER: Next tonight: turning lowly (egyszerű) algae (alga) into fuel, another in a series of stories about how people are innovating to move the economy forward.

"NewsHour" correspondent (tudósító) Tom Bearden has our Science Unit report.

DAVE DISS, Solix Biofuels: This is what the final product looks after it's spun down (kicentrifugálás, kicsapatás).

TOM BEARDEN: Dave Diss gets a little annoyed when people call his algae pond scum. He and the company he works for think it's the next big thing in alternative fuels. Diss manages the Coyote Gulch (szakadék, szurdok) Demonstration Project for the Solix Biofuels Company out in the Southern Colorado Desert.

It's essentially a series of large water-filled metal tanks that hold 120-foot-long plastic bags full of water and algae, a process the company hopes can be massively scaled up (sokkal termelékenyebbé tehető) to produce economically competitive biodiesel.

DAVE DISS: Algae is injected into the bags. This one here was just injected yesterday. And you see how it's a lighter color...

TOM BEARDEN: Yes.

DAVE DISS: ... than this darker one? And, as it grows -- and it takes from five to 10 days for it to reach maturity to where it can be harvested -- then we will extract (eltávolít) it out of the bags and move it into the harvest facility, and spin out (kicentrifugáz) the water, and then you have a marketable lipid to extract the oil from the algae.

TOM BEARDEN: Solix is one of about 200 companies trying to find a way to make biofuels out of algae. The company began testing the production process three-and-a-half years ago at Colorado State University, using this small-scale (kis méretű) tank to try out various ways to grow algae.

BRYAN WILLSON, Solix Biofuels: For this to go to scale, we have to be able to do this at much, much lower cost.

TOM BEARDEN: Solix co-founder and mechanical engineering professor Bryan Willson says the tests showed that a closed system using plastic bags was the way to go.

BRYAN WILLSON: So, by growing them in these closed panels, we can control their environment and just grow those very specific species.

It also gives us the ability to tailor the environment, because we -- under normal growth conditions, algae don't produce oils. To get significant oil content, we have to impose certain biological stress conditions to change their metabolism (anyagcsere). And that's much easier to do in a closed system.

An unlikely partner

TOM BEARDEN: Eventually, they ran up against the limits of the test tank, and went looking for capital to build a larger facility. Solix found a seemingly unlikely partner in the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, one of the country's wealthiest. About 1,400 tribal members live on the Southern Ute Reservation near Durango, which sits on top of an enormous natural gas field.

The reservation has what the Solix process needs: land, carbon dioxide, and water. One of the Ute Tribe's natural gas wells (forrás) sits right next door to the Solix project. It's not an accident. Oil and gas deposits (lelőhely) are often surrounded by underground water, which is brought to the surface when the fuels are extracted.

This brackish (kissé sós) or saline (sós) water is called produced water, and environmental laws require special handling, so it doesn't contaminate (beszennyez) the surface. Wells also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to global climate change.

The Solix technology uses both of these waste products to accelerate the growth of the algae. The produced water and CO2 are piped to the Solix project. The water fills the tanks. The CO2 is injected into the bags to nourish (táplál) the algae.

BRYAN WILLSON: In order to get high growth rate, we have to supply CO2 to the algae. And that happens in the very bottom of the panels. And what we have here is the air that is mixed with the CO2 is existing the panels through these tubes.

TOM BEARDEN: So, it bubbles up (felbugyog) through the bottom?

BRYAN WILLSON: Bubbles up through the bottom.

TOM BEARDEN: The algae feeds on the CO2, preventing it from being released into the atmosphere.

Rebecca Kauffman is the president of Southern Ute Alternative Energy, which oversees the tribe's energy investments.

REBECCA KAUFFMAN, Southern Ute Alternative Energy: In looking at algae growth, when you see what the inputs are, its a great match with the gas industry, which is kind of nice.

If we can take output from one industry or one sister company and use it, and make money off it in another way, that's great. Why wouldn't we do it?

So, when we first heard about algae, we did a lot of research in it, looked at what NREL had done in the early years, which I think was about a five-year study or so that they had done with it, and to see where Solix has taken it was really exciting.

"A long-term investment"

TOM BEARDEN: Bruce Valdez is the executive director (ügyvezető igazgató) of the Southern Ute Growth Fund, the tribe's business arm, which has $2.5 billion in investments.

He says the fund is always looking for alternative technologies that don't take farmland out of food production -- like corn ethanol -- don't use up water that could also grow food, and also don't harm the environment.

BRUCE VALDEZ, Southern Ute Growth Fund: We believe in harmony with Mother Earth. We believe in -- in giving back. And we believe that we have to live in harmony with Mother Earth.

TOM BEARDEN: Both Solix and the tribe know that this technology has a long way to go before it can produce biofuel in sufficient quantities to be economically viable (életképes).

But, unlike most venture capitalists, Valdez says the Utes are willing to wait.

BRUCE VALDEZ: As Indian people, we're always looking long-term. That's one of the unique advantages we have as an Indian tribe, is, we can look long-term, where we're not so much looking quarter to quarter. We're looking for generations down the road. So, this is a long -- everything that we do is pretty much a long-term investment.

TOM BEARDEN: The demonstration project is set to run for two years. But Solix already has a few clients who are producing small quantities of fuel from algae.

Solix CEO Doug Henston says, success or failure hinges on (múlik, forog valamin) how cheaply they can produce the biofuel.

Is your ultimate success essentially dependent on the price of traditional oil?

Doug Henston, Solix Biofuels: Well, I would say yes. And that's really true for any renewable energy. I mean, there's a price of oil at which renewable energies don't work.

But what we're trying to do is compete reasonably with petroleum in that, you know $70- to $80-, $90-a-barrel range, where we think things will eventually level out (kiegyenlít, egyszintr hoz).

TOM BEARDEN: If they can compete, the professor and his Indian partners hope to build similar biofuel plants next door to other CO2 generators, like coal-fired power plants (erőmű), and turn a lot more waste products into usable fuel.