Flights of fancy.

• Author: Chapman, Dan
• Position: Global TransPark air-cargo complex

Chemistry, as professor-turned-governor Jim Martin well knows, is a logical, exact science. Bonds form. Elements build compounds. Actions have reactions.

Alchemy, as any respectable scientist will tell you, is heretical balderdash. You can't turn ordinary metal into gold.

Impossible. Ridiculous.

But the governor may have to blend the wisdom of chemistry with the wizardry of alchemy to realize his most passionate, legacy-ensuring dream: the so-called Global TransPark air-cargo complex.

Martin believes that the proposed 15,000-acre industrial and aviation park, which eventually could employ 55,000 people and add billions of dollars to the state economy, can be an economic-development dream come true. The governor sees the project as the logical next step for a state that was the first in flight and ahead of the curve on research parks and community colleges.

It's too far ahead of the curve, however, for those who question the need for an all-cargo, 24-hour-a-day airport ringed by factories. To them, the governor's lofty notions are wacky, Buck Rogers pipe dreams.

"I don't think anything will come of it because I don't think it's a practical idea," says Jerry Orr, aviation director for Charlotte/Douglas International Airport. "I do know that sometimes government tries to force things to happen that aren't good ideas. And if you build it and they don't come, somebody still has to pay the rent."

The governor is undaunted. "Visionaries look at today and plan for what tomorrow will bring," Martin has said. "We can make today's dreams tomorrow's realities."

And, as Professor Martin knows, you need a catalyst to make any chemical equation -- or economic-development scenario -- go forward. John Kasarda, director of the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill, is Martin's catalyst.

Kasarda, 46, is the latest in a distinguished line of sociology professors at Chapel Hill to catch a governor's ear and leave his mark on the state's history. The most famous was Howard Odum back in the '30s and '40s.

"Odum saw the need for the state to diversify its economic base and to address some of its social problems," says William F. Little, interim provost at UNC.

One of Odum's prize students, George Simpson, was the first head of the Research Triangle Park Foundation. Over the years, the UNC sociology department helped form a successful bond between academe, business and government.

Some of the fruits of the influential triumvirate's...