The Rake Magazine

Tag: global warming

  • Pimp My E-Ride

    John Herou isn’t your typical electric-car ideologue. The founder of e-ride Industries possesses a bright strain of idealism to be sure, but fundamentally he’s a practical man, an inventor and classic car buff, more entrepreneur than tree hugger. The cars he builds, called neighborhood electric vehicles because by law they can go only twenty-five miles per hour and drive on streets with commensurate speed limits, are distinctly Minnesotan. While more common designs tend toward the futuristic, usually resembling a bubble or a jellybean, e-ride’s EXV2 and EXV4 look like small SUVs. They feature rugged tires, optional chrome hubs, plenty of cargo room, abundant panels of shiny aluminum diamond plate, and, of all things, a high payload capacity.

    In fact, if you care to know, Herou’s primary vehicle is a gas-powered Ford F-250 truck. “My dad was a chiropractor in Milaca,” said the sixty-three-year-old Princeton native, wearing khaki pants and a tucked-in shirt. He is somewhat tight-lipped and bashful. “And I was in the electrical industry here for about thirty-five years. I thought it would be fun to build an old replica of a 1932 Ford Roadster for the kids. That’s how it all started.”

    A passerby turned into Herou’s home driveway one day and offered to buy the electric Roadster. Right then, he saw that there was a market for his invention. His first electric cars were golf carts designed to look like classics from the 1930s. They were elegant and upscale, with chrome headlights, baby moon hubcaps, and solid oak drink holders and sweater baskets. He sold them to wealthy people all over the globe, including one to the king of Morocco and four to the Abu Dhabi Golf Club. The slogan was, "For the fun-loving perfectionist who loves a good ride." The description could just as aptly apply to Herou.

    His cars, which come in vivid primary colors, are sturdy, meticulously designed, and also entirely reflective of Herou’s particular tastes. We hopped into a white two-seater EXV2 outside the e-ride offices in Princeton. The car was comfortable, with the pared-down feel of a Jeep Wrangler. Its nine eight-volt deep-cycle batteries, which are stashed in a compartment between the seats, are enough to keep the car moving for fifty-five miles between charges; they also power various accoutrements, such as a horn, windshield wipers, and an optional stereo and heater.

    Herou could hardly wait for me to turn the key. When I did, there was a mere click and a disconcerting silence, as though I’d switched on a toaster. He assured me that the car was indeed running. Then, I made his day by fumbling for the nonexistent gear shifter. “You were reaching for the stick shift,” he said, obviously delighted. With one finger, he flipped a toggle switch on the dash from forward to reverse. Now, I just hit the ga… I mean accelerator? I asked, robbing Herou of an opportunity for further delight. The car moved easily, the only sound being the whine of turning wheels.

    Proponents of electric vehicles like to point out that some of the first cars in America were battery powered and that in the late 1800s, these cars held many of the land-speed and distance records. Through various actions by the oil and auto industries—some call them conspiracies—electric cars were phased out. Then, after a successful experiment in California in the 1990s, recounted in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, they were phased out again. It’s been difficult to build a sustained and cohesive electric-car movement, explained Lee Hart, an engineer and member of the Minnesota Electric Auto Association, a group formed just last year. “If you are interested in electric cars you are an iconoclast,” he said. “We’re like farmers. We’ll trade technical information on how to do things. But when it comes to political action, it goes nowhere. We don’t lobby. We don’t have lawyers.”

    Hart, who can talk for the better part of an hour about battery technology, is on his fourth electric car, a 1980 Renault he converted himself by the curb in front of his house. The car, which is powered by a dozen “plain old lead acid batteries,” was “intended as a short-range vehicle, a get-me-to-work car. I only needed a range of thirty miles or so.” Yet this self-proclaimed evangelist, like other electric-car pioneers toiling away out there, has big plans. He intends to build a vehicle that may go three hundred miles on a single charge. It’s a version of a model designed in the late 1990s called the Sunrise. If all goes well, he will sell the car as a kit—thus avoiding various federal regulations—that the average person could assemble with bolts and a wrench.

    Hardcore enthusiasts sometimes refer to neighborhood electric vehicles or NEVs, a category of automobile created in 1998 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as “glorified golf carts.” But they don’t necessarily mean that disparagingly. “John is doing great work,” Hart said. The problem, if you ask him, rests with the various state legislatures, which have limited the cars to twenty-five miles per hour. “They’ve restricted them to where they can’t be used.”

    More than forty states allow NEVs on public roadways. Minnesota passed its law just last year, thanks to a bill sponsored by Senator Paul Koering. Of e-ride, he said, “They asked me to come over and tour the factory and I was so impressed. They look like little Hummers. I want one!” According to Koering, the legislation generated very little opposition. In fact, at some point the state may offer a tax credit toward the purchase of an electric vehicle (supplementing federal credits). “I’ve gotta tell you, with the new members of the legislature,” he said, “the tone that I’m hearing, people are on the environmental bandwagon. I feel like the pendulum has swung. People are getting more excited about this every day, and rightfully so. None of us are happy with the war in Iraq and we want to see less dependence on foreign oil so we can say to the Middle East, Take your oil and gas and shove it.”

    Indeed, it was after the World Trade Center attacks and the attendant stock-market disaster that Herou’s golf-cart business dried up. “Nobody from overseas was buying anything at that time,” he explained. And so in 2003, with gas prices on the rise, he turned his efforts to electric cars. It was a logical progression. “About eighty-five percent of what we sold had never seen a golf course, anyway,” Herou said, referring to their use in retirement and other planned communities. “Plus, people wanted larger vehicles that would go farther and carry more.”

  • The Temple is Melting

    If Minnesota hockey were a religion (and many, of course, would contend it is), Steve Mars would be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons carry an apocalyptic message: Something must be done to save the faith, because the temple is melting.

    Warm winters of late have cut the outdoor-skating season nearly in half, and as outdoor ice goes, Mars says, so goes the status of our state as a puck mecca.

    “For years our municipal parks were to hockey what Chicago’s are to inner-city basketball,” says Mars, a red-headed, boy-faced forty-nine-year-old who was a star winger on the Duluth East and Hamilton College hockey teams. “Imagine Michael Jordan without playground basketball. We’re losing our playground hockey,” Mars says. “All of those kids who just want to go out with their skates and stick now have almost no opportunity.”

    Mars recently came up on the losing side of a contentious battle with the Eden Prairie Hockey Association over the use of $3.4 million raised to build an indoor arena (the third for this southwest suburb). He proposed instead spending the money to install up to six refrigerated outdoor rinks in city parks. Among other benefits, he says, that would have opened the sport to hundreds of kids who cannot afford the $1,400 to $1,900 to join a team and purchase equipment.
    The cost of playing hockey has been rising in direct correlation with rising temperatures; as free outdoor ice disappears, teams are forced to shell out the $150 to $200 it takes to rent an hour of indoor ice. Multiply that by twenty or so—the number of practices each team once counted on conducting outdoors—and the outlays grow prohibitive.

    “Minnesota is the state of hockey and we’re telling eighty percent of the kids they aren’t allowed in the club,” Mars says.

    Like many religions, Minnesota hockey is political. According to Eden Prairie hockey parents who insisted on remaining anonymous, the clash between the indoor vs. outdoor ice advocates was often “nasty” and led to several of the children of those involved being cut from teams they deserved to make. Many individuals contacted for this article on both sides of the issue refused to comment, saying only that they wanted to put the ugliness behind them. Jerry Fagerhaug, the Eden Prairie Hockey Association president who backed the indoor arena, did not return multiple phone calls.

    The issues in Eden Prairie are by no means limited to that community. According to Paul Douglas, the WCCO Television weather guru, Minnesotans have no choice but to “adapt to this new, Chicago-like climate.” Douglas says there will still be ice in Minnesota, but it won’t be nearly as reliable as it was a few decades ago. “Skating by mid-November was the norm for much of the twentieth century, but that date is being pushed back into mid- or late December. The skating season will, on average, be shorter by as many as ten to thirty days per winter than it was during the 1970s and early 1980s.”

    That means fewer kids may experience what the late Herb Brooks called “the joy of going to the local park rink and playing pick-up games.” Brooks, who coached the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team to Olympic gold at Lake Placid, proposed the way forward for Minnesota Hockey shortly before his death. The state doesn’t need any more “million-dollar Taj Mahals,” Brooks said in the January 2003 issue of Let’s Play Hockey. “Why do we have all these arenas around town? To give kids the chance to play, right? But they’re expensive! What if we could find a more cost-effective way to get more ice and allow more kids to play? We need to supplement the indoor arenas—artificial outdoor ice is the missing link.”

    “The people who advocate for more indoor ice tend to be people who never experienced the joy of outdoor ice,” Mars says. “They also feel that refrigerated outdoor ice is unreliable. But all they have to do is drive over to the Roseville Oval to see that’s not true.”

    The John Rose Minnesota Oval, the largest refrigerated ice surface in the world, offers four outdoor rinks. The enormous facility is open from the first week in November until the first week in March and remains operational at temperatures up to fifty degrees. Since its establishment in 1993 the skating center has rarely been forced to cancel a session because of weather.

    Steve Mars, who failed in his campaign to convince the Eden Prairie Hockey Association that outdoor refrigerated ice is the only way to preserve the sport in the era of global warming, says he’s glad the conflict has, for the moment, been resolved. But he laments the missed opportunity. “This was our chance to bring hockey back to any child who wanted to play. That’s what makes me lose sleep and lose friends over this. I mean, jeez, come on guys.”

  • Will Steger’s Greatest Hits

    1944
    Will Steger born and raised in Richfield, the second of eight children

    1959
    Steger, a freshman at Benilde, buys a motorboat and, with his brother, drives it down the Missippippi–and back

    1963
    Steger devises a kayak trek to the headwaters of the Yukon River. It involves a long portage—over the Rocky Mountains

    1967
    Steger graduates from St. Thomas with a degree in geology

    1970
    Steger moves permanently to his Ely property and teaches outdoor skills

    1982
    Steger makes his first major dogsled expedition in northern Canada

    1986
    In his first professional expedition, Steger leads the first dogsled team ever to reach the North Pole

    1988
    Traverse of Greenland is the longest dogsled expedition in history

    1989
    The Traverse of Antarctica is the first dogsled team ever in Antarctica

    1997
    Steger’s last polar expedition—solo from North Pole to Ellesmere Island—is aborted

    2003
    Arctic Transect

    Follow the new expedition at www.PolarHusky.com

  • What’s a “Transect”?

    Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact. The trick, of course, is finding a way to make a living doing both. To that end, they founded an online adventure education program called NOMADS.

    In the past, explorers simply found someone with deep pockets to sponsor their treks. But in the modern age, especially as sponsorships have dried up along with record-book opportunities, they often fund their projects through teaching, lecturing, writing, or some other form of motivational soapboxing. Many though, like Porsild, Pregont, and Steger, are actually teachers by training and temperament. Ironically, they go into the wild specifically to connect with students around the globe—the children at the other end of the satellite uplink.

    In fact, the expedition itself may be the easy part, compared with the heavy burden of Transect’s educational mission. The expedition has an education director. He is Dr. Aaron Doering, a University of Minnesota expert on instructional systems. Doering is more educator than adventurer—this will be his first major expedition. But he lends real brainpower and technical skill to the team. He and Pregont will manage all the technical hardware and software that allows the team to connect, through Porsild’s curriculum, with millions of schoolchildren who will follow the expedition on the Web.

    The team has two main missions—one educational, the other scientific. In addition to the extensive curriculum in social studies and geography, they’ll conduct some hard science designed to confirm the reality of global warming and climate change. “We’re actually working with NASA to ground-truth the information they have about snow depths and UV radiation,” says Dr. Doering. He explains that some recalcitrant politicians still claim global warming is speculative, because no one has taken measurements on the ground in these remote locations. This expedition will help put to rest this insidious form of denial.

    There are two other members of the team. Hugh Dale-Harris is a Canadian explorer and educator with much experience in the Nunavut region. The youngest member of the team is Eric Dayton, a gifted young adventurer who has partnered with Steger many times in the past. Dayton’s father, Sen. Mark Dayton, has been a longtime friend, supporter, and tent-mate of Steger’s. The three have made numerous trips together, including a memorable trek in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The younger Dayton graduated this year from Williams College and has already shown signs of political mettle. Having spent a season working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, he recently made a few phone calls and secured the final round of funding for Transect—money the expedition desperately needed to make it back next spring. “It was the first time I’ve had a team member pick up the phone and get funding like that!” says Steger. “He’s an amazing young man.”

  • Will Steger: The Rakish Interview

    You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.

    I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.

    An outdoorsy guy from the city starts to develop a neurotic view of wilderness, that it’s growing too scarce, that the cities are too crowded and they’re spilling over. An outdoorsy guy from the Range laughs and says relax. You can go days—weeks—without seeing another soul up here. It’s still possible to get lost in this world. Even with GPS and cell phones and Gore-tex, nature is a dangerous thing. Somehow that’s reassuring.

    Still, everyone around here knows where Will lives. He is a legend and a local hero, even if he is a bit of a lefty and a treehugger. Even the rednecks can appreciate what Steger has done in his decorated career as an arctic explorer. Later, sitting with Steger in the Ely steakhouse among quietly gawking admirers and spoiling roughnecks alike, I am not surprised to learn that Steger has never been in a fistfight in the forty years since he moved to Ely from Minneapolis. He is not surprised to hear me ask it.

    There is no other way to describe Will Steger than to say he is a sort of self-taught Zen master. His life in the harshest climates seems to have softened his soul like the silkiest chamois from deer hide. He is a modest and compassionate man, a natural leader with brilliantly disguised management skills and a mind for a million details. And somehow he seems not to have aged in his twenty-year career as a professional explorer. The skin on his face is taut, the crow’s-feet around his eyes have been there since his thirties, his body is lithe and powerful.

    Steger shuffles around his property in an unspeakably filthy mountaineering jacket, his long hair feathering into a kind of salt-and-pepper halo. Iron Will has been unofficially retired from exploration since 1997, when he aborted a solo trek that would have taken him from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island, towing and paddling a kayak sledge. After the rescue ship was called, he told himself he’d never return to the Pole. He’s been hanging out on his property ever since. Until now.

    And what a property it is. Today, it stretches to three hundred acres and includes numerous cabins, a sauna, a boathouse, a lodge, a guesthouse, and countless barns and shops. It is, as they say, entirely off the grid. Solar panels and wood stoves provide for the most quotidian needs. But there are numerous gasoline-powered generators, and a recently installed satellite uplink for serious Internet access available for moments like this—when the homestead is buzzing with volunteers, staffers, and expedition members. In a sense, this is precisely what this place was built for. What the man himself was built for.

    Sitting in the middle, at the highest point of Steger’s rolling, rocky property, is “The Castle.” It is a Gothic, Cinderella edifice built with raw timber, glass, and granite, with flying buttresses, balconies, cupolas, and a riot of copper-plated dormers. The physical reality of this building—so nearly complete, in its twentieth year—goads Steger. It represents the hard reality of a dream he’s had since his first polar expedition in 1986: To not only go into the wide open spaces and conquer them, but to bring people of the world together. Never has that vision and mission felt more focused than now. As an educator, scientist, explorer, and writer, Steger is absolutely convinced of the reality of global warming. He’s just as convinced that a quick and effective response is not merely possible; it’s the only morally responsible thing to do.

    Last year at this time, Steger was feeling restless. He’d written four books, he occasionally lectured, but he pretty much lived in isolation at the end of the road. He’d seen the Internet coming for years, and saw the brilliant possibilities it offered. At the same time, he was increasingly disturbed by global warming, now an established fact that only the most stubborn and selfish politicians deny.

    Meanwhile, the growing field of adventure education intrigued him. In 1999, Steger was approached by Dr. Aaron Doering, an education professional at the University of Minnesota who specializes in information systems. At the same time, Paul Pregont and Mille Porsild were in touch. Down in Grand Marais, they’d founded NOMADS and PolarHusky.com, an online education program connected to their dogsled expeditions. The four discussed the possibility of a new expedition. But funding was scarce. They came close to landing a major sponsorship from Coca-Cola, but it all fell apart after September 11th. By spring of 2002, it looked like a bust.

    Then last December, Steger was in Minneapolis for the holidays when he accidentally bumped into another legend of exploration, the trans-global cyclist Dan Buettner. Their brief conversation was the final, decisive push Steger needed to go ahead—with or without the funding in place. He realized his restlessness of the previous year had had a purpose. On a personal level, he wanted to get back on the ice and into the headspace of a long arctic expedition. On a professional level, he wanted to prove what could be done with all the modern tools of adventure education.

    Arctic Transect is a massive educational undertaking—as much an epic classroom curriculum as a dogsled adventure. An estimated ten million children from kindergarten to twelfth grade will be tuning in on the Web. This kind of approach is not new. NOMADS has been doing it with dogsleds since 1999. Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen had online components on their last two expeditions. Dan Buettner’s most recent exploits have been webcast through ClassroomConnect.com. In fact, way back in the dark ages of 1997, Steger himself had one of the earliest satellite uplinks to the Internet on his solo North Pole trip.

    Arctic Transect will travel 3,000 miles through five communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The expedition leaves Yellowknife on December 15 and arrives next spring at Pangnirtung, Nunavut, on the Arctic Ocean—with any luck, before the ice begins to break up. Transect’s mission is to show how connectivity is changing our world—both for better and for worse. But the real goal is not the Arctic Ocean before the ice breaks up. It is human understanding before global breakup.