The Pokémon Question

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The game is getting people outside, but is that a good thing?

Pokemon Go is getting couch potatoes outside and walking around again. People are rediscovering their neighborhood and local fauna. But all the while, they have their nose stuck in a smart phone. Is it a good thing that all these people are wandering around tripping over low branches, or is this yet another sign of our eventual disconnection from the world around us? We assemble a panel to debate.

Joining us for the debate: 

Grey Chynoweth is the Chief Operating Officer at Silvertech, a company based in Manchester, NH.

Maura Adams is a program director at the Northern Forest Center.

Taylor Quimby is Senior producer of this show and current Pokemon Go enthusiast.

Sam Evans-Brown is the host of this show and was a big time Pokemon fan in his youth.

 

Outside/In was produced this week by: 

Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, & Logan Shannon

Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder 

Photos of Sam are by Greta Rybus unless otherwise noted.

Up Against the Ropes

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The “Save the Whales” movement of the 1970’s was instrumental in putting a stop to commercial whaling. But even as humpbacks and other whale populations have bounced back, one species is still up against the ropes. Literally. In this story, Sam tackles the problem of whale entanglement - and discovers that proposed solutions include crossbows, Australian lobsters, and Chinese finger traps.

A little while ago, here in New Hampshire, this crazy thing happened.

A dead humpback whale washed up onto our shores, in the little town of Rye. The last time something like this had happened was more than a decade ago, in the year 2000.  

People flocked to see it. Once news of the whale had spread, cars were parked on both sides of the street and traffic on the narrow, two-lane coastal road was backed up for miles.

Panoramic hill

“Last night there were thousands of people coming to Rye. That’s not an exaggeration, there were thousands of people,” said Tony Lacasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, which was involved in disposing of the carcass, “I’m from New Hampshire originally and I was asking people where they were coming from and they were coming from Kingston and Farmington and Lee, they were 25, 30, 40 miles away.”

The crowds came despite the overpowering, thought-destroying stink of the decomposing whale. She was an adult in the prime of her life and her flukes of her massive tail had to push around a full 40 tons of whale body. No one knew exactly how long she had been dead, but her body spent three days on the beach, and had been spotted floating on the water a week before.

“With six or eight inches of blubber and no cooling system on-board, it essentially was an oven for a few days and a lot of tissue for a few days and a lot of the tissue is quite deteriorated,” explained Lacasse.

So here’s the scene: there’s 40 tons of stinking, rotting meat being carved up into gooey chunks by ocean scientists who are trying to determine what killed this whale, but despite that gorey process, hundreds of people are gathered to watch.

Whales - even a dead whale, rotting, stinking, cut into bits on a beach - capture something in our imagination.

Whales in ropes

A lot of species are recovering. For instance, most populations of humpbacks are being considered for delisting as an endangered species.

But then there’s the North Atlantic right whale -- a whale that got its name because in the whaling era it was known as the “right whale to kill”. Right whales are are slow swimmers and, because of their copious amounts of blubber, they float to the surface after they’ve been harpooned.  The right whale hasn’t bounced back. There are less than 500 of them in the wild today and they are thought to be “functionally extinct” in the European Atlantic.

But these days it’s not hunters and harpoons killing these whales... it’s ropes. Millions of ropes.

Whales sometimes get tangled up in fishing gear. And by sometimes, I mean a lot. By looking at their scars, scientists have estimated that 83 percent of right whales get tangled up in fishing gear at some point in their life. For humpbacks it’s not as bad, but still more than half get entangled.

And in recent years, those entanglements have been getting worse. Amy Knowlton, a scientist with the New England Aquarium started to notice that more whales were getting “severe” entanglements, “meaning that it could compromise their ability to feed or swim and it’s going to eventually lead to their death.”

She set to work trying to track down the reason, and now believes they can tie the increase to a change in rope manufacturing that occurred in the mid 1990s, when rope manufacturers began to make a much stronger rope.

All of a sudden whales were hitting ropes just like before, but they’re weren’t able to break free.

Wart the whale

So what can be done?

One answer, which might seem easy and obvious, is to simply cut whales free when they get tangled. (You’ve perhaps heard a public radio story about this very feat.)  In fact, there is an entire network of teams whose only job is to respond to calls about whales and sea turtles tangled in fishing gear.

When these teams get the call their first order of business is to slow the whale down. To do this, paradoxically, they attach more ropes and buoys to the whale. Their goal is to get the whale to think, boy, this is a lot of work, I’m gonna just stop swimming. And that works really well on humpback whales -- but not on right whales.

“There’s nothing that’s enough to stop a right whale,” says Scott Landry, the director of the Animal Entanglement Response team in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Right whales are filter feeders, “So they’re designed to swim through the water with their mouths open for hour after hour after hour. They’re like a freight train.  And so trying to slow the freight train down is really hard.”

This means that Landry’s team is successful 90 percent of the time when they try to disentangle humpback whales, but only manage to free around 60 percent of entangled right whales.

The unique challenges of freeing right whales has led these teams to invent their own specialized disentanglement tools: sharp knives attached to painters’ poles, cutting grapples (basically a ball of knives) that are pulled through trailing fishing gear, and even crossbows fitted with rope-cutting arrowheads (initially meant as a turkey decapitating arrow).

a Marine animal entanglement response team (maer) working to disentangle the humpback whale "foggy" off the coast of gloucester, massachusetts, on may 18, 2016 (ccs image, noaa permit #18786).

a Marine animal entanglement response team (maer) working to disentangle the humpback whale "foggy" off the coast of gloucester, massachusetts, on may 18, 2016 (ccs image, noaa permit #18786).

The crossbow method was first used in 2010 to save Wart, one of the most iconic whales on the Atlantic coast, who survived to have another calf. Landry had only a few seconds to make the shot, while standing on an inflatable boat out in the open ocean.

“It was very lucky. And also it was a lot of practice,” he says modestly, even going so far as to decline to acknowledge that he himself made the shot. “We work as a team so, if you think about it the person who got the boat in the right position was working just as hard as the person working the crossbow.”

But cutting individual whales free, one at a time, is not going to solve this problem.

From treating symptoms to preventing disease

Each year Scott says he cuts between 7 and 15 humpback whales free from ropes. Meanwhile, scientists have estimated that in the Gulf of Maine somewhere between 10 and 15 percent -- perhaps as many as 150 whales -- get entangled each year.

That’s why Tim Werner, Director of the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction, is annoyed whenever he sees  news coverage of whales being cut free from ropes.

“Oh isn’t that nice. We went out and freed that rope off that animal,” Werner jokes, “And we’re saving whales… Hip hip hooray for us.”

New England is ground zero for the problem of whale entanglement.

Just in the state of Maine, depending on the year, there’s somewhere between four and six-thousand commercial lobsterman. Each of them has a maximum of 800 traps. This means without even counting mooring buoys, eelpot buoys or gillnets, there are literally millions of ropes that whales have to avoid along the Maine coast.

“Now you have to visualize yourself as a massive whale, this gargantuan animal trying to swim through this tangled web of ropes, it’s just like… what was that game?  Operation?” says Werner, “Where you try to pull out the bone without hitting the edge, and the red nose would go MEH!”

"wart" the right whale (ccs image, noaa permit #932-1905)

"wart" the right whale (ccs image, noaa permit #932-1905)

Solutions

Scientists and fishers -- which is, by the way, the “woke” term for fishermen -- from all over the world are working on the entanglement problem gathered in New Hampshire a few months back in a dark hotel ballroom to share what they have learned.

Their projects ranged from experiments with whale alarms (short version: humpbacks don’t seem to care about loud noises) to experiments with rope color (short version: right whales see red and orange ropes best). There was even a study that entailed researchers affixing a giant replica of a whale fin to the side of a boat, and ramming it into the ropes kept variously taut or slack.

The two ideas that seemed to attract the most attention from the gathered scientists, though, were ropeless fishing and weak links in ropes.

Scott Westley, a lobster fisherman from New South Wales Australia, is the international ambassador for ropeless fishing. Over the course of two months, repetitive theft of his traps cost him something on the order of $100,000. So, Westley went looking for a way to hide his lobster traps. He settled on a system that allowed him to sink his ropes and buoys to the sea floor, and use an acoustic signal -- the same technology that your car’s key fob uses to unlock your doors -- to release the float when he’s ready to collect the traps.

However, at the seminar Westley didn’t seem to think this was a solution that would work in New England. He says rock lobsters in Australia are gregarious, “so getting the first couple in is the hard bit, and then from there on they want to be with all their friends.” This means he fishes with large traps that he leaves down for months at a time. New England lobsters are wary of one-another and so here lobsterman fish hundreds of smaller traps, that only capture a few lobsters at a time.

“It’s chalk and cheese that way,” says Westley.

The breakaway ropes idea was inspired by Amy Knowlton’s research that found the stronger ropes were making entanglements worse. Fishers in Cape Cod Bay took that information and proposed using a sleeve, which works similarly to a chinese finger trap, to connect two “bitter ends” of rope (yes, that’s where that term comes from). This allows fishermen to retrofit their existing rope with weak links that break away if a whale gets entangled.

New England is excited about this idea at least. Massachusetts recently announced $180,000 in funding to test out this idea.

More challenges to come

When I was talking to Tim Werner I asked him if he actually thinks it’s possible for vertical ropes in the water to coexist with whales. And in response he rattled off a list of all the reasons the problem would likely soon be getting worse -- a lot of buzz around a new design for off-shore mussel farms and the push to moor floating wind-turbines out in the ocean, for instance.

I pointed out to him that he had just listed new challenges and not solutions and he laughed.

“Yeah, how about that logic?” he said, before pointing out that some of the solutions that aren’t feasible today might help with these future challenges.

If you ask me, I think that if this problem of whale entanglement does indeed worsen, that might be enough of a catalyst to spur the public into action. This is a species that the public actually rallies behind.

Last week in Rye, New Hampshire thousands of people came to see the stinky, half-dissected carcass of a humpback whale. People are willing to pay to sit on the cold, windy deck of a whale watching boat, just on the off chance that they might see one of these animals. We have entire networks of guys all up and down the east coast, who are trained to jump into boats and shoot the ropes off these entangled animals with rope-cutting crossbows as soon as they get they get the call.

I’m pretty sure, this is a species that when push comes to shove, people are going to be willing to pull out all of the stops to protect.

They’re just not quite sure how, yet.

Outside/In was produced this week by: 

Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, & Logan Shannon

Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder 

Photos of Sam are by Greta Rybus unless otherwise noted.

Ask Sam | Syrup-titious

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Whether he likes it or not, Sam has become the go-to source for all of our questions, from showing him photos of weird bugs we want him to identify, to why asparagus makes your pee smell funky, to what psi our bike tires should be. And we're not alone - everyone has questions for Sam. 

If you have a question for Sam, leave him a message on the Ask Sam hotline: 603-223-2448

Mike from Poughkeepsie asks:

“During an episode of the West Wing President Bartlett gets upset when he finds out that at leadership breakfasts they’ll be serving Vermont Maple Syrup versus New Hampshire Maple Syrup. That got me thinking, can you tell the difference between maple syrups made in different places? Local pride in quality aside, is there a way to distinguish New Hampshire maple syrup from Vermont maple syrup or Canadian maple syrup?”

 

Well for starters, I have an “Ask Everybody Else” question: What’s with The West Wing? Why are we still talking about The West Wing? 

(Disclaimer: I have not watched The West Wing. I await your outraged emails.)

(Producers note: Sam? Really? REALLY!?! *sigh*)

Now, syrup. Great Question. For starters, it’s frankly no surprise that Mr. Bartlett’s team wound up serving Vermont Maple Syrup, because most American-made syrup is from the Green Mountain state.

That said, I’m wildly and unrelentingly skeptical that anyone would be able to distinguish the state that a given batch of maple syrup came from by taste alone. And I’m not alone.

“All maple syrups produced at different sugar orchards are going to taste a little bit different,” said Jim Fadden, President of the New Hampshire maple producers association, whose family has collected sap in New Hampshire for seven generations.

But can those differences tip off a taster as to the state of origin? “In my experience the maple trees don’t recognize the borders.” Fadden doesn’t buy it.

While there are other flavor notes in syrup that you can tell between two syrups, the differences are very slight. Two syrups from two sugar shacks are dramatically more similar than two IPAs from two different brewers. As to what causes these different flavors? Bacteria, the same thing that makes your toast toast and not just hot bread, and amino acids. Do we understand how those all interact? Answers range from *shrug* to meh.

Googling around, you can find some articles stating that Vermont has a requirement that Maple Syrup have a slightly higher sugar content than other state, but when you check the rules, both states have the exactly same threshold for syrup these days -- 66.9 percent -- so while I’m not sure if that was ever true, it doesn’t seem to be anymore.

But to be really sure, we at Outside/In asked Twitter for a champion: someone bold enough to believe they could do the impossible and determine the state of origin of four maple syrups by taste alone. Twitter brought us Lucas Meyer, who against all sense or reason successfully guessed all four syrups (you should listen, it was absurd.)

I was baffled, so I threw this one back at Mike from Poughkeepsie, who -- it turns out -- is a math professor. He informed us that the odds of randomly guessing all four correctly is about 1 in 24. A good guess to be sure, but far short of winning the Powerball.

So is this possible? I remain skeptical. To really answer this question I propose that we need to recruit a sample of supertasters, let them train for a year -- tasting maple syrups from different sugar orchards and taking scrupulous notes -- and then have another blind taste-test with a statistically significant number of samples.

Hear that NSF? Consider this my official grant proposal.

Rebecca from…a few desks over...asks:

“Why does it take my dog so long to figure out exactly where it is that he wants to go to the bathroom? Number one, number two... it doesn’t matter. There’s a lot of pickiness going on. On-leash, off-leash, on walks on the road, running free… it doesn’t matter. Location seems to be incredibly important and I want to know why?”

Well Rebecca, (who is, full-disclosure, our digital director here at NHPR, and only called the Ask Sam line when I told her if she just keeps asking questions in the break room we’re not going to be able to create any content for the website) it’s because your adorable wheaten terrier is in fact descended from a timber wolf*.

For wolves and wild dogs, whose noses are simply astonishing, taking a poop is similar to leaving a trail of information behind:

“Who’s been there, when they’ve been there, what’s their reproductive status, what they’ve been eating, etc,” explains Dr. Brian Hare, who heads Duke’s Canine Cognition Center, and is the founder of Dognition.

“As people say often, it’s like a dog’s reading the newspaper to smell what others have left. They are creating content, and so just like you as a media person, you want to put your product your content in a place where people will see it. The reason that dogs for instance want to defecate or urinate on things that are high is because that’s going to be easier for someone else’s sniffer to run into.” 

Dogs, with their leavings, are attempting to create an “olfactory bowl” (a fancy science-y term for their territory), and it would totally defeat the purpose of all that effort if they pooped somewhere hidden and a dog passing into their territory just walked right by.

Other insights?

  • Dogs that learn on a single type of surface are weirded out about using something that they are not used to. These preferences tend to be set by about four-and-a-half-months-old.

  • Sometimes pooping is simply not your dog’s priority, and distractions -- especially the presence of other dogs -- can be an issue.

  • Dogs are sensitive to magnetism, and when the magnetosphere is calm (about 20% of the time) they like to orient themselves North/South. “Why they would do that?” Brian Hare says, “Nobody knows.”

So you can take the dog out of the taiga, but you can’t take the taiga out of the dog. Just a little something to appreciate every time [insert your pup's name here] refuses to just let you go back inside.

 

* this statement may not be 100% science.

Outside/In was produced this week by: 

Sam Evans-Brown, Maureen McMurray, Taylor Quimby, Molly Donahue, Jimmy Gutierrez, & Logan Shannon

Theme music by Breakmaster Cylinder | Additional music by Uncanny Valleys

Photos of Sam are by Greta Rybus unless otherwise noted.

Anothah Boston Cheat

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Ari Ofsevit is a guy from Boston fueled by an intense, nerdy love for sports. The day after running this year’s Boston Marathon, his face was all over the cover of the Boston Globe and on all of the network news channels, but on the internet, people were accusing him of cheating. This is Ari’s story.

The Boston Marathon has a long, well-documented history of cheaters.

Of course, there was that most famous of marathon cheaters, Rosie Ruiz, who hitched a ride on Boston subway 10 miles into the race. But cheaters abound: there’s this armchair investigator who claims to have found at least 47 people who cheated back in 2015 by taking someone else’s bib, or by taking short-cuts in their qualifying marathon. There’s also the thriving online marketplace, where people say they’d be willing to spend as much as $5,000 dollars to get their hands on someone else’s starting number.

And this year, once again, a high profile Boston marathon finish is being called into question.

The racer in question is Ari Ofsevit. And he’s a friend of mine.

After the race, I was very surprised to see Ari was all over the internet.

I was then doubly shocked to learn that beneath every story written about Ari and in a forum of a website called Let’s Run internet  commenters were calling for him to be disqualified.

When Runner’s World noticed the online muck that was swriling around Ari’s story whenever it was posted, they stirred the pot, posting a second article about the reaction to the first article, inviting readers to “engage” on the question.

“So, there are people who say you cheated,” I said to Ari, when I interviewed him.

Ari responded with an exasperated snort.

“With cheating you have to have intent,” he said, “People were saying things like, he shouldn’t have accepted the aid from those guys. Well you know, I didn’t have the opportunity to say that because my brain was not functioning.”

Today's episode of Outside/In (which I encourage you to listen to, instead of reading… I promise, it’s better) is the story of my friend Ari, his fifteen minutes of fame, and the bigger question: what’s a race like the Boston Marathon for? 

What Happened?

If you want to hear this story straight from the horse’s mouth, with an impressive dose of profanity mixed in, you can read Ari’s account of why he thinks he collapsed just before the finish line of the race. What’s below is my abridged account.

His preparation for the marathon the day before was pretty reasonable - despite making a transcontinental flight the morning before the race. Ari hydrated, he slept in his own bed, and he woke up before his alarm.

And that day, Marathon Monday, was gorgeous weather, 65 degrees and sunny. (Though Ari, who hates running when it’s hot, calls it “sneaky warm”.)

The first 17 miles Ari felt great and was on track to beat 3 hours. He says he was drinking every water stop. But as the race wears on he started to slow down, though he said it was nothing unusual.

“Most people are going to feel lousy on those hills,” he said.

He’s slowing down: from 6 and half minute mile pace, to 7 minute mile pace… to mile 26 when he’s up to nearly an 8 minute mile.

But he turned the corner onto Boylston street, and then end was in sight.

“I remember thinking, “Alright legs, go,” Ari said. That thought was the last thing he remembers before waking up in the intensive care unit four hours later.

Did he finish?

Ari got to within 200 feet of the finishing line before collapsing with a body temperature of 108.8 degrees. At this temperature, doctors told him he had a 30-minute clock ticking toward organ failure and brain injury.

ari did pretty well... right up until the very end of the race

ari did pretty well... right up until the very end of the race

Two runners helped him across the finish line. And first responders dumped him into a tub of ice. This actually led to an over-correction, and when they sent him off to the hospital he was actually hypothermic: his body temperature had dropped to 84 degrees.

Ari didn’t break the 3-hour mark, but he did get a time: a  very respectable 3  hours and 3 minutes. You can find his name, and his time on the results. He finished in 1848th place - and like all finishers, he got a medal.

Once his story started to hit the media, first on the cover of the Boston Globe, and then later on the network TV channels, certain parts of the running community started grousing.

“To me, it would have been considered, he should have been a DNF,” Jay Curry told me. DNF is runner-speak for “Did Not Finish”.

Curry is an an OR nurse, a cyclist and a triathlete. He’s never done the Boston Marathon, but he has done ironman triathlons: that’s where you have to run a marathon after swimming 2.4 miles and biking 112. I found him through a Facebook comment he left underneath one of the articles about Ari.

“It kind of takes away from the sport, if anybody can just pick him up and carry him across the line  or I could jump on a bus and say, Jeez, I’m kinda tired right now, I’ve got two miles to go I’ll just call a taxi and take a taxi to the finish line and be considered a finisher.”

Jay says he has no ill-will toward Ari, and doesn’t think he deliberately cheated. But he’s steadfast. Ari did not finish. And Jay’s not alone. For every 10 people who celebrate his finish as a story about good sportsmanship and community - there are one or two that say, nice story, but he should be disqualified.

Albert Shank a Spanish teacher and marathoner from Arizona is another.

“You’re toeing the line running the same exact course at the same time as these elite runners from Kenya, and Ethiopia, and the United States and all over the world, and I think you should be subjected to the same rules as they are,” Shank told me in a phone interview.

When it comes to this question of whether he deserves to be considered a finisher, there’s a legitimate point being made. If Ari had been in first place, he definitely would have been disqualified. This actually happened in the Olympic marathon in 1908. Dorando Pietri, an Italian, had to be helped to his feet by the course umpires when he collapsed five times in the last 400 meters. The second place finisher -- an American -- protested, and Pietri lost his gold medal.

Ari has done a lot of races... a lot of races.

Ari has done a lot of races... a lot of races.

What's a race for, anyway?

But there’s a big difference between an Olympic athlete , and Ari Ofsevit. Hell, there’s a big difference between the front of the Boston Marathon and Ari Ofsevit.

“I understand that there are folks out there in the world that, a rule is a rule is a rule, and I get it… god bless ‘em for feeling that way,” said Dave McGillivray, the race director of the Boston Marathon, one of the people who very well could have disqualified Ari.

The rules are that runners accepting aid from others “may” be disqualified, not that they “shall” be disqualified. Typically, the routine is that another competitor submits a complaint, which the race jury considers. In Ari’s case, there was no complaint… at least no official, not-in-an-internet-comment-section complaint.

“It was a gallant effort, and I feel he earned the medal. Let’s move on,” said McGillivray.

In reality, there are two races going on in Boston, with two different sets of rules. One of those races -- the elite field -- is really only about who is fastest. The other, is mostly just a community building event. One that would be totally ruined if you militantly disqualified thousands of people who did things like take water from someone other than an officially sanctioned water-stop.

Some of the complaints circle around the prestigiousness of the Boston Marathon. It’s really a tough to race qualify for, and so many people register that in 2016 more than 4,500 people who made the official qualifying time still got turned away.

Because he finished, Ari will likely qualify for next year’s marathon and he could be taking a spot from a runner who finished the race on his own two feet.

Take it up with Meb

So who gets the final word? I’m going to give it to Meb.

Meb Keflezighi -- olympic silver medalist, winner of the 2014 Boston Marathon, and general goodwill ambassador for the sport of long-distance running --  actually tweeted a photo of the guys carrying Ari across the finish. That tweet was above, but here it is again.

You’ll notice, Meb didn’t write #ObviousDQ.

 

 

 

Tiny Terror

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A mini episode about one of the world's cutest predators. 

The Shrike

Henry David Thoreau

Hark—hark—from out the thickest fog
Warbles with might and main
The fearless shrike, as all agog
To find in fog his gain.

His steady sail he never furls
At any time o' year,
And perched now on winter's curls,
He whistles in his ear.

Gridlocked

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Something very different is going on up in Boothbay, Maine. It was an experiment which – if it works – could represent a fundamental shift in the way we think about using electricity.

Listen to the full show

I finally went to visit the rocky peninsula the Maine coast in August of 2015. I had been following what was going on there intermittently by reading the dispatches from the Portland Press herald’s excellent energy reporter (who has an equally excellent byline) Tux Turkel, and occasionally wading into the arcana of the filings at the Maine Public Utilities Commission. But after so much reading, I wanted to hear about it first-hand.

If you want to hear the details of the Boothbay project and explanation for why it matters and how it works, you should scroll back up and listen to this week’s podcast. But here’s the tantalizing question that drew me up to Maine: what if everything you thought you knew about energy was exactly backwards?

What if the way that we currently do electricity is actually the most expensive option, and all of that fancy “clean-tech” and “green-tech” actually the cheapest option?

Certainly, if all you’ve ever done is looked at a chart of the cost per megawatt hour of a given source of energy, this is a surprise.

This counter-intuitive possibility is not news to folks who have been paying attention. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been churning out reports saying so for years. For instance, a recent one concludes that technology available today “can unlock $13 billion per year of avoided grid investment and 10 to 40% savings on customer bills.” Another predicts that within 10 or 15 years it will be cheaper to build a new house with solar panels and a battery than to connect that house to the electric grid.

But the challenges of rolling out technologies like these are pretty profound. In part of our interview that didn’t make it into the podcast, Richard Silkman, whose company was responsible for the Boothbay experiment, explained to me that he initially had hoped to create a business that would compete with the utilities whenever an upgrade to the grid was deemed necessary. Here's how it would work, the utilities could propose a new power line and wherever the technology was the right fit,his company would propose a competing suite of renewable energy, energy storage, and other technologies that could shift demand away from hours of peak stress on the grid.

“But as we got more involved in the process and began to learn more about how the system would treat us, we realized that was not going to be an option,” he said.

The essential struggle is that the utility industry is not governed by the same market forces that made massive technological change in areas like computers and other gadgets possible. Utilities have operated for years as regulated monopolies. Only in a few states has something that vaguely resembles a free-market for electricity emerged. In order to make money selling electricity or building power lines, your company must work through a complicated web of regulators, electric rate designs, and separate regional markets for energy, generation capacity, voltage regulation… and so on.

Indeed, even as we were putting the final touches on the podcast, a new chapter in the saga had begun. In a filing, the local utility argued that electric demand in Boothbay has been growing more slowly than originally forecast and therefore the pilot project was unnecessary and should be discontinued. It also says that of 13 times they called on the batteries or backup generator, only 6 times did they feed energy back into the grid without any problems.

Silkman’s company (in a surprisingly colorful rebuttal, as regulatory filings go) contends the utility “got it wrong,” and that it was in fact the presence of the project which has resulted in declining electricity demand. It also claims that the utility has withheld crucial data it needs to make the pilot work most efficiently, and the only data that has been provided was in a “in an apparently hostile attempt… to discredit the usefulness and value” of the pilot project.

I asked Steve Hinchman, one of Silkman's collaborators, about his company’s relationship with the utility when I interviewed him. “This project is challenging them,” he replied, saying that the folks on the technical side of the business have been helpful and interested in the project but “the people that are more responsible for the financial long term planning would prefer not to have competition, to be honest.”

In short, if the transition renewable energy and the smart grid is going happen, it’s going to require a whole-sale change in the business model of electricity, and that could be an ugly fight between the companies that deliver us electricity now, and those that may do so in the future.

This is happening in some places, though different states are following different tracks. In New York, the emerging plan is largely market-based, meanwhile in Vermont regulators have taken the lead. Whichever path is followed, the result could be similar: as Gordon Van Welie, CEO of ISO New England, once told me in an interview “theoretically perfect regulations and perfect markets would yield the same result.”

Will that result be something like the Boothbay pilot, or something else entirely? We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

Photos of the 2003 Blackout and Boothbay

Parenting at 24,000 Feet

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For alpinist Ben Clark, scaling the world’s toughest mountains was a source of pride and peace; for his parents it was a source of constant worry. After they learned to live with their son’s adventurous streak, Ben decided to quit the mountaineer life altogether. Why? The answer may surprise you. 


Ben Clark directed the documentary, The Alaskan Way.

"The Alaskan Way" is a documentary film chronicling a season spent in a community of heli-skiers in Haines, Ak. that asks: "Is living the dream worth risking it all? Together the heli skiers explore the commitments, sacrifices and rewards of living a life with deep passion for deep powder. During the filming of The Alaskan Way a great tragedy occurred. Heli ski guide and avalanche forecaster Rob Liberman and client Nick DoDov perished in an avalanche on 3/13/12. I will never forget that day as it set my own life on a course to produce this film with suddenly incomprehensible obligations. How the story could be told and how could the story not be told were constant daily questions as perspectives mounted, some with vehemently opposing views. As a director I had only a simple solution-tell the truth with the footage I have and put it out there. This nearly 60 minute documentary film about Heli Skiing may not entertain you and I apologize personally to anyone who is bored reviewing the material, it is not ski porn. This film informs viewers about the circumstances discovered by a team of professional heli ski guides operating in a consequential environment. Despite thier best efforts to ensure safety in the mountains they met a situation where all efforts still resulted in the loss of two lives and one lesson learned: The best can still have a bad day. Please consider supporting the availability of this film with a donation of $5 or more to the tip jar. 10% of profits will be donated to Avalanche Education initiatives chosen by The Alaskan Way TV LLC. Any donation helps and I hope you will remember Rob Liberman, Nick Dodov and the valliant efforts of thier colleagues and friends. Please introduce your friends, families and fellow powder skiers to the lifestyle that for a brief moment in time was captured here and asks us all to weigh the decisions we make when committing to the pursuit of deep passion for deep powder. Ben Clark Director, The Alaskan Way

Follow Ben Clark on Instagram @bclarkmtn

You can also find out more about his film projects at his website: bclarkmtn.com

The Young Man of the Mountain

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An Everest Ethics Question

Tyler Armstrong is 12 years old. He likes to play laser tag.  He’s learning to play guitar. And this spring he's heading to China, where he will attempt to summit the world's highest mountain. In this episode, an ethical debate: how young is too young to climb Mount Everest?

Tyler Armstrong talks to a local news station last year about his Everest climb.

Explore Everest from the comfort of your living room, with this interactive guide.

Champagne on the Rocks

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We reported this story back in 2015. There have been a couple of changes which we mention in the version you see below: Episode 39: Champagne on the Rocks. Both versions of this episode are included in this post for the sake of keeping our archival ducks in a row. Enjoy!

In the summer of 2015, Scott Jurek set a new record for running the 2,181 miles of the Appalachian Trail. But on his triumphant day atop the last mountain in Northern Maine, his 21st century campaign for the trail's record ran afoul of a park founded on ideas about wilderness from a decidedly earlier time.

Scott Jurek Celebrating at the Top: 

A photo posted by Scott Jurek (@scottjurek) on

A photo posted by Scott Jurek (@scottjurek) on

A photo posted by Scott Jurek (@scottjurek) on

A photo posted by Scott Jurek (@scottjurek) on