It will take time to assess the legacy of Pete Seeger, who did an awful lot in his 94 years. He
popularized folk music through his membership in The Weavers, wrote a lot of classic songs
(recorded by The Byrds and others), and lead the way to an effective cleanup of the Hudson
River by founding the — still going strong — Clearwater organization.
Seeger saw the Hudson every morning from his perch on a mountainside in Beacon, New York.
He bought the place in 1949, and in 1961 he wrote, “Sailing up my dirty stream/Still I love it
and I’ll keep the dream/That some day, though maybe not this year/My Hudson River will once
again run clear.”
How many people get to realize their dreams? According to the nonprofit Riverkeeper, water
quality is mostly “acceptable” today from Albany, New York to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The Hudson
is running, well, not exactly clear but a whole lot clearer than it was in 1976, when the state
environmental agency warned people not to eat the fish they caught. (General Electric started
using PCBs at its capacitor plant on the Hudson River in 1947, two years before Seeger moved in.)
Pete Seeger on the roof with his solar panels. (Photo: Ed Witkin/Reprinted with permission of
Home Powermagazine)
Yes, Seeger drove an electric car, and charged it from his own solar system. According to the
folksy Home Power magazine, in 1991 Seeger was intrigued by Ed Witkin’s battery powered
1969
VW Microbus, which was used to provide electricity for one of the Clearwater stages.
Pete wanted his own electric vehicle, and Witkin helped him find a 1988 Ford Ranger, with
both four-wheel drive to handle his mountain and a 26.4-kilowatt-hour bank of lead-acid
batteries connected to a nine-inch Advanced DC motor.
That truck, which got named “Truxie,” is old-tech today, and (especially because it had to
go up those hills) had a range of only 10 to 20 miles. It suited Seeger’s needs, though, and
he used it a lot to haul the firewood he burned in his woodstove. He also connected his electric
chainsaw to the truck.
Beacon is only a few miles from the Indian Point nuclear power station, and 10 miles from the
Central Hudson oil-fired plant. This irked Seeger, who didn’t want his electric car to get its
electrons from non-sustainable sources. That led to the rooftop solar system — 20 AstroPower
120-watt photovoltaic modules, 2,400 watts in total. The electricity not used by the Seegers,
or Truxie, went back to the grid and spun their meter backwards. Witkin estimated that the
solar system — not big by today’s standards — offset about 22 percent of the Seegers’ electricity consumption.
“Pete Seeger wasn’t technically all that savvy, but he totally defined himself as an environmentalist,
and he used that electric truck all the time,” Witkin, who lives in North Carolina, told me.
“Sometimes he’d use it to make maple syrup, or to power the PA at events with music. It’s still
up there at his house.” Witkin said Seeger was still using Truxie as late as last November.
Seeger lived his principles. When I was at E/The Environmental Magazine, he used to send us passionate letters to the editor with crushed flowers in them. Let’s hope Truxie finds a good home. And those solar panels go on putting renewable energy back into the grid.
