The Road to Detroit

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Residents of Detroit, Michigan have always taken their cars seriously, so they were understandably baffled by the latest contraption rolling down Eight Mile Drive: a school bus painted with corn rows reading, “Crusin’ ain’t easy at three dollars a gallon. Oil is over. Drive the Future.” And then, above the rear wheels, “Biodiesel.” 

According to Jamie Henn, the 21-year-old co-organizer of the Road to Detroit campaign, the slogan embodies an underlying logic: “We thought, cars are the major contributor to global warming. Cars are made in Detroit. We’re going to go there.” 

The Road to Detroit’s mission is multifaceted. “The Road to Detroit crew spent the summer talking to farmers, Republicans, and, most importantly, labor,” says Sarah Connolly, a representative from the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a non-profit sponsor of the bus trip. The common denominator uniting these groups: indignation over the wasteful behavior of the “big three” Detroit-based automakers—Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, and General Motors. 

The Road to Detroit crew doesn’t shun the wisdom of existing environmental organizations. On the contrary, they’ve taken an important cue from RAN’s “Jumpstart Ford” campaign by addressing their 15,000-citizen-strong “Clean Car Pledge” to the Ford Motor Company. “Ford has had the most fleet-wide greenhouse gas emissions five years running,” says Boeve, making them an ideal high-profile industry target. Road to Detroit also teamed up with San Francisco-based Energy Action to create a media-savvy campaign that managed to sustain the romance and idealism of a college road trip. 

Drive the Future Weekend, the culminating event of a long, greasy (their bus runs on vegetable oil as well as biodiesel) journey, felt predictably eclectic. On Saturday, August 20, the eight-member bus crew, along with an entourage of friends and like-minded activists, descended on suburban Detroit for the Woodward Dream Cruise. They rumbled down Woodward Avenue all afternoon waving to children, spreading the word on alternative fuel technologies, and voicing concern about a stagnant, inefficient U.S. auto industry. “You just have to let people know that there are alternatives and they’ll be excited,” reflected Mike Gregor from Macomb, Michigan. 

On the following afternoon, the bus rested outside the First Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Detroit while its passengers hosted an all-day educational symposium on alternative fuel. “Movements start with visions and profound questions,” declared Rich Feldman, an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) veteran, longtime autoworker union activist, and author of End of the Line, an oral history of the U.S. automobile industry. He encouraged the assembled crowd of students and concerned local citizens to take their political cues from such varied sources as Martin Luther King, the Zapatistas, and anti-WTO protestors in Seattle. His talk portrayed the Road to Detroit as the vanguard of an alternative vision for a town that, with rising oil prices, encroaching foreign competition, and job flight, has been forsaken by the U.S. economy. 

As director of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the nearby University of Michigan, Walter McManus released a study in July on the potential effects of higher gasoline prices on vehicle sales and the U.S. auto industry. Among his findings: were oil prices to rise from August’s $67 per barrel to $80 or $100 per barrel, even patriotic Americans would stop buying U.S.-made cars. Consequently, Detroit would bear the brunt of the impact on the economy in the form of 465,000 automobile and support industry jobs lost. 

But McManus’s study also looks optimistically towards economic recovery: “While high oil prices do put American jobs at risk, I think there’s still time to do something to combat these risks.” Specifically, he has found that “fuel prices matter to new vehicle buyers.” Last year, over 95 percent of SUV  drivers claimed that fuel prices would factor into their decision to purchase a new car, a statistic that suggests car buyers would support an auto industry shift towards production of more fuel-efficient vehicles. 

True to its expressed commitment to the city of Detroit, the conference also featured a host of local artists. “The city has left us shattered and broken,” sang Joe Reilly, a Detroit-based folksinger whose music addresses industrial decay, pollution, and human resilience. Later, students from the local Matrix Theatre Company performed skits mocking auto industry CEOs and a local chapter of “Raging Grannies” led participants in a round of climate-sensitive children’s songs: “The people in the street go cough cough cough….” 

Perhaps the most surprising guest of the event was Reverend Charles Morris, pastor of a catholic church in nearby Wyandotte, Michigan. With a reference to Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” he detailed his efforts to “walk the walk” to make his own parish more environmentally sustainable. As director of Michigan Interfaith Power and Light, a collection of energy conscious religious organizations, he has helped his congregation to reduce its energy use by 60 percent. 

By late afternoon, the assembled crowd had broken into groups to discuss, among other things, the next stage of the student climate change movement. Billy Parish, a 23-year-old organizer for Energy Action, has organized a “campus climate challenge” in which he hopes students on 500 campuses will petition their Administrations for better energy practices. 

His exuberance was coupled with a pragmatic sense of political expediency: “Imagine 1,000 student groups across the continent working to transform their campuses into sustainable communities, organizing enormous unified actions, and joining together in state, regional, and national student summits. This is the grassroots energy the global warming movement needs.”  

Riding a surge of grassroots energy and artistic inspiration, the Road to Detroit tour bus and its entourage made its last stop outside the former Model T assembly plant in downtown Detroit. In an appropriately austere ceremony, Henn delivered the Road to Detroit’s clean-car pledge to Bernie Rickey, vice-president of the UAW 600 Union. 

Weeks later, Katrina’s effect on gas prices would bring the Road to Detroit campaign into sharp focus. 

The prospect of a new global climate order being enacted in December suggests that the type of collegiate activism embodied by the Road to Detroit will not only be relevant to today’s climate change debate, but perhaps even stand as a political force to be reckoned with. Their biodiesel fuel, after all, at least compared to gasoline, is inexhaustible, organic, and U.S.- grown. Their movement may last longer than the big three auto-makers assume it will. “The future can be frightening or it can be a renaissance,” says Sarah Trapido, a crew member who plans to stay plugged into climate change happenings on returning to campus this fall. “We opt for the latter.” 

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Mike Ives is a student at Middlebury College in Vermont. His last article, “On Corn and Culture,” appeared in the June  2005 edition of Z.