Middlebury students head for Detroit
as part of campaign for cleaner cars
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| The Road to Detroit includes a stop in New York City. |
MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—Four Middlebury students are taking action on the road this summer. May Boehve '06.5, Austen Levihn-Coon '07.5, Jamie Henn '07, and Jeremy Osborn '06.5 are joining other college students on a bus tour called "The Road to Detroit," to spread the word about clean energy and, with any luck, help spur a green revolution with a visit to the headquarters of the American auto industry.
Before departing on the Road to Detroit, Boehve, a political science major, was part of the now-famous Project BioBus, which took a group of Middlebury students on a three-month tour last September, promoting bio-diesel at schools in more than 20 cities. Among her other accomplishments, she received a National Wildlife Federation grant to begin a worm-composting system on campus and was a founding member of the Sunday Night Group, Middlebury's climate action group. Osborn and Henn were also co-founders of that group; Osborn, too, is a political science major, while Henn is a history major. Levihn-Coon is majoring in environmental studies and has also been an active member of the Sunday Night Group.
While taking economics professor Jon Isham's winter term class, "What Works? Building the New Climate Change Movement," both Henn and Osborn began to work with Billy Parish, the coordinator of a youth environmentalist organization called Energy Action. At the end of winter term, Middlebury hosted a "What Works?" conference, which brought Parish and student leaders in the northeast to campus to discuss new strategies to energize the movement for climate change.
According to Henn, "On the second night of the conference, we all got together in the Gamut Room, over a plate of nachos and a map of the United States, and cooked up the Road to Detroit." In February, the group presented its idea at the Northeast Climate Conference as an Energy Action Campaign. It was there that the Project Biobus crew gave the Road to Detroit group their 1991 GMC Bluebird Bus, which has been converted to run on a combination of used vegetable oil and bio-diesel, along with $5,000 to move the project forward.
And move forward it did. Road to Detroit expects to appear in more than 50 towns and cities, educating people about clean energy and global warming, and collecting signatures for the "Clean Car Pledge." The Pledge asks signers to buy union-made American cars that not only get 40 miles to the gallon, but also meet California's higher emissions standards. After covering 13,000 miles over the course of two months, the tour will roll to a stop in Detroit on August 20. There, organizers hope to present their petition to the CEOs of the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler—as well as the United Auto Workers, to show auto industry employees how they also will benefit from investing in fuel efficient vehicles.
Team RTD is expecting a productive and positive summer. When asked how the bus is running, Levihn-Coon's reply was, "The horn doesn't work, so we can't honk at people who give us a thumbs up. Instead we've been using the PA." How appropriately resourceful!
For more information on the Road to Detroit effort, you can visit the team's web site.
— Jennifer Schneider '07