Ian Lambert, July 17th, 2024

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo: I'm Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo. It's July 17th, 2024 and I'm here with, please say your name.

Ian Lambert: Ian Lambert.

DLT: Can you please spell your name?

IL: I a n L a m b e r t.

DLT: And do you live in the city of Detroit?

IL: Yes, I do.

DLT: What neighborhood do you live in?

IL: Indian Village.

DLT: And how long have you lived in that neighborhood?

IL: Three years.

DLT: Where else have you lived?

IL: In Midtown for two years.

DLT: And what career are you in?

IL: I am the Dean of Graduate Studies at the College for Creative Studies here in Detroit, and I'm also a professor.

DLT: And how did you get involved in sustainability and climate action?

IL: About 25 years ago, I took on a new academic role at a university in the UK, where I'm from. And at the time, there was a sustainability class that nobody wanted to teach. So I was the new guy and they said, here, teach this. So I started researching the class and put together a curriculum and a class and a project for a group of design students. Prior to that, I had been working with reclaimed materials, as a furniture maker. Had sort of gone around finding discarded building waste, construction waste on construction sites and taken that timber and using it to make furniture. Some of that ended up in exhibitions in London and in Edinburgh, and formed the basis of work that I was studying in the 1990s as a furniture maker.

DLT: And why did you end up relocating your work to Detroit?

IL: That's more for family reasons. My wife is Canadian, I needed a job over here. I hadn't really considered Detroit much until I saw the job advertised, and I came over here. It's kind of interesting that I had two job offers at the time. I was very fortunate, and this was the backup. But when I came here, I saw an enormous opportunity to be part of a really kind of, energetic regrowth of a city, a regeneration of a city which would have required a good deal of a sort of a climate action or sustainability mindset, in design. And I was very impressed with the way that the city was using design as part of that kind of regeneration, particularly through Design Core, which is part of the college, which is located in the College for Creative Studies. And they're also the stewards of the Unesco City of Design. And we're the only Unesco City of Design in the US. So, when I came here, I just saw this enormous opportunity to start working in this field in a way that goes beyond just simply taking materials and reusing them, but in a way that really kind of embeds sustainability and community development and climate justice in systems change. You know, and really, I'm really looking at that interdisciplinarity where people in business and the sciences and technology and industry can all come together to work towards a common goal.

DLT: And can you talk a little bit more about how you saw the city using design for the regeneration?

IL: Well I was, I became quickly aware that the role of Design Corps was to try to use design to energize business development, and to drive business development and economic growth. But design isn't, you know, something that gives rise to material objects. Design is a process. It's a way of thinking and a way of problem solving. So we can— And it's also, it's a very human-centered activity. So, looking at the climate crisis here in Detroit, you know, people often sort of look to scientists to come up with the answers. Now, scientists give us a grasp of the problem. They can explain what's happening. And their role is critical in providing the evidence of the situation that we're in. But the climate crisis isn't just a science crisis or a technology crisis. It's very much a cultural crisis. And it's, at the root of that is our material culture. There was an article in the Guardian newspaper today, talking about how there's been a rise in greenhouse gases from China. That's arising from the production of, aluminium, or I should say aluminum, as we say here, and flat screen TVs as well. This very, this very sharp spike in demand. Not just for the flat screens, but also for aluminum as a material in semiconductors and its role in renewable energy infrastructure. So that just goes to show the sort of the consumer demand on things that we need, and how it's integrated with our infrastructure.

And we need to look at that from a systemic point of view and understand how the commodity flows and the flows of materials and the flows of things need to change, because if we just continue to make new stuff all of the time to sate consumer demand, there's going to be a problem. But also, driving that consumer, behind that consumer demand is a real need for energy to meet those things as well. So, in that consumer crisis, it's a real challenge for us to change that economic system overall. Now I feel as I'm maybe going off down a rabbit hole in this answer, but, you know, the paradigm shift that's needed to change from a growth-led economy to an alternative economy for, like, there's all sorts of alternatives to that. But economies that rely less on the production of things, and moreso on the, marshaling of experiences. So that we're not depleting our resources. And every time we extract resources from the ground, we're using a huge amounts of energy. Every time we process those materials, we're creating gases that are that are giving rise to pollution. And that's a very much a global thing, because the article that I read in The Guardian was very much focused on China. But by proxy, all countries in the world that sort of are a part of this demand are, by proxy, part of that problem. It's not just a Chinese problem. I'm not sure I answered your question. [Laughter]

DLT: No, I think you did. And you mentioned the term climate justice. What do you mean by that?

IL: In that large parts of society, both locally and globally, are overlooked or mistreated in this crisis. So, if you look at it from a global perspective, you know, there's a large part of the world's population that live in abject poverty, don't have running water, don't have sanitation. And live in very, very poor conditions, work, if they have a job, work in very poor conditions, and are overlooked in the insatiable appetite of those of us who don't quite realize where we are, how lucky we are, how wealthy we are, in the sort of Global North or Global West. So, you know, you might ask a question. A colleague of mine posed this question, you know, with regard to a sneaker, you know, what was the name of the person that made this sneaker, you know? And we wear sneakers, you know, we all, we need clothes, we wear clothes, we wear shoes. But the price of those clothes are driven down by using workforces in parts of the world where that labor force is very, very cheap. But the reason that that labor force is very, very cheap is because their working conditions are terrible. Their lifestyles are very poor.

So that's maybe one example of a sort of a climate injustice globally. And to get that global equity is going to be extremely difficult because we're locked into this economic system, this growth-led system. Locally, you might find that people are overlooked by the way that the city's infrastructure is. It's no coincidence, going back, right back to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, that the poorer neighborhoods tended to be to the north of an industrial city, because of the prevailing southwesterly wind would blow the pollution over those parts of the city. And the wealthier neighborhoods lived away from that pollution and that production. That's just a simple matter of demographic distribution, which favors the wealthy over the poor. And it's a form of climate injustice. You might see the same here, where the underprivileged communities maybe have to suffer, you know, the problems of pollution. Poor water, poor sanitation, poor services. That sort of, that are brought about through an industrial endeavor. So I mean, that's just one form of climate injustice. I mean, we can sort of expand that into social justice, that when you live in a city that is built around the automobile, you know. There is known evidence that the automotive companies had some kind of role in advancing the personal vehicle over the public vehicle. You know, again, you can argue that that's a form of climate justice when people have to take the bus and walk long distances because we've got very poor public transport infrastructure. Again, you can argue that that's a form of climate injustice.

DLT: And what year did you move to Detroit?

IL: 2019.

DLT: And since moving here, have you noticed any particular ways that Detroit is affected by climate change, uniquely?

IL: We're all affected by climate change. How Detroit is affected uniquely is not how we're affected by climate change, but our response to climate change. I know that there is an enormous amount of work going on in the city to make a transition into a city that that is starting to become a lot more circular in its thinking. I've been working on the city of Detroit Waste Diversion Advisory Committee. And we're talking about how we deal with waste, and there is a will to make this change, but it's slow. You know, in the United States— Well, the world average for recycling is about 9%. 9% of all the materials that we produces are recycled. And that's the— And in the United States it’s 9%. So we're at the global average. That means that somewhere, someone, somewhere is not doing any recycling at all. But if you look at countries like Germany or South Korea, their recycling rates are as high as 70%. So, you know, people are demonstrating how you can become these kind of zero waste cities. I think we're behind the curve. And I think there's a lot of acknowledgment to that. But the— Again, it's a matter of political will, because we have some people who recognize that— And by the way, waste diversion is just one small part of the problem. And we're not, you know, I think it's recognized that recycling is just a tiny component of how we might respond to the climate crisis. But, you know, there will be a number of people that will follow the science and try to act in response to that. And there are others who are ideologically opposed to the notion that there was a climate crisis and that is, that's a very dangerous place to be. If we are guided by science, then we have a sort of a much more empirical process. If we’re guided by ideology, then it's politically driven. It might be that it's a matter of it's just too inconvenient, or I just don't want to change my lifestyle. I don't want to make these changes, or I just don't want to know.

And you do have these kind of extremes of people, people that are very passionate and acting on the climate crisis to the point where I think they kind of almost alienate those people that they need to change. And on the other hand, you have people that are ideologically opposed to it because it doesn't align with their political views, their social values, their theological values. And their way of life is, they might say, we're not going to change our way of life because someone's telling me that the world is getting hotter. In the middle, there are a large number of people who just don't want to know about it. It’s just too overwhelming. It’s too— You know, there's this notion of climate anxiety as well. So how we actually move people, to bring people into, move people along, is going to be a long and protracted process. And I'm not sure that we're going to, we're going to run out of time. It does require action in, at all levels. It requires action at the grassroots level. And that's something I've noticed in Detroit a lot. There are a lot of people working at the grassroots level who are trying to deal with how we deal with waste, how we deal with composting, urban farming, how we deal, how we use land in Detroit, how we depollute land in Detroit, how we try to sort of create cleaner, greener, safer neighborhoods. On the other hand, it takes an enormous amount of political will to make these changes, to make these economic shifts. And you can see it in certain countries, and in other countries, you're not going to see it at all because of that rhetoric which is ideologically driven. I've kind of lost my thread there. [Laughter] Where do we, what was the original question?

DLT: Mostly about, you know, how climate change was affecting Detroit in particular, and I definitely think you addressed that.

IL: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

DLT: Are there any grassroots organizations in Detroit that you would want to mention, that you've seen doing this work?

IL: [Well, I mean, one stand out organization is Make Food Not Waste. Danielle Todd leads that. She's done a tremendous job with it. And they're really, really growing and gaining momentum. I first met Danielle about 2 or 3 years ago, and, you know, I've really seen her organization start to make an impact, they’re showing up at lots of events. And I think what's really interesting about Make Food Not Waste is its— When people think of food waste, they think of composting. Now, there’s widely-known figures that show that we waste about a third of the food that's produced in the world. When people in the world are going starving, people in Detroit are going starving, that is really, that is not a good system. And that is, that kind of waste comes about as a kind of a, it's collateral damage in a much bigger sort of industrial food distribution and food production process. And Make Food Not Waste is kind of, they're not about composting. Composting is the last resort of dealing with food waste. And people just think, oh, well, I haven't eaten all my food, that’s all right. I'll just compost it. In actual fact, we need to think about how we stop food being wasted and make sure that as much food as possible ends up on the plate, and ends up being consumed.

And I really like their ethos, that ethos, because it sort of reminds people that composting is still a form of throwing away, even though that material’s going to compost, even though that material can be returned to the Earth, it still requires a degree of processing. Particularly if it's industrial composting. You know, like anaerobic or aerobic digestion, which is useful. Biodegradable plastics. But that kind of that kind of work is really making people stand up and they— And I may be looking at old figures, but the last figures I saw that they were feeding about 5000 people a week with donated food. Which was on, was maybe on the cusp of going off or maybe wasn't going off at all. You know, people showing up, well, we ordered too much. We ordered too many tomatoes. And we've got, fifteen boxes of them. Can you take them? You know, and again, for them, there are challenges because they've got to use that food quickly, because there are plenty of people that will say, here's a load of food. And then they have to go, well, we have to freeze this. But they’re one organization. And now I'm— Can we just pause for a moment? I want to look up—

[Recording paused]

DLT: The recording is unpaused.

IL: And then, I think another quite inspiring organization is Green Living Science. They came out of Recycle Here! which are up in Midtown. Interestingly, when I first moved to Detroit, I got an apartment, and I asked about recycling and nobody in the apartment wanted to know about it. They were pretty, you know, a very commercial property management organization that just couldn't care less about recycling. They really couldn't. So, I went out and I found Recycle Here! just over the street. And what I liked about it was that— And I used to show up on my bike, so I was known as the guy on the bike. So, sometimes you see people lining up in their cars trying to get in there and you're thinking, well, you've probably driven 2 or 3 miles to bring that 4 pounds of trash to be recycled. Anyhow, I digress. What I liked about it is you go in there and you would see how they had divided everything up into the different types of materials. Then the onus was on me to go through the large bag of recycling that I had to then pick out and sort through the different types of plastic. They took styrofoam, that is, expanded polystyrene, which is very hard to recycle. They take all sorts of things there. And it was, it was quite educational in the sense that I know where things go. But every now and again I would look at something and say to the guy, well, what do I do with this? I don't know what it is. There was no marking on it. And he goes, well, we can't do anything if we don't know what it is. We can't recycle it. So that will just become a contaminant.

And what grew out of them was Green Living Science, which is an organization that just deals with the awareness education, and they were providing services on dealing with waste. These are things that really, that were typically, in a lot of other cities and particularly in Europe, would just be the sole task of the municipality, of the city, of the local government. But the work that they're doing, I think, is really important, and it's just driven by some people that were just very passionate about making these changes. But what that sort of brings to mind is that the city itself has sort of instigated this kind of recycling program, where you can order a blue bin and put it outside your house with all your recycling in it. So, every week I will diligently put out my recyclables in. My blue bin is always bulging. My black bin is hardly anything in it because I just try to recycle as much as possible. But you got to be careful when you recycle, because there was this phenomenon known as wish cycling. And it's when people aren't really sure whether something can be recycled or not, but they wish it could be recycled. So they put it in the recycling. And actually, that can be quite damaging if it can't be recycled, because it then contaminates the system. And so we need, people need to know much more about what can go in the blue bins and what can go in the black, what should go in the black bins.

But I've also seen it, even at sustainability events, where the organizers have thought of every detail right down to the plates and the knives and forks that are used up that are either made of recyclable materials or compostable materials. And the food has been brought in often by the catering team that I use at Make Food Not Waste. And then they have these trash cans around and they say, well, this is for all the stuff that's compostable, and this is for all the stuff that isn't. And you peer into both bins and you've got exactly the same trash in both. Because people, we're not as accustomed as we need to be. We haven't formed the habits that we need to put stuff in the right place. And I think that other cultures, other countries have been doing it for much longer, and they're much more used to it, and their education programs are much better. But I think one of the things that's going to win around the— and again, I'm digressing from your original question, but I think this is important—one of the things that's going to win around those people that are, have some degree of opposition to measures that we put in place to tackle climate change is profit.

I know of a friend of a friend who had a quite large waste processing facility in Scotland, where they would deal with a lot of waste. And they very kindly took me on a tour and it was absolutely fascinating. And they proudly stated that only 1% of the waste material that goes through the processing facility ends up in landfill. Which is good, because, you know, we've got to reduce what goes to landfill. Possibly a lot of that waste was built up and sent to Sweden to be burnt in power stations and generate electricity, but nevertheless, they were able to extract value from all of that waste, even to the point where, you know, a shopping mall had been demolished and all the concrete was there and they’re breaking it up and using it for aggregates and roads, and that sort of stuff might have otherwise been just tipped into landfill. And, you know, landfill is not a good way to go. We want to stop doing it altogether. But right now, we need to reduce our reliance on that. Anyway, the point I'm making is that he, they sold the business, and they sold it for over 18 million pounds, because it was highly profitable. I just thought, well, this is great. Someone else wants to buy it off. It's a bigger, you know, these big sort of multi-, these big sorts of corporations that deal with waste management. And I think we need to start creating value.

I mean, there's a saying in the UK: Where there's muck, there's brass, you know. And I think people have been dealing with waste for centuries. You know, people have been trading in rags and trading in bones. You know, we used to call in the Rag'n'Bone man, would come round and collect all your waste because there was a value in it and there is. They’re even getting to the point now where in certain parts of Europe—and actually now in the US, I believe in Maryland—they’re mining landfill sites going back to the 1960s. They've got to be quite careful because you got to look at the regulations of what went in the ground because, you know, at some point when landfills were first in use, there was no regulation of what went in them. So, there's probably quite a lot of hazardous material in there somewhere. But they can go down and retrieve, excuse me, retrieve large amounts of metal, you know, which is kind of easy, comparatively easy to return to the production cycle, as well as other materials. And it seems to me that that sort of illustrate not only how stupid it was to throw, how silly it was to throw things away, but that there is, that if we're prepared to even dig up our old waste sites to get waste, then it shows that there's value in waste. And I think that's going to be an important driver. If you can go to a large manufacturer, big corporation and say, and be outraged at something that they're doing that is bad for climate change or bad for the environment, they're not going to listen. But if you go to them and say, you know, if you change that process to this process, we can save you $1 million a year, people are going to listen. So, we do need to get into that sort of level of problem-solving where we can bring people with us. We need to demonstrate, you know, the value, you know, the value-added in what we're doing. Not just, of course, in the social and environmental value, but in the capital value.

DLT: And can you tell me about your work with d.Tree Studio?

IL: Yes. That was a partnership between the College for Creative Studies and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History. I was having a conversation with Leslie. Tom, who was my partner in the d.Tree Studio at the Wright Museum. She's the Wright Museum's chief sustainability officer. She has irrepressible energy in these matters. And she told me about these three trees that were, that had to be removed. These three zelkova wood trees. Zelvoka is, It's a bit like an elm, but they're actually mistaken as elms, but they're identified as zelkova wood. They're quite popular in landscape architecture and they are originally from Japan, but they're, you know, they're good at, sort of, providing shade and they're quite hardy trees. However, these trees had been misplanted and, after about 25, 30 years, they started to die, so they had to be removed. And the museum, in trying to, you know, become a zero-waste organization, didn't want to just toss these trees out.

A lot of trees are just mulched. The mulch can either be, somehow, composted down, often it goes into landfill sites. It's wasted. It's not, the wood itself isn't used. So, I mentioned that there had been a project in Edinburgh called the Witch Elm Project, where a large elm tree was diseased and had to be removed, and the wood from the elm tree was given to 25 artists who made a number of very beautiful objects. Doing a little bit of research, there were a number of other projects of the same ilk. There was the Witness Tree project, which came out of the Rhode Island School of Design, where students were working with the wood to make objects that had a cultural narrative embedded within them. So we figured we could do something similar here in Detroit. And given that the trees came from the Wright Museum, that really kind of drove the thematic narrative of the whole project. So we were starting to look at the African-American experience in Detroit, and climate justice in Detroit. But also, driven by this desire to divert waste into some form of production cycle, you know, whether it's the production of an artistic artifact or goes into mass production, it’s still returning to the production cycle.

We took these trees down, and we milled them. There were [] into plants. We kept all the branches. We wanted to keep the roots, but we couldn't get the roots out. We kept all the bark. And they were stored in the basement of the college. We found a spot in there to season the wood. We expected that to take about 6 to 12 months. Then the pandemic hit. And, you know, the pandemic has distorted time for everybody, but it delayed the project by 12 months. But that was actually a blessing in disguise, because we were really trying to get down to the intention of the project, and it gave us time to think very, very carefully about, not just about how we're going to get some students together to make stuff, but really, what was behind the project, the whole narrative of the role of trees in cities, you know, the importance of a tree canopy for the health of the city, for the reduction of temperatures. And we were able to put together— Well, Leslie put together a tree podium where she got together a number of speakers. We did it as part of the Month of Design, which was online at this point. And the speakers talked about the importance of trees and how we need to be connected to trees. And then we created, we decided that it couldn't just be a group of CCS students. We had to bring in people that had a much more of a lived experience in Detroit. So we opened it up to artists who are based in Detroit. We included Hamtramck and Highland Park in that. And they'd been living in the, they had to have been living in Detroit for at least three years. And we got, actually, seven free spaces in the class of 12 students in total. So, we had seven scholarship places, and we created these artifacts over the course of 15 weeks.

You know, instrumental in that were artists like, Olayami Dabls of the African Bead Museum, and that's dealing with their own problems right now, with the partial demolition that's been happening in the last few weeks. But, you know, Dabls’ narrative in his artwork is incredibly powerful. And the way that he tells stories, and in fact, Dabls himself rejects the notion of art. He sees art as being a sort of a Western commodification of human artifice, and sort of maintains that in a lot of African cultures, there is no word for art. It's just making of stuff and things. So we decided to call the exhibition when we finally got to it, twelve makers— Sorry, two institutions, three trees, twelve makers and avoided the word art and really focused on the word making. But what arose from this was a whole series of artifacts that told stories. And, you know, one was, one of the students was a high school chess champion. And she created this decolonized chess set, where the purpose of it was, rather than having two opposing sides that were trying to, one was trying to defeat the other, we have two sides of, two differing sides that were going to try to work together. It was a really, just a wonderful allegory in the whole thing, or metaphor in the whole thing.

Then we had another student who created a hair pick, a comb. And, you know, she was really focused on the relationship between the mother and the child. And that's a very strong part of the African culture to, for the mother to connect with their daughter through hair braiding. And in working with that, there's a very sort of visceral connection. There is a very tactile connection through working, through communicating with your child in that way. And she created this, she started to make a series of these small hair picks, which proved to be very difficult to make. So, she decided to make a large one. And during the course of the project, she became pregnant, and there was this really wonderful moment at the end where she was sitting down to present, because she was visibly pregnant, and cradling the hair pick that she'd made in her hands, in her arms, like a child. It was a kind of really, there was a beautiful narrative in there. And then other students were, you know, looking at land injustices in Detroit, were looking at building stock and materials that have been extracted from buildings. Or one of the students was a performance artist who created kind of a prop for a performance, which I thought was really kind of powerful. So, it gave rise to an exhibition that— Two exhibitions, in fact, one was CCS and then a year later, a much more, a high-fidelity exhibition at the Wright Museum itself. And I think in that 12 month process between the two exhibitions, that gave us a chance to really reflect on the project. And the project, also— Leslie and I wrote a paper which was published as a part of a conference proceedings. We won. We won a service design award, International Society of Service Designers Award for Community Service Design for the project. So I think it had a really, like, nice impact, strong impact. So I believe there's interest in other parts.

And we're working on a kind of a phase two of the project. And just trying to think about how we can now start to extend the impact of what we do with it next as providing a playbook for other people to pick up and do their own thing with it. But I think it was also worth noting that there are quite a lot of organizations in Michigan and in the United States. There's the Urban Lumber Network, which seeks to take over lumber and return it to the production cycle. You’ve got Urban Ashes, Paul Hickman's Urban Ashes and, you know, he sort of works out of Ann Arbor but he’s trying to put some work into Detroit. And, you know, Detroit takes down about 10 to 20,000 trees each year. Now, some of those might be small saplings, but a good number of those trees are very large trees where that's an enormous source of lumber. And you see them being mulched on site and in fact that, you know, gardeners can call up arborists who will show up at your house and just dump a load of mulch on your, in your garden, and you can distribute it around your flowerbeds. You know, that's all very well, but if you've taken down a, you know, an 80 year old, 100 year old oak tree, there's a lot of timber in there that can be used for furniture, used for construction, used for floorboards, used for art, sculpture. And, you know, you're kind of trapping the carbon in it by keeping it as that material. So, you know, that's another example of how we, you know, the reason that these trees are mulched is because it is the most cost-effective way of dealing with it. It costs money to take a tree out of a city and bring it back into the production cycle. If you're looking at forestry, you've got one person with a chainsaw sawing down a tree, and then there's an operation on site that just drags that tree away. You don't have to worry about closing any roads or trees falling on houses. If you do it in the city, you need an entire crew of people to keep people safe. And then to take that that stuff away. Yeah, anyway.

DLT: And can you spell that name you mentioned? Dabls the artist.

IL: D a b l s.

DLT: And the first name?

IL: Olayami. But he goes by Dabls. That's all you know. Yeah.

DLT: Okay. And can you tell me about your work with the Detroit River Coalition?

IL: Oh, yeah. We had a meeting last night. That is, again— Well, about ten years ago, I started doing research into ocean plastic. It started off as a project that was looking at the material culture of beach combing in the Scottish islands. You know, in Scotland, the west coast of Scotland, there's lots and lots of islands, famous islands. And we were working in the Outer Hebrides, and a friend of mine, he was a journalist, was working on a series of oral histories in the Outer Hebrides, where a lot of the Gaelic-speaking, the Gallic-speaking communities are sort of dying out in this, some of these island communities are dying out. And she wanted to capture these oral histories. And she was talking about island life. And I became very fascinated with this from a material culture perspective, because there was a degree of subsistence of what came ashore. And when I got there, we went to some very remote beaches and found a lot of plastic washed ashore. And I was listening to all these stories that locals had about things that are washed ashore.
Now, of course, if you're on a beach in a highly populated area, people will clean their beach. People will go out and they’ll pick up trash and toss it in the bin. But if you're in a remote area, there's nobody going to it to clear it up.

So, you see the abundance of material that washes ashore. And there have been these kind of stories going back— We went to an island called Scarp, which was treeless. And because it was treeless, the islanders, you know, would either have to go over to the main island to get to get lumber, or they would have a fairly plentiful source washing ashore on a particular beach. So they could just go down there and get lumber. And as you move into the sort of 20th century, a lot of that lumber was sawn lumber. But they had enough there to build homes, build furniture, build coffins, and there was enough for them to use, because they could have that subsistence from things that washed ashore. Now, if you move into the later part of the 20th century, you start to get lots of plastic washing ashore. And what was really fascinating— We were talking to one couple on the island. Now the island is now uninhabited, and I won't go into that, but it has holiday makers that have homes that they go in the summer. And we’re talking to one couple that have been holidaying there for about 35 years. And one of them said that the variety of objects that were washing ashore on the beach there had diminished, had been in decline since the mid-1990s, and that coincided with the time that the city of New York stopped dumping all of their trash in the sea. So, New York trash would be taken out on barges, tipped in the ocean, and people think, oh, it just sinks, it's going to go to the bottom. It doesn't, of course, the plastic floats and it floats just below the surface. And a lot of this garbage was washed ashore on European beaches. So, thank you. But that whole kind of narrative of that changed when New York stopped doing that. You can see that had that kind of—this is anecdotal evidence. But, you know, you can still notice these impacts.

But when we went to the beach, a lot of the waste we saw there was maritime waste, a lot of plastic, a lot of rope, lots of tubs, shoes, Wellington boots, glasses. You know, I was going along the beach, and I really could not believe what I was seeing. But there was every type of plastic. All the plastic you can imagine, it was on this beach. There were lots of metal objects, lots of steel and aluminium objects, lots of fabric, polyester, lots of wood. And all of these materials could theoretically be returned to the production cycle, except for one thing: that this is a really remote island, and the cost of sending a clean-up team to go and get all this and put it in a box and take it back to a recycling processing place is, you know, would be incredibly, incredibly high cost. And notwithstanding the fact that a lot of ocean plastic is difficult to recycle because it's contaminated by salt, it becomes very brittle because it's been floating around for years. Ultraviolet light makes the, photo degenerates the plastic and it becomes more difficult to recycle, and so on and so forth. So, what we need to do is get into a process of prevention. So, fast-forward, me coming to Detroit. We're a long way from the ocean here. But we are in a big sort of inland water network, with the Great Lakes and all the rivers. And there was a lot of plastic that goes into the Great Lakes. So basically, this plastic in the Great Lakes is ocean plastic upstream. And I was invited by Genevieve Rattray to join the Detroit River Coalition to bring that in. And it's really quite an interdisciplinary team of people and Genevieve was like, from a sociology background and a fine arts background, but we have artists and scientists and policy makers, all working, and academics and. cultural theorists all working in this space to look at the health of the Detroit River. And it really comes down to the Great Lakes itself, because so much of the water from the Great Lakes flows down through the Detroit River and out to sea. And of course, it's a very important industrial thoroughfare as well. You see a lot of shipping going up and down the Detroit River.

So, it is an advocacy group that's trying to change policy, but I think it's also trying to sort of— A big part of the work they do is the Belle Isle cleanup. And the Belle Isle cleanup happens throughout the summer months, I think, on the third Saturday of every month in the summer. And we collect huge amounts of plastic from these cleanups. A lot of it is in PET bottles. PET bottles are the most commonly found objects in the ocean, in terms of ocean plastic. And a lot of our drinks manufacturers—I won't name names—okay, no, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola also make their own brands of bottled water. And this plastic is, these drinks are just drunk and they're tossed. Interestingly, we don't find that many soda cans or liquor bottles on Belle Isle because there was a deposit scheme, so people will keep them. But there's a lot of PET bottles, among lots of other trash as well. And it just astonishes me that people will go to this, you know, it's the biggest park in the city of Detroit, I think. But it's a nature reserve. I know it's managed by the state of Michigan. It's a nature reserve. Detroiters can go there and enjoy it. It's got a beach. It's a really beautiful place. You can do watersports around there. You see lots of people fishing there, people enjoying the water, people canoeing around it, swimming in the smaller inland lagoons.

People don't want to be swimming in dirty water. And it just baffles me that people would show up there and enjoy a picnic, or just enjoy the view and maybe drink a bottle of Coca-Cola, and then toss it over their shoulder. And the last time we were there back in April, I was talking to the park warden, who just said he walked up to a guy who he had just seen dropping a plastic bottle and said, okay, I'm gonna have to fine you. And the guy said, oh, I didn't see you there. And he goes, well, why did you do it? And the guy said, well, I didn't see you then. And he didn't seem to understand that that's not the point. The point is that just don't throw the stuff on the ground. And this stuff, if we're not taking it out of the water, it's going to end up in the ocean. But what we're doing is just dealing with, it's environmental stewardship as much as anything, but it's also trying to hammer home to people of our own responsibility in dealing with environmental stewardship, but also how we deal with waste.

DLT: And was there anything else you wanted to discuss that none of my questions so far have brought up?

IL: You're asking for it if you do that. [Laughter] I think—I mean, I could talk for a very long time about lots of things here—but I think one of the things that I have a little bit of a focus on is cycle infrastructure. Like, I have this belief that a city like Detroit, which is completely flat, could potentially be the Amsterdam or the Copenhagen of North America. And Amsterdam, the Netherlands are famous for their cycle cities. It's a very flat country. Copenhagen's also got an incredible cycling network, amongst other European cities. But I think the Dutch do it really, really well. And there is a mindset there that is about cycling as a practical way to get around. And we live in a city that's very flat. And also has a lot of redundant road space, because we used to be, used to have a population of over 2 million people, and we now have a population of about 680,000. And this is a city that was built for cars, and now we have lots of road space that we really could give up and not really notice if a number of lanes in our main thoroughfares, and some of our back streets as well, were given over as protected cycle lanes.

And that's the key thing, is protected cycle lanes, you know. And there was a wonderful advert with a child walking down an unprotected cycle lane. And they said, no one in their right mind would allow that child to walk down there. So why would you cycle down it? That is absolutely right. There need to be protected cycle lanes. People drive, I’ve seen people drive in cycle lanes here. You know, all the time I see people driving in cycle lanes, even the protected ones. City of Detroit vehicles parked in the cycle lane. I mean, what are you supposed to do? And if you're going to get people onto bikes, if you're going to— And I'm not talking about, we're coming for your cars. We're not coming for your cars. But cars are going to become increasingly electric in the next 10 to 15 years. They're going to become electric. And we don't have the mineral resources for all of the batteries for all of those cars. If you take every single internal combustion engine driven car in the world and convert that into a battery driven car, there aren't the mineral resources to do that. So, some of the— And that's not, it's not a simple transition. We know this. The future of electric vehicles really needs to be in micro vehicles, not in large pickup trucks, you know. And I'm not denying that large pickup trucks are incredibly useful.

And, I mean, I should point out that before I moved to Detroit, I'd never owned a car in my life. And I bought my first car after I moved out of my apartment in Midtown. So I lived in Detroit for two years without a car. I was part of the Zip[car] scheme and I bought into, I bought a house that needed a large amount of renovation, and I realized I'm going to need a car. So, I bought a car at the age of 53, having never owned a car in my life. And, you know, and I would gladly accept that cars are really, really useful. They're very useful. I'm not anti-cars at all. I just think that if you don't need to use your car, don't use it, in the same way that if I don't need to have my radiators on, my heating on in the summer, I won't have my heating on in the summer, because I don't need to use it. You know, if I don't need to eat all the food in my fridge, I won't eat all the food in my fridge. In the same way, if I don't need to take my car, I won't take my car. But it's difficult on a day like, you know, at the moment it’s so hot that if I cycle to work, I'm going to need to shower as soon as I arrive. But anyhow, again, we need to get back to this infrastructure of bikes and more busses as well, in Detroit. So, transport infrastructure is something I'm very passionate about.

And I know that the Joe Louis Highway is a is a really wonderful step in the right direction. And it's this great big sort of, you know, U-shaped kind of thoroughfare. But we need those thoroughfares on all of our streets. One person from the City of Detroit told me that part of the concern is that people equate protected bike lanes as part of gentrification, so some communities are opposed to them. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It's really about improving the mobility of the city. And, you know, in Indian Village, going through Indian Village on Kercheval Avenue, there was a protected bike lane that goes all the way from the Stellantis plant at the one end right down to Mount Elliot. And then it stops abruptly. So, you've enjoyed the protected bike lane, and now you've just got to get onto the road at the mercy of vehicles. And if you're going down Vernor Highway, you don't want to be cycling on there because people drive like, people are crazy drivers. They undertake, and you need to ride them on the sidewalk. So, it just seems to me that that felt like a project that was just put in place to look nice, and then it's not being completed. It's just, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. And so, you could start to build that in, that., you know, again, recognizing that, you know, November, December, January, February, you might not want to get on your bike, but we have an opportunity here to reduce our reliance on vehicles. That's not to say that people have to stop having vehicles. It means that just don't use them as often.

DLT: What was the Zip scheme you mentioned?

IL: The Zipcar scheme. So, it's where you— The Zip cars are parked all over the city. You join, you shoe your driving license, you sign up, you pay a monthly membership fee, which includes your insurance. And when you need a car, you go onto your app and you book it and you just get in the car. So, when I first got here and Detroit being Detroit, if I needed to go to the grocery store, I had to go and get my Zipcar, drive to the grocery store, do my shopping, get my groceries and bring it back. If I had to go to the hardware store, if I had to go on any kind of out-of-town chores or errands, I needed to get these cars. And that's all very well, because they're good, they're all over the world, these schemes. I used to use one in Edinburgh, where I lived for 20 years. I just used a Zipcar all the time, or cycled, or took the bus. But when you move out to a neighborhood that doesn't have that scheme, it becomes more difficult. Number one. And number two, as a scheme, it does privilege those people who have smartphone technology and a bank account. And there are a lot of people in the US who have neither of those things. So, if you don't have any of those things, you can't use that service. You can't use the electric scooters. You can't use the bike schemes that we have around the city. So again, that's, I suppose that's another form of climate injustice. You know, there are certain parts of society that are excluded from the services and measures that we've got in place that might actually help us alleviate some of these transport infrastructure problems.

DLT: All right. That was all the questions I had for you today. Thank you so much for your time.

IL: Okay, thanks.

[Recording stopped]

DLT: This is part two of the July 17th interview, with an addendum.

IL: And I just wanted to add some of the things that we're doing at CCS to address climate change. And I think a lot of colleges and universities around the world are taking steps to mitigate their impact on the climate crisis, all organizations have an impact. The museum does, you know, the Wright Museum is doing enormous amounts of work. So it's a big sort of a carbon neutral, zero waste, organization. At the college, we're taking steps to monitor and reduce our energy consumption, and think about how we deal with waste and sort waste, you know, all the light fittings in the college were changed to LED lights, which save the college enormous amounts of money a year. And there’s an illustration of why, you know, apart from the fact that we’re reducing energy, we’re also reducing costs. We’ve instituted a recycling scheme, so now that all of our food from the refectory is going to, it's going to be—any food waste is composted. We're looking at a greater number of meat-free options. There are a number of universities in the world that have just started to ban red meat, or any meat, on their menus and their factories.

And then we are also integrating climate design, or sustainability in design, or sustainable design into our curriculum, as well. It’s becoming an important part. In September, we are starting a new graduate degree in design for sustainability, which takes, you know, it takes a design-led approach, a design thinking approach to the climate crisis. I mentioned earlier about design thinking as a methodology. And we're looking at the climate crisis, you know, through the lens of a sort of socioeconomic or material culture system. So, it's about how we make interventions on systems. And so, there's three parts of the program which look at— The first part looks at zero waste design, and circular economies and how we can think of those, how we look at our production and consumption as systems and how we can return things back into production cycles as we use them.

The second part of the program looks at civic infrastructures, and cities, and the way—at really the kind of the notion of human settlement and human dwelling and how humans’ attachment to the land, particularly in cities, has an impact on how we can look at the systems and infrastructures at play there that that can be altered, and where interventions can be made to make changes. And lastly, we're looking at environmental stewardship. I'm talking about a lot of the narratives that are at play here to kind of make us take greater care of the planet that sustains us. And the program uses a lot of that design thinking systems approach, but also a lot of storytelling and narrative and communication strategy to get people to get people to come with us, to think differently. So it's a very strategic program, tries to also address policy change. But what we're not doing is, you know, today we're going to design a chair and it's made of bamboo. That's not what we're going to do at all. It's really got to be a much more of a systems- and infrastructure-driven kind of program.

DLT: All right, thank you.