Jon Kabbe, August 20th, 2024

Jon Kabbe, August 20th, 2024

In this interview, Jon Kabbe talks about how he learned about the climate crisis, how he works to alleviate its current impacts, and how he's preparing for the future.

Detroit Historical Society

Detroit Historical Society

en-US

Jon Kabbe

Jon Kabbe was born in Ithaca and grew up in Mount Pleasant, New York. He’s been a resident of Berkley, Michigan for sixteen years. Before retiring in 2000, he worked in various roles at Dow Corning Corporation.

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo

8/20/2024

53:25

Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo: I'm Doris Lanzkron-Tamarazo. It's August 20th, 2024, and I'm here with. Please say your name.

Jon Kabbe: Jon Kabbe. J o n Last name K a b b e. As in Bravo, Bravo, Echo.

DLT: Thank you. And where do you live?

JK: I live in Berkley, for the last sixteen years.

DLT: And how long— Where did you live before then?

JK: Up near Midland. I worked for one of those chemical companies up there. There's two of them. I worked for the little one.

DLT: And tell me how you became interested in the issue of climate change.

JK: It started to be a concern for my father, who was a professor of organic chemistry at Central Michigan University in the late 1950s, and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, because I was a kid, and I just couldn't imagine that anything substantive could happen. And yet he, from that time, continued to be concerned all the way to the point that he died.

DLT: And what was the cause behind his concern? What was he learning in his research?

JK: It was— He took a broad view of science. And so, instead of being just an organic chemist, he was also concerned— And he and my mom, together wrote a book that was about, basically, four college students that needed some science to get a general science course. And out of, I think that's where, well, that's actually where the ideas got recorded. But, I don't know where the idea originated because, I mean, I was in elementary school at the time I first heard this idea. But the idea has been around since the 1850s. There was a woman in Philadelphia that ran some experiments that showed that carbon dioxide raised the temperature. But she didn't get any credit for it. She was a woman, after all, at that time. Until some guy in the 1880s or 90s published exactly what she did and got credit for it. And so, you know, my father's a scientist, would have perhaps sometime run across that background.

DLT: And so hearing about climate change, from your father, you didn't initially feel that there was some concern there?

JK: No, I didn't, because as I looked around, I couldn't see any evidence. But these things move slowly. They have, you know, sort of a long, slow, change until you get to a tipping point. And we've arrived at that tipping point. Even since I've lived here, sixteen years, I can see the difference in the climate within that time period. Dramatic change.

DLT: And what differences have you observed over the last sixteen years?

JK: When I first moved here— Two things. One is I loved it come July, when the lack of rain and lots of clear sunshine would kill the gra—not kill the grass. But the grass would go dormant, and I didn't have to mow it. And so it would stay, you know, brown the rest of the summer and then in the spring it would come back. And that stopped happening. I'm having to mow now, starting sometimes in April, which was far earlier than when I arrived. And now I mow sometimes into October. Because otherwise the grass gets kind of ratty-looking and my neighbors aren't happy. The other is when I first moved here— I've got an ancient snowblower, but still works, and I used it a lot every winter because it was just too much snow to move. I have a fairly long driveway. The last two, three years, I think I've used it at most once a winter. And when I've used it, the snow is not as deep, but it is wetter and denser than it used to be. So, it seems to me that we're getting warmer winters and soggier winters. The other thing I noticed, I have, I think it's called a tulip tree right next to my driveway that, when I moved here every spring, would get these big blossoms on it that were just pink and white and beautiful. And for the last three or four years—I think it's three years—the buds start to get to the point of opening up, because we get a warm spell in March and then we get a freeze, kills them off and they fall on the driveway and make a greasy, nasty mess. And that's happened every year. And that just didn't happen previously.

DLT: And what do you feel the larger consequences of these changes are?

JK: Larger consequences. In Berkley in 2014 and 2015, we had two one-hundred-year floods. Which turned my street into a river, which I still, it boggles my mind because I'm not that far— The street kind of rises going to the west, and I'm fairly close to the peak of that rise, and then it drops to the west and it drops to the east. And how you could get enough rain— My house looked like it was on, it was an island. It was completely surrounded by flowing water. How you could have that much water coming down in that small of an area and cause that kind of thing to happen. And all the water backed up in the streets, backed up the sewer systems into the houses. And so up and down my street afterwards there was contents of basements that were lining the streets, piles continuously about three or four feet high. All up and down the street. It was just stunning. And in Berkley, the typical weekly trash collection is 19 tons. They, the city organized a special collection for all this stuff that was out in the streets, and it was 960 tons.

DLT: Wow.

JK: Just for that one pickup. So, a totally different experience. And of course then it was a bunch of people— That covered pretty much the whole city of Berkley. And then the people got their basements redone and cleaned out and fixed up. And the following year, in 2015, I didn't get it, but south of me in Berkley, they got hit again with a similar-sized flood and wiped out their basements again. And, you know, people were going berserk. And the problem is that the typical sewer system in the area, I think, is designed to handle one and a half, one and three-quarters inches of rain an hour. And the storms that we're getting, seems to me to, yeah, the pattern of rainfall in the area has changed. We get fewer, it seems to me we get fewer rain events. But the rain events we get are deluges. And so we're getting rain and big bunches instead of kind of spread out. And therefore the sewer system just isn't designed to handle that. And, you know, if the city of Berkley decided, okay, we're going to upgrade our sewer systems. Where's that water going to go? It's gotta to go all the way down to Zug Island. So you've got to replace everything between Berkley and Zug Island. And I have no idea how much that costs, but it's way over any budget I could think of.

DLT: And were most people in Berkley able to get their basements repaired or are there some people who still have some of the consequences from that flooding?

JK: There are a number of neighbors that never, that they clean— They had finished basements, they cleared all that out, and never refinished them because of the fear of this happening again. And putting stuff up on blocks and things because— In my case, I was just lucky. My wife sent me down to the basement to check on it, and I got down there, and there was water coming backwards out of the drain where the drain for the washing machine goes in. And so I pulled the hose out of that and grabbed a towel and poked it in there with my finger, and it just spit it out. [Laughs] So I went, got a screwdriver, really jammed it in there, and then that held. But then the tub right next to it was filling up and I grabbed, I happened to have a rock, and I took a rock plus with a towel on the bottom and put it on top of the drain that was coming back up. And that slowed it down enough that then with a bucket, I could take it over to my sump pump and keep my basement from flooding. But that was kind of unique in the neighborhood. Most people had anywhere from eighteen inches to, well, eighteen to thirty-six inches in their basements. That does a lot of damage. And it's contaminated with sewage. Because Berkley has a combined storm and sanitary sewer system. And so, when you have those situations, you know, everything that gets touched by that, unless you can somehow, it's got really hard surfaces that you can sanitize, you got to toss it. It's just not safe. And the police were cruising around, because there's all sorts of people coming around and scavenging with the idea of selling this stuff, and the police needed to put a stop to that because you were just transmitting potential disease.

DLT: And besides flooding, what other impacts have you noticed in your neighborhoods?

JK: More power outages. Although, those are those are somewhat sporadic. But, you know, you've also noticed people putting in backup generators all over the place. I have not done that. More activity. When I first arrived, the power lines were kind of plowing [Laughs] through gaps and small gaps and trees and the power company's been coming around and trim, trim, trim trees and yet we still end up with the occasional power outage and that's really quite inconvenient. And that's happening not just in the summertime as it did originally, but it's also happening in the winter. I think as a consequence that the snow precipitation we get can be either ice or really wet snow that sticks to everything and therefore takes the trees down and the power lines go with it. So. It's a threat.

DLT: And have you or any of your neighbors used any sort of solar power or other kind of renewable energy?

JK: There is a house that is a few blocks from me that has, I think, put up— I think it's the house I heard about that went off-grid. And I have no idea [Laughs] what that cost, because I've seen the house and it's got a lot of solar panels on it. Three years ago, I had solar panels put on my house. Or, well, actually, on my garage, which is clear of shadows of trees and things like that. And because of the rules agreed between DTE and the Public Service Commission, you're only allowed to install as much solar as, theoretically, those panels will generate in a year equivalent to the total that you've used in past years from DTE. And unlike the rules in the beginning that my brother up in Mount Pleasant benefited from, where when he generated excess electricity, consumers bought it from him at the retail rate, when I generate excess electricity, I sell it to DTE at the wholesale rate. And then when I need it, say, at night, I buy it back from them at the retail rate. And that makes sense to me from the standpoint that DTE’s got a whole bunch of infrastructure that if I'm connected to and potentially benefiting from, I need to pay for that. And the way we pay for that is the difference between wholesale and retail. Because otherwise there's no point in DTE being involved. I mean, if I'm going to sell electricity and buy it at the same rate, and I'm generating as much as I use, they got all that infrastructure, they're not going to be making any money. You can't, just can't sustain that.

DLT: And so you still have the solar panels up?

JK: I still have the solar panels up. I'm having a conversation with the people that install those solar panels about adding new solar panels because in May? June? A couple months ago. [Laughs] I think it was June. I bought a Ford Lightning pickup, all-electric pickup. And I did that in order to continue to be a good citizen of the world, not just of my town, state and country, but to deal well with the world, not polluting it. It's a lot more efficient than any other vehicle I've ever had. Gets the equivalent of about 70 miles to the gallon. But there's an opportunity there with that truck. It's got the equivalent of ten Tesla powerwalls, which is a whole lot of battery storage. And so if I had a power outage and the battery was fully charged, I could run my house easily for eight to ten days, just off the truck. And then if that ran out, I could go someplace that has electricity, plug into a fast charger, recharge it, and come back before, you know, the contents of the freezer thawed or the house got cold in the winter. So, exploring on Thursday with the company that installed the original solar panels, adding some solar panels because the truck resulted in me consuming more electricity than I was. And this two-way charging and discharging possibility is an electric backup. And there are people that are doing this with their electric vehicles so that they run off solar panels during the day, and then at night, your electric vehicle battery runs the house or whatever it is you are hooked up to. So this provides a lot of possibilities. I just need to sort out which ones make sense for me in my situation.

DLT: And you talked about your father's research into climate change. Have you done research of your own to learn more about the impacts?

JK: Yeah. This is where the story gets a little gruesome. About three years ago— I'm Jewish, a member of the synagogue Temple Emanuel in Oak Park, and the president of the temple had heard me express concerns about climate change. And so she asked if I was willing to lead a group at the synagogue dealing with climate change. And that triggered me doing [Laughs] what I usually do when I'm faced with a problem that I don't fully understand: I start doing research, and I have probably read a PhD level reading related to climate change. What I discovered is that climate change is driven by three large chunks, if you will, and the percentages that they contribute depends on how you divide up the world. But there's about a third of it that's buildings, a third of it that's transportation, and a third of it is food creation. And, for whatever reason, I started to, I thought that we could, as a group, by focusing on food, we could help people take more immediate action than changing your building or necessarily your vehicle, [Laughs] unless you do as I did and get an electric one. And that led, the study of food led to a whole genre of agriculture that is developed called regenerative agriculture. Which is various approaches to farming that are quite a huge change from the industrial version of chemicals and chemicals and chemicals and lots of fossil fuels involved in farming. And, as a consequence, I located my mutual friend, a farmer up near Midland that was raising his beef in this regenerative fashion. So through the temple, did some communicating to say, hey, if you want beef, you know, order it there and I'll go up once a month and pick it up, pick up the orders and bring them back. But this regenerative agriculture really can take the greenhouse gases generated by farming to either near-zero or even potentially below zero, so that we would be pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The weird thing to me is, given that potential, regenerative agriculture is being adopted exceedingly slowly. In my estimation, it isn't going to happen. We aren't going to get enough of that until, you know, climate starts really destroying the world. And by that time, then our food supply becomes kind of a liability for us.

And so I got to wondering, well, why? Why do we have these difficulties of change? You know, of agriculture, just agriculture. Why is the adoption of electric vehicles so slow? Why are all these aspects of our life that are where we are contributing to climate change—Everybody is making big noises about airline travel. In the United States, if you just take the United States and look at the greenhouse gas emissions from airlines, greenhouse gas emissions from beef and greenhouse gas emissions from clothes that we buy on an ongoing basis, you could, if we change the way we dealt with food or with clothes, we could eat all the beef we want, no matter how it was produced, even if it's produced in this greenhouse gas nightmare. And we could do all the flying that we're doing and still have less carbon impact than the way that we're currently dealing with clothes. Clothes are two and a half times the carbon footprint of the airlines. And that just stunned me. But we've gotten into this consumer mentality, and consumerism is driving the destruction of the world in so many different ways. And ultimately—as I said, oh, this is the gruesome part—I finally concluded that trying to keep collapse from happening, the society winds down because catastrophe is somehow happening, and I don't know what exactly will trigger it, but everything is interlinked. Our economic system, our food system, our consumerist ideals, ideas, those are all interlinked. And you can't solve one of them. Even racial inequality and injustice is part of this overall puzzle. And you can't fix one thing without fixing them all. And I just looked at that and said, I can't see how that's going to happen, we're not going to really get serious about fixing things until we have to. Until we're forced to. And so I went to the temple president and said, I'm not, this is a wasted effort. We're deceiving ourselves by focusing on climate. Because all of this is tied together and is ultimately going to result in societal collapse in the United States, which is just absolutely unfathomable. You know, you look around Detroit, you look at everything that's going on. You know, the Michigan Central Railway station and the magic that's been created there. And you think, hey, ten years from now, that may mean not much of anything, because everything is collapsed. And it’s just insane, hard to imagine. And as a consequence, I do not sleep well at night with the idea of how bad this could get. Now, I would say that Detroit is in a uniquely advantageous situation as a city. Most cities do not have forty square miles of vacant land that could be converted to the production of food. There is no other city that I've ever been in or around or heard of where within the percentage of land and in the city, there's that much free space that could be converted to raising food. Because if everything collapses, it's going to be, we're not going to get food from California and Florida and all these distant places. When something shows up on our plates, it's traveled an average of 1800 miles in this country. That just isn't sustainable. That just cannot, that is not going to be able to be sustained. We have a fantasy that it will, but it's just that, I think, a fantasy. So then we have to re-localize.

[Recording paused]

We were talking about re-localizing our food supply. And Detroit has done some really beneficial things—partly because of the land, and partly because of the disadvantaged people that have frequently ended up living here—of local gardening and, you know, building skills about raising food, their own food. And so there's a basic skill level there that is developing. There is lots of vacant land. And probably, if I run through my head and say, what do I think is possible? I think other than perhaps raising some animals—which actually is beneficial to the land—Detroit, it might come close to feeding itself if we didn't throw away the vast amounts of food that we in this country tend to do, let it go to waste. If we're very careful with the food, then Detroit is actually exceedingly lucky. And it has easy access to water for the growing of food. So, you know, there's some magic that's available in Detroit that I hope gets recognized and people expand the number of people that are involved in thinking about, engaging in this, locally growing food happens. That would be so lovely and creates resilience when the bottom falls out. If you can provide your food, boy, you are in a much more advantageous, say— I don't know how a city like Chicago or New York would do that. I just look at the structures of those, the layout of those cities. There's a whole bunch of people there that are either going to have to leave the city, which they may or may not easily be able to do, or they die. And that's terrifying.

DLT: And you said that Detroit has a lot of potential for this climate resilience. Does that apply to Metro Detroit as well, or just the city itself?

JK: I've been thinking a lot about that, because I live in a suburb. I'm not in the city. And there are two differences. One is, the suburbs, while they're closer to farmland outside the city, if —pardon me—if you're going to have that farmland produce food, you've either got to engage somehow with that farmland personally, or form deep relationships with the farmers, in order to have access to that. Now, the other problem that the suburbs have is there is not a lot of land. The housing is fairly dense. And so the ability of the suburbs— And I'm just beginning some trials to see how much food I might be able to raise on my lot where my house is. And all of that takes some time and some cooperation from the city, when you tear up your lawn and it's no longer this perfect grass-appearing thing. And, you know, the cities and the neighbors are concerned about the values of their property and those sorts of things. So there's a bunch of cultural ideas that interfere with even experimenting in this territory. I've had to have some discussions with the city because they aren't happy with some of what they thought I was doing. But the other advantage of getting rid of our green lawns is if you take a typical lawn, it doesn't take water coming out of the sky very quickly before it starts running off. And one of the lessons from regenerative agriculture is if you change the plants that are there, you can change the amount of rain that the land can absorb. For instance, there's a farmer. Well, the one that provides the beef. They get an inch of rain an hour, and there's a field right across the fence which is industrially farmed. And you'll see water running off the field. His field, which is grazed and has these deeper-rooted plants in it, the estimate is that somewhere around eight, nine, ten inches of rain an hour could fall on that ground before water would run off. And so that does two things. One is that farmer doesn't benefit nearly as much in terms of soil moisture from a rainfall as John, my friend, does. And when it runs off, it takes soil with it, which is another problem. We've got about thirty-six to thirty-eight years of topsoil left, and then it's all gone. It's all washed off. It's disappeared, if we keep farming industrially.

And so, when you put the water and you get it to stay in place and then it goes down, well, these deep-rooted plants can draw it back up. And his fields stay greener all summer than anything around him. So if we were to change our lawns into appropriate, effective, resilient, garden spaces, we could limit the amount of water that, then, in these extreme rain events, the amount of water that washes off. And I'm in the process of testing that out. Perhaps later this fall, after the plants have all died. I've got half of my lawn that's in a prairie garden, which is deep, more deeply-rooted than my lawn. My lawn, you know, you go down about this, about two inches in, and the roots are gone. That's as deep as they go. And it's just like a solid mat versus where the prairie garden is, there's roots that are going down multiple feet. And that all helps loosen up the soil and get microbes acting and all that kind of cool stuff, and allows the water to permeate down there. And there's some standard tests that you can do to see if I've actually achieved anything. I've only been doing it for three years, and John the Farmer has been doing it for thirteen years now, so he should be well ahead of me. But if we can stop the water from running off our lawns and maybe even absorb some of the rain that falls on the hard surfaces of our roofs and driveways and such, and get that to stay put rather than running into the drains, we delay and maybe eliminate the need to completely rebuild our sewer systems to cope with these big rain events.

DLT: And you said you were working on trials to see how well your property could support agriculture. What do these trials entail?

JK: I'm widowed, since 2015. I've found a lady, lives in Beverly Hills, and she and I have become a committed relationship, and we bounce back and forth between two houses. And from a sustainability perspective, our living situation is ridiculous. Between the two of us, we have eight bedrooms, five-and-a-half baths, four-car garage spaces and so, that part of it is insane. But neither one of us want to give up our house, so [Laughs] we're stuck. But she's into gardening and she is helping me gradually convert my yard into garden space. Which is not a single, if you're going to do it in a healthy way, it’s not a single-year process. I think this fall I am going to actually try planting, amongst other things, planting some wheat. She loves—Lenore is her name—she loves to bake, gotten really good at it. And to have locally-produced grain— she has a flour mill so she can grind her own grain—and it's just like with coffee: fresh-ground coffee tastes better than pre-ground coffee. Turns out that wheat being turned into flour is the same way. It tastes better if it's just been ground rather than ground [Laughs] who knows how long ago and put it in a paper bag and shipped all over the place. So it's tastier. And if we are successful in raising it—which we may not be the first time, but it's something to continue to pursue—then we can have our own grain supply. And then the question then becomes, how much of what can you grow given the space you have? And in Beverly Hills, the lots are bigger. As you get into Berkley, there's a lot of smaller lots. And you go to Royal Oak and there's even more smaller lots. I've got a stepson and daughter-in-law who live in Royal Oak. They maybe have twenty foot by thirty foot space that they could, if they were forced to, raise vegetables on. And so that's going to be much tougher for them to feed a family than it is for me. I'm all, you know, Lenore’s all alone in her house. I'm all alone on my property. So we might be able to stretch that enough. But if I filled up my five bedrooms? No chance. So then you got to figure out, okay, how, what's the minimum distance I can reach to, to gain access to the food that I need to sustain my life. And that's one of the weaknesses of the city. Agriculture ten thousand years ago enabled cities. But now, because the cities have gotten so big, they could be a liability. So all of this is, it's hard to know how it'll all turn out.

And I suspect I will live long enough to see enough progression of collapse, which I personally feel I can look around and see is already happening, that there's dysfunction growing, in the whole world. One of the characteristics is we've become a lot more hot headed, and there's clear evidence that increasing heat, warmth due to climate change leads to more hot-headedness, for instance. And in my concern, I have found various pathways with random people that I meet in stores, all over the place, and somehow gravitate the conversation to: Do you see collapse, societal collapse? And they will go, oh, yeah, I see it already. And I don't say that. I just say, you know, do you see something in the future about things not working very well? And they're like, oh yeah, it's already started. It's here. I just don't know what to do about it. And I've only had— Out of thirty, thirty-five conversations I've had within the last six to nine months, I've only had one person who said, no, technology's going to bail us out. And all the rest are unanimous in looking around saying, this is freaky, things are headed in a direction that isn't going to be good. And that surprised me. Because in conversation with my rabbi and a few other people from the synagogue, there was like, well, you don't want to talk about this because people don't want to talk about it. It's scary and they just don't want to talk about it. And yet I've. I never run across somebody that didn't want to talk about it. Which is, to me, absolutely fascinating. We're scared to talk— We're told not to talk about it. But yet when you talk about it, people are like, whew, yeah, I get it. And there's a certain sense of relief in that conversation, which again surprised me, as opposed to distressing them. There's one person at the coffee shop that I frequent that when I had a conversation with this person that got distressed by it and said, hey, I have to stop talking about this because it's freaking me out. That's the only one that kind of got freaked out, and not relieved to know that what they were seeing is being seen by others. That's the hazard in this. If you think you're the only one that's seeing it, it's a lonely, lonely path.

DLT: And what would you say to someone who doesn't believe that climate change is real or an issue?

JK: Depends on how the conversation gets started. If somebody is convinced that it's not happening, trying to convince them that it is is probably impossible. So rather than, since climate change is wrapped up with the other dynamics in our society— Our economic system is a major driver of climate change, and climate change is now having an impact on our economic system because of insurance losses, you know, insurance companies saying, we just can't continue to pay this stuff. We're losing money. And we're having multibillion dollars a year of losses through the country, so it's beginning to have an impact. It's having an impact on our food supply, from the dairy cows in Texas. Dairy operations in Texas are winding down because they just don't have water and they can't get it. And so there's a whole bunch of things that are intertwined, interwoven, however you want to think about it. So if somebody is not into climate change, my question is, well, as you look around the world, do things seem to be getting better or worse? And again, like these thirty, thirty-five conversations, whenever that aspect of the discussion occurs, I have yet to have somebody say things are getting better. So then the question was, well, how long do you think it's going to get worse? And I've yet to have anybody say that they think that the decline is going to stop. They just see it going on and on and on.

And so then my question is, what is it that's going bad that you're seeing? So if you think about this mix of, you could almost call them crises. And there is a term called poly-crises, which is this idea that all these things are wrapped and intertwined. And so, different people—I've come to think, I'm not absolutely sure—but I've come to think that various people will see various symptoms of the poly-crisis. And by focusing on that, you lose sight of thinking about the others. But these are so huge, it's hard for our human brain to wrap our minds around how this all came to be, and then what logically can I do about it? And it's the logically, what can I do about it, that led me away from working to mitigate climate change for the purpose of preventing the really bad stuff from happening, and recognizing the really bad stuff is going to happen, and that at the synagogue, I'm focusing my efforts on dealing with the sequel. What do we do after the collapse? How do we survive and potentially thrive together? And community is an absolutely critical component of that. We cannot all take the individualism that we've had, and consumerism. But consumerism and individualism are deeply related. And we cannot take the individualism that we've been living with, living by, and carry that into the future and say, I'm going to deal with this all by myself, because if you do that, you die. We need— You're going to need a deeply interconnected, committed community that you're a part of. And if you do that, then you raise the odds substantially that you can not only survive, but potentially thrive. But it'll be a very, very, very different lifestyle than we're living now.

DLT: And was there anything else you want to discuss that none of my questions have brought up for you?

JK: Yeah. In preparation for this, Lenore and I were talking about her experience, because she started living in Detroit about 1970. Teaching at Earhart [Elementary-Middle School]—I don't know if that was a junior high or what—Earhart school down in southwest Detroit. I think it's still there. And her commute, she had a Volkswagen Beetle, if you could [Laughs] imagine that. And, in the winter, not all that infrequently, she would have trouble because of the snow and the depth of snow, getting to work and the city did not at that time plow out the residential streets, just the main arteries. So the challenge was to get to the main arteries and then hopefully, get to school. And her recollection of year after year in those early years and making that commute in the winter, struggling to get to work because of snow. Now, it was not an everyday thing, but it was frequent enough that that is a major memory. And that's gone. Those snow patterns are just not there anymore. And she looks at that and just shakes her head. And so Detroit and Michigan is an absolutely gorgeous place. I love Detroit. I love the area. I love Michigan. I grew up on a farm. And I love that view of a healthy farm. So I'm trying to find a core set of ideas that say, okay, let's not make this complicated. And thinking about health. We've thought about income. We've thought about the amount of stuff we have in our lives. And I'm in the course of writing an article, a satire on storage units, investing in storage units because it's such a growth industry. And storage units do two things. One is they boost the economy in the building of it, and then they boost the economy because of all the stuff people buy to put in them and then pay rent. And so, we have a beautiful place and we need to work together and begin building small, intact communities of, say, a hundred, hundred and fifty people, that can relate closely with each other. And to me that's part of health. Healthy food— And the food where we're consuming is not healthy. All this processed food. Believe it or not, on average, when you correct for demographic changes of Asians and Hispanic people moving to this country, on average, in 2017, people were shorter than we had been. And just like, woah. That's an indication that the nutrition is inadequate. And yet we have obesity running amok. So we have both obesity and malnutrition occurring simultaneously. That is part of health.

And we need to re-localize our food sources. Which is really crazy for me to say, because Lenore and I have a ritual in the afternoon, late afternoon. How about an adult beverage and a snack? And one of our favorite snacks is edamame from Trader Joe's. Until I looked at the package and found out it was from Thailand. Which is just so destructive of the environment as to be silly. Why? My parents and I used to raise it on the farm in Mount Pleasant. What justifies bringing it from Thailand? So I don't know what else to say. But if you want to hit the pause button for a while, for a moment and just, you noodle and I noodle and see if there's anything else. Or we can call a halt to it right now. One more thought. We need our help, our housing, our residences to be far more energy efficient. The question becomes, how do we get there? You know, do we tear everything down and build new, which would boost the economy, but would strip the forests in the country and all sorts of other resources would be chewed up, and we'd have to dig more holes in the ground to extract them and all that kind of thing. So a major challenge becomes, how do I, in a personal sense, how do I take my five-bedroom house and I'm the sole occupant of it on an ongoing basis other than guests and a cat, which is really fun. And how do I make that total energy-efficient and still comfortable? Or do I have to learn to live with a certain degree of discomfort that I've been unwilling to previously. Such as, the temperature in a house in the winter is fifty degrees? Put a sweater on, or multiple sweaters if you're generating heat like I'm not. And so, the residences— And we really don't, and I think it'd be incredibly sad if we were to take, well, let's just tear everything down and build new energy-efficient houses. And there are people who have two thousand square foot houses that are heated with two light bulbs. That's enough heat to keep the house comfortable. But that has required starting from scratch. And again, there is so much beautiful residential architecture in this city, that it would be a travesty to me to tear it all down. And then, of course, you fill up the landfills.

DLT: All right. Any final thoughts before we finish up the recording?

JK: I think I'm done. [Laughs]

DLT: [Laughs] That was all the questions I had for you today. Thank you so much for your time.