Best Article : TO BUILD A (BETTER) FIRE By Burkhard Bilger
Two men walked into a bar called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt, festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and spoke in a loud, unmodulated voice—like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely Biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sun-baked skin and piercing eyes.
The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how they’d landed in the Oregon woods wasn’t clear, but they stuck stubbornly to their set list and met with only polite applause. Finally, near the end of the show, one of the performers—a spindly comedian with thick, black glasses and a T-shirt that said “Freak”—peered out from under the spotlight and fixed her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. “Do you have a job?” she said, almost to herself.
Scott said no, then yes.
“That sounds fishy. What is it you do?”
Scott fidgeted for a second, then mumbled, “I make stoves for Africa.”
“You what?”
“I make stoves for Africa.”
Scott was being modest. In the small-but-fanatical world of stovemakers, he is something of a celebrity. (“Peter is our rock star,” another stovemaker told me.) For the past seven years, under the auspices of the German technical-aid agency GTZ (now GIZ), Scott has designed or built some 400,000 stoves in 13 African countries. He has made them out of mud, brick, sheet metal, clay, ceramic, and discarded oil drums. He has made them in villages without electricity or liquid fuel, where meals are still cooked over open fires, and where burns are among the most common injuries and smoke is the sixth-leading cause of death. In the places where Scott works, a good stove can save your life.
He and Andreatta were in Cottage Grove for Stove Camp. A mile or two from the Axe and Fiddle, a few dozen engineers, anthropologists, inventors, foreign-aid workers, and rogue academics had set up tents in a meadow along a willowy bend in a fork of the Willamette River. They spent their days designing and testing wood-burning stoves, their nights cooking under the stars and debating thermodynamics. Stove Camp was a week-long event hosted by the Aprovecho Research Center—the engineering offshoot of a local institute, education center, and environmental collective. Now in its tenth year, the camp had become a kind of hippie Manhattan Project. It brought together the best minds in the field to solve a single, intractable problem: how do you build cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people?
A map of the world’s poor is easy to make: just follow the smoke. About half the world’s population cooks with gas, kerosene, or electricity while the other half burns wood, coal, dung, or other solid fuels. To the first group, a roaring hearth has become a luxury—a thing for camping trips and holiday parties. To the second group, it’s a necessity. To the first group, a kitchen is an arsenal of specialized appliances. To the second, it’s just a place to build a fire.
Clean air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection agency (EPA), contains fewer than 15 micrograms of fine particles per cubic meter. Five times that amount will set off a smoke alarm. Three hundred times as much—roughly what an open fire produces—will slowly kill you. A well-made stove can easily clear the air by piping the smoke out through a chimney or burning the fuel more efficiently. Yet most appliance manufacturers see no profit in making products for people who can’t pay for them. And most aid agencies have found easier ways to help the poor—by administering vaccines, for instance. Stovemakers are a chronically underfunded bunch, used to toiling in the dusty margins of international development. Aside from a few national programs in Asia and the Americas, their projects have tended to be small and scattershot, funded a few thousand stoves at a time by volunteers and NGOs. “We’ve been watering this rock for a long time,” Dean Still, the head of Aprovecho, told me.
Lately, though, the rules have changed. As global temperatures have risen, the smoke from Third World kitchens has been upgraded from a local to a universal threat. The average cooking fire produces about as much carbon dioxide as a car, and a great deal more soot, or black carbon—a substance 700 times as warming. Black carbon absorbs sunlight. A single gram warms the atmosphere as much as a 1500-watt space heater running for a week. Given that cooking fires each release 1,000 to 2,000 grams of soot in a year and that 3 billion people rely on the fires, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet.
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