by Tim Folger
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 aid agency GTZ, Scott has designed or built some 400,000 stoves in thirteen 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, 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 weeklong 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, Jacob Moss, a Stove Camper who works for the Environmental Protection Agency and started its Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, told me. 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 Christmas 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 EPA, contains less 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. Wood smoke, as sweet as it smells, is a caustic swirl of chemical agents, including benzene, butadiene, styrene, formaldehyde, dioxin, and methylene chloride. Every leaf or husk adds its own compounds to the fire, producing a fume so corrosive that it can consume a piece of untreated steel in less than a year. The effect on the body is similar. Indoor smoke kills a million and a half people annually, according to the World Health Organization. It causes or compounds a long list of debilities—pneumonia, bronchitis, emphysema, cataracts, cancers, heart disease, high blood pressure, and low birth weight—and has been implicated in a number of others, including tuberculosis, low IQ, and cleft palate, among other deformities.
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 seven hundred times as warming. Black carbon absorbs sunlight. A single gram warms the atmosphere as much as a 1,500-watt space heater running for a week. Given that cooking fires each release 1,000 or 2,000 grams of soot in a year, and that 3 billion people rely on them, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet.
In June 2009, the sweeping Waxman-Markey climate bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Hidden among its 1,400 pages was a short section calling on the EPA to identify ways to provide stoves to 20 million households in five years. The bill made no mention of how or where the stoves might be built or who might pay for them. But there was talk of carbon-credit subsidies, international cofinancing, and major appliance manufacturers entering the fray.
The engineers of Stove Camp, in other words, found themselves suddenly blinking in the spotlight—like a band of raccoons caught digging through a scrap heap. "Kill a million and a half people and nobody gives a damn," one government official told me. "But become part of this big climate thing and everyone comes knocking at your door."
The entrance to Stove Camp was marked by a piece of weathered plywood hung on a rusty railroad trestle, with the words FRED'S ISLAND spray-painted on it. The place wasn't technically an island—it was bordered by the river on two sides and the railroad on the third—but it did belong to a retired carpenter named Fred Colgan. When I arrived on a Sunday evening, he and Aprovecho's Dean Still showed me an old trailer where I could sleep, a few yards from the tracks. "Wait till that timber train comes through at four in the morning," Colgan said. He gripped an imaginary bedstead and rattled his head up and down. "If you see giant rats in the middle of the night, you haven't had too much to drink. We're infested with nutria."
Still laughed. "A nutria is a rodent," he said. "Entirely harmless."
"It's a rat the size of a cocker spaniel."
Before Colgan and his wife, Lise, bought the island four years ago, it had belonged to a slaughterhouse and meatpacking opera tion, which left its buildings scattered across the grounds. Colgan offered the use of them to Still in 2006, after the stove program outgrew its original facilities a few miles up the road. The research center now has seven employees and a rotating cast of volunteers, who spend their time testing and developing stoves for projects worldwide. Their offices occupy a ramshackle complex along the river, with a wooden corral to one side and a labyrinth of labs, workshops, and storage rooms in back. Still holds his stove meetings in the meat locker, where the carcasses used to hang.
"Here's the deal," he told us one morning. "The world is absolutely littered with failed stoves. At the UN they laugh at us when we say that we have another project. So if we keep on blowing it, we're in trouble." He peered at the bleary-eyed campers, about thirty strong, gathered around mismatched Formica tables. Jacob Moss, the EPA official, sat next to a pulmonologist from the National Institutes of Health; Peter Scott had recently returned from Uganda, and others had worked on projects in Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Malawi, Peru, India, and China. "It ain't easy," Still told them. "But it ain't impossible. We're going to be offered opportunities. But if there's going to be money for twenty million stoves, we have to be ready. And we have to not screw this up."
Still, who is fifty-seven, is one of the presiding spirits of the stove community. He has a large, ruddy face and a mop of white hair, a wide walrus mustache, and dark eyebrows that curve high above his eyes, giving him a look of perpetual, delighted surprise. Decades of living and working in hardscrabble villages have instilled an improbable ebullience in him, and a correlative roundness of form. I once compared him to Buddha when I was talking to Scott, who quickly corrected me. "Dean's a mystic Episcopalian," he said. "The only thing Buddhist about him is his girth." It's true that Still keeps plastic statues of St. Francis, the Virgin Mary, and the Archangel Michael glued to the dashboard of his truck. (Michael's flaming sword, he says, reminds him that "sometimes to make something good happen you have to kick people in the ass.") But when I was with him, they were
joined by well-foxed copies of William James and a book of Mad Libs. When it comes to stoves, he said, any spiritual guidance will do.
Earlier that summer, Still had flown to London to accept an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy, presented by Prince Charles. To prepare for the ceremony and press interviews, he'd had to buy his first suit since his wedding twelve years ago, and the Ashden foundation had given him a week's worth of elocution lessons. ("The English, geez, they're so unconsciously imperialist.") Still has a clear but indecorous way of talking, with an old hippie's loitering rhythms and self-questioning asides. Although he has trained a generation of stove designers and built one of the world's premier stove-testing labs, his science is mostly self-taught and he's uncomfortable playing the expert. "I'm just the mouth," he told us, waving his hands at the engineers in the room. "These guys are the brains." They just needed a little prodding now and then.
He turned to the whiteboard behind him and scrawled out some bullet points with a pink marker. "This is now the definition of a good stove, according to Waxman-Markey," he said. "1. Reduces fuel use by more than fifty percent. 2. Reduces black carbon by more than sixty percent. 3. Reduces childhood pneumonia by more than thirty percent. 4. Affordable ($10 retail or less). 5. Cooks love it. 6. Gets funded." The last three weren't in the bill, Still admitted, but no stove could succeed without them. And none had ever met all six criteria at once.
"So this is what we have to do this week, my dears," he said. "Save the damn world." He grinned. "I mean, you didn't want an easy problem, did you?"
Building a stove is simple. Building a good stove is hard. Building a good, cheap stove can drive an engineer crazy. The devices at Aprovecho looked straightforward enough. Most were about the size and shape of a stockpot, with a cylindrical combustion chamber and a cooking grate on top. You stuck some twigs in the chamber, set them on fire, and put your pot on the grate—nothing to it. Yet one stove used a pound of wood to boil a gallon of water, and another used two pounds. Fire is a fickle, nonlinear thing, and seems to be affected by every millimeter of a stove's design—the size of the opening, the shape and material of the chamber, the thickness of the grate—each variable amplifying the next and being amplified in turn, in a complex series of feedback loops. "You've heard of the butterfly effect?" one engineer told me. "Well, these stoves are full of butterflies."
Like science and religion, stove design is riven into sects and disciplines. Some engineers use only low-cost materials like mud or brick; others dabble in thermoelectric generators and built-in fans—cleaner and more efficient, but also more expensive. Most stoves are built for combustion: they consume the wood and reduce it to ash. But a few are designed for gasification instead. These stoves heat the wood until it releases its volatile compounds, which are ignited in the air. (All that's left of the wood afterward is its carbon skeleton, which can be burned separately as charcoal or used as a fertilizer.) Gasifiers can be remarkably clean-burning, but they're also finicky. Because the fire burns at the top of the stove, rather than rising up from a bed of coals at the bottom, its flames are easily stifled when new fuel is added, turning the stove into a smoke bomb.
In the vestibule of the Aprovecho building, Still had set up a small "Museum of Stoves" on facing wall racks. Its contents came from more than a dozen countries, in an odd menagerie of shapes and sizes: an elegant clay chulha from India, a squat steel Jiko from Kenya, a painted coal-burner from China, like an Easy-Bake oven. Most were better than an open fire, yet all had failed the test in some way—too flimsy or inefficient or expensive or unstable or unclean or hard to use. "We still haven't cracked the nut," Peter Scott said.
Scott had come to Stove Camp to build a better injera stove. Injera is the spongy pancake that Ethiopians eat with almost every meal. The batter is usually made of an ancient grain called teff and fermented until it's bubbly and tart. It's poured onto a ceramic griddle, or mitad, then set over an open fire or a concrete hearth. In Ethiopia, injera is often cooked by women's cooperatives in kitchens that may have forty or fifty smoky, inefficient stoves running simultaneously—one reason that the country has lost more than 90 percent of its forests since the early 1960s. "In the north, people will travel hundreds of kilometers to get wood, then double back to bring it to market," Scott told me. A good stove, he figured, could cut that fuel use in half.
For the past several months, Scott and his kilt-wearing friend Dale Andreatta—a mechanical engineer from Columbus, Ohio, who often did stove projects pro bono—had been collaborating on a prototype. It had an efficient ceramic combustion chamber shaped like a miniature fireplace, with a round griddle perched above it like a tabletop. Scott had tried using a traditional mitad, since local cooks would much prefer it, but the ceramic wouldn't heat evenly, so he'd switched to steel instead. Steel conducts heat much more efficiently than ceramic, and it's often used for the plancha griddles in tortilla stoves. Injera, though, is an unforgiving dish. Its batter is thin and watery, so it can't be moved around like a tortilla, and any hot spots in the griddle will burn it. "The Ethiopians are unbelievably particular," Scott said. "If the injera doesn't have the exact size of bubble in the batter, they'll say it's garbage."
Luckily, Scott was used to improvising under much rougher conditions. His years in the African bush had left him, at forty, as sober and sinewy as Still was gregarious and stout. Scott had lived in mud huts in Swaziland, battled intestinal infections in Zambia, and been robbed by bandits in Uganda. When he first went to Africa for a stove project in 2002, he was taken hostage on his third day, in an Internet café in Pretoria. "They tied us up, laid us on the ground, a gun at the back of the head," he told me. "I had a strong premonition that I was going to die. But I didn't die. So after that I didn't worry too much about my own safety." He went on to build stoves for refugees in the Congo, tobacco-curing barns in Malawi and Tanzania, and institutional stoves throughout eastern and southern Africa. In 2006 he became the first Aprovecho member to receive an Ashden Award. (As a Canadian, he told me, he was excused from the elocution lessons.)
Over the next few days, I'd periodically find Scott and Andreatta skulking around the Aprovecho workshops and laboratories, looking for tools or discussing metallurgy. Their preliminary tests had not been encouraging: the griddle was 200 degrees hotter at the center than at the edge. When I asked Andreatta how it was going, he lifted an eyebrow. "The optimist thinks the glass is half full," he said. "The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources."
When Aprovecho was founded in the late 1970s, building stoves was a good deal less complicated. "Appropriate technology" was the byword then. Grounded in the teachings of Gandhi and the economist E. F. Schumacher, the philosophy held that poor countries are best served by low-cost, low-tech, local development. Better to teach villagers to make a stove than to give them stoves that they can't afford to repair or replace.
Aprovecho took the idea a step further. "We wanted to work as an inverse Peace Corps," Ianto Evans, one of the founding members, told me. Evans was an architect and ecologist who'd done research and volunteer work in Guatemala and was then teaching at Oregon State. Instead of exporting American know-how to the Third World, he and a small group of artists and academics decided, they would try to teach Americans to live more sustainably. "We would bring in villagers from Kenya or Lesotho, have them stay with us, and teach us what they knew—everything from cooking to growing things to assessing how much is too much." They would build a model Third World village in the Oregon woods.
In 1981, with the help of a Canadian foundation, the group bought forty acres of second-growth timber five miles west of Cottage Grove. The land lay on a south-facing slope at the end of a logging road. It was rough, marginally fertile ground, wet year-round and often freezing in the winter. But the new owners spared no effort in improving it. They deep-tilled the soil and enriched it with compost. They planted pear, apple
, and quince trees, a grape arbor, and a bamboo grove. They built a library, a workshop, an adobe hut, and passive solar cabins, and, to top it all, a giant tree house thirty feet above the ground. To neighbors or passersby they might have seemed like squatters, yet they were ambitious, industrious, self-serious folk. Aprovecho, in Spanish, means "I make good use of."
Deforestation was the issue of the moment, and Evans believed that stoves were an ideal solution. A few years earlier, at a research center in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, he and a team of local craftsmen had tested a variety of designs and materials and brought in cooks to try them out. "Any fool can do technical things," he told me. "But if people don't want it, don't bother." The team eventually hit upon a mixture of sand, clay, and pumice that was stable and freely available. They cast it into a massive hearth, about waist-high, carved out a firebox, burners, and interior channels to direct the heat, then added a chimney for the smoke. They dubbed it Lorena, after the Spanish words for mud and sand, lodo and arena.
The Lorena never made many inroads to American kitchens, but it was an immediate hit internationally. While Evans was still testing it, a United Nations representative saw the stove and persuaded him to publish the design. "The facts are stunning," Evans wrote in a 1979 book on the Lorena. "Data from several sources indicate that improved stoves—and of these the Lorena stove appears to have advantages over the others—can save one-half to three-quarters or more of the wood normally used in cooking." Projects for the Peace Corps, World Bank, USAID, and the governments of Senegal and Lesotho followed, often inspiring others in turn. In some areas, the Lorena was so popular that its name became a generic term: it simply meant "improved stove."