The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010

by Tim Folger

  The experience wasn't altogether unpleasant—there are worse things, apparently, than becoming a giant slab of bacon. But by the time I stumbled out, sixteen minutes later, my head was swimming. When Smith later downloaded the monitor's data at his office, it showed the carbon monoxide in the chuj spiking to 500 parts per million, then abruptly leveling off. The program wasn't designed to show levels any higher than that, he explained. "Oh, buddy," Still said, staring at the screen. "If you'd gone to a thousand for ten minutes, you'd be in a coma now."

  Stories like these were a source of endless frustration to stovemakers. The trouble with tradition, they'd found, is that it can be remarkably thickheaded. Ignore it, and your shiny new stove may get turned into a flowerpot. Cater to it, and you may end up with a new version of the same old problem. The campers in Cottage Grove spent half their time agonizing over cultural sensitivity ("We're highly dominated by elderly white engineering types," a stovemaker who'd worked in Uganda told me. "So you get a lot of preposterous ideas that'll never fly in the kitchen") and the other half grousing about "design drift." Too many stoves start out as marvels of efficiency, they said, and are gradually modified into obsolescence. Once the engineer is gone, the local builder may widen the stove's mouth so it can burn larger sticks, only to draw in too much cold air. Or he'll make the stove out of denser bricks, not realizing that the air pockets in the clay are its best insulation. The better the stove and the tighter its tolerances, the easier it is to ruin.

  "When we first got into this, we had this utopian vision of working with local communities to build locally grown stoves," the EPA's Jacob Moss told me. "We've moved away from that—I won't say a hundred and eighty degrees, but maybe a hundred and sixty. I don't really listen to small stove projects anymore. When I hear Dean say that one millimeter can make a nontrivial difference, it's inconceivable to me that all these local stovemakers can make all these stoves efficiently. You have to work in a different way."

  Three years ago, on a taxi ride in southern China, Still had a glimpse of the future. He was working as a consultant for the EPA at the time, passing through the city of Kunming, when he spotted some odd little stoves for sale on a street corner. He shouted for the driver to stop and stepped outside to examine one. "It was like Shangri-La," he told me. The stove was meant for burning coal, so its design was all wrong for wood, but it was sturdy, compact, and cleanly manufactured. More important, its combustion chamber was made of a hard yet miraculously light and porous clay—a combination that stovemakers had been scouring the Earth to find. "There, in this two-dollar coal burner, was everything needed to make the world's perfect rocket stove," Still says.

  The stove had a telephone number printed on it, so Still called it on his cell phone. Two months later he was visiting the factory where the stove was built, in eastern China. Within two years, the factory was producing a stove to Aprovecho's specifications. Sold under the name StoveTec, it isn't much to look at: a hollow clay tube clad in green sheet metal, with an opening in front and a pot support on top. But it incorporates all ten rocket-design principles with a consistency that only mass production can offer. The StoveTec uses about half as much wood as an open fire, produces less than half as much smoke, and sells for eight dollars wholesale. In the United States, where it retails for five times as much, it has been especially popular among Mormons and survivalists.

  Still's stove is a kind of proof of principle. It shows that an efficient, user-friendly stove can be mass-produced at a cost that even the very poor can afford. But it also shows what's missing. The StoveTec isn't suited to some dishes—tortillas, chapatis, heavy porridges—and its life expectancy is less than two years. While it's much less smoky than an open fire, it can't quite meet the Waxman-Markey standards.

  The search for the perfect stove continues, in other words. Not long before Stove Camp, I visited a company called Envirofit, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Envirofit's laboratories are housed at Colorado State University in a converted power plant from the 1930s. On the morning of my tour, half a dozen experiments were going on simultaneously. One glass case held nine stoves, all furiously burning pellets fed to them by an automatic hopper. Across the room, the smoke was being parsed into its chemical components by a rack of blinking machinery. (Wood smoke may not be cyanide, as Still put it, but hydrogen cyanide turns out to be one of its trace elements.) On a catwalk upstairs, a programmer was modeling green and yellow flames on his computer, while a biologist down the hall was subjecting live human lung cells to wood smoke. "We grow them in the basement, but they're fully functional," I was told. "They even produce phlegm."

  Envirofit's CEO, Ron Bills, is a former executive of Segway, Yamaha, and Bombardier. His new company is technically a nonprofit, yet Bills believes that stovemakers, for too long, have treated the developing world as a charity ward instead of a business opportunity. "A lot of the poor—call them emerging consumers—get inundated with crummy stuff," he told me. "So we're going back to Henry Ford." Envirofit's first new product was essentially a re-branded version of Aprovecho's stove, made by the same Chinese factory with a few improvements in durability and design. In July, however, the company unveiled a new model. It was shaped like an ordinary rocket stove, though much more stylish, and had a major innovation at its core: a durable metal combustion chamber. Made of an alloy developed together with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, it could withstand the caustic fumes of a wood fire for more than five years, yet cost only three dollars a unit to produce. The Envirofit combustion chamber could be shipped for a fraction of the cost of a fully built stove and adapted to local designs and cooking traditions. It was mass production and appropriate technology rolled into one.

  "That's the goose that laid the golden egg right there," Bills told me. "That's the Intel inside." He had nothing against groups like Aprovecho, he said. They could continue to hold their Stove Camps and sell their stoves made out of clay. "But Henry Ford didn't stop with the Model T. If we are going to make an impact in my lifetime, it has to be done at scale. And when you have a three-billion-product opportunity, what is enough scale? One million, two million, five million? I like to dream big." Thanks, hippies, he seemed to be saying. Now, please step aside.

  On the last day of Stove Camp, I stumbled out of bed late, in search of coffee—the timber train having catapulted me awake, as usual, four hours earlier. Aprovecho was as busy as a science fair. The pulmonologist from NIH was putting the finishing touches on a rocket stove made from an oil drum. A Norwegian designer was running emissions tests on a little tin gasifier. And another camper was watching emission measurements unspool across a laptop. "Look at that!" he shouted. "It's flat-lining! There's almost no particulate matter!" On the whiteboard next door, the words SAVE THE WORLD had long since been erased and replaced with mathematical equations.

  Scott and Andreatta were in the far corner of the workshop, probing their injera stove with an infrared thermometer. Their week had been a succession of setbacks and breakthroughs. When their first prototype, with its steel griddle, had too many hot spots, Scott had suggested that they try aluminum. It conducted heat even better than steel and was considerably cheaper. A few e-mails to Ethiopia had confirmed that the metal could be locally cast from recycled engine blocks. By the next morning, Andreatta had roughed out a plywood mold for the griddle and they'd taken it to a foundry in Eugene. But the design proved too complicated to cast—it had radiating fins along the bottom to distribute the heat. So they'd settled on something simpler.

  The new griddle was a third of an inch thick and flat on both sides. Andreatta had put a ceramic baffle beneath it to temper and diffuse the flames, but he still had his doubts. The melting point of aluminum is 1,220 degrees Fahrenheit—about half as high as the peak temperature inside a rocket stove. If they weren't careful, the griddle would dissolve before their eyes. Andreatta switched on his LED headlamp and peered at the infrared thermometer. For now, the griddle was holding steady at 433 degrees—just 5 degrees shor
t of the target temperature. Better yet, the center was less than 25 degrees hotter than the outer edge. "Even Ethiopian women don't get it in that range," Scott said.

  Still strolled by, wearing a T-shirt with a giant longhorn beetle on it. He had a groggy grin on his face, as if he'd just woken up to a redeemed and revitalized world. Sometimes he saw the stove community more as Ron Bills seemed to see it—as a gathering of undisciplined hobbyists, engaged in the equivalent of building iPods out of toothpicks and aluminum foil. But this wasn't one of those days. Earlier that summer, a research group under Vijay Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia, had surveyed cooks in Uganda and Tanzania who had tested a variety of improved stoves. In both studies, the StoveTec/Envirofit design had won the highest rating, beating out the most recent Envirofit stove in the Tanzanian study. "My people, they aren't always very smart," Still had told me. But they were inventive, resourceful, and doggedly resilient. And after thirty years of trial and error and endless field research, they understood fire very, very well.

  The injera stove was the kind of project that might always fall to them. "What is the market for an improved cookstove, really?" Still said. "People hope that it's big, but we have an eight-dollar stove and it's not easy to sell. Everyone forgets that poor people are really poor." In Africa, where less than a quarter of the population has electricity and the most efficient technologies are beyond reach, an open fire can still seem hard to beat, if only because it's free. "But you know what? We're going to do it," Still said. "A lot of people think that if you don't make a whole lot of money at something it can't be good. I think those people are wrong. If you want to do what poor people need, and you really don't stop, you're not going to be rich. Not unless you're a lot smarter than I am."

  Just before we broke camp the next morning, Scott came to find me in the meat locker: the prototype was ready for its first pancake. He and Andreatta had hoped to cook true injera bread for the occasion, but they couldn't find the time—or the teff—to make a proper sourdough. So they'd settled for Aunt Jemima. "This is our first test," Scott said, holding up a pitcher of pancake batter. "People of the world, cut us some slack." Then he poured it onto the hot griddle.

  Over the next three months, the stove would go through more rounds of fiddling and redesign. The aluminum would prove too conductive for real injera and get swapped out for a traditional mitad. To get the ceramic to heat evenly, the baffles beneath it would have to be removed. At one point, in Addis Ababa, Scott would nearly abandon the project, only to have an Ethiopian cook make some key suggestions. Yet the result would be even better than it seemed on this sunny August morning: the world's first successful rocket injera stove—twice as efficient and many times more durable than those it was meant to replace.

  As the batter hit the griddle, it spread into a circle that nearly reached the edge. Within a minute, it was bubbling up evenly across its surface. "Yeah, baby!" Scott said. "If we'd tried that last Friday, it would be blackened char in the middle." He slid a spatula under the batter and tried to flip it, leaving half on the griddle but the rest well browned. He stared at the pancake. "We can't really fucking believe it," he said. "I mean, these designs usually take months and you're still scratching your head." The stove was almost ready, he thought. Now they just had to convince a few million Ethiopians.

  EVAN OSNOS Green Giant

  FROM The New Yorker

  ON MARCH 3, 1986, four of China's top weapons scientists—each a veteran of the missile and space programs—sent a private letter to Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the country. Their letter was a warning: decades of relentless focus on militarization had crippled the country's civilian scientific establishment; China must join the world's xin jishu geming, the "new technological revolution," they said, or it would be left behind. They called for an élite project devoted to technology ranging from biotech to space research. Deng agreed and scribbled on the letter, "Action must be taken on this now." This was China's "Sputnik moment," and the project was code-named the 863 Program, for the year and month of its birth.

  In the years that followed, the government pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. Then, in 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly 80 percent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China's future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.

  In 2006 Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October 2009, China must "seize preemptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution."

  A China born again green can be hard to imagine, especially for people who live here. After four years in Beijing, I've learned how to gauge the pollution before I open the curtains; by dawn on the smoggiest days, the lungs ache. The city government does not dwell on the details; its daily air-quality measurement does not even tally the tiniest particles of pollution, which are the most damaging to the respiratory system. Last year the U.S. Embassy installed an air monitor on the roof of one of its buildings, and every hour it posts the results to a Twitter feed, with a score ranging from 1, which is the cleanest air, to 500, the dirtiest. American cities consider anything above 100 to be unhealthy. The rare times in which an American city has scored above 300 have been in the midst of forest fires. In these cases, the government puts out public health notices warning that the air is "hazardous" and that "everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors." As I type this in Beijing, the embassy's air monitor says that today's score is 500.

  China is so big—and is growing so fast—that in 2006 it passed the United States to become the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases. If China's emissions keep climbing as they have for the past thirty years, the country will emit more of those gases in the next thirty years than the United States has in its entire history. So the question is no longer whether China is equipped to play a role in combating climate change but how that role will affect other countries. David Sandalow, the U.S. assistant secretary of energy for policy and international affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, "China's investment in clean en ergy is extraordinary." For America, he added, the implication is clear: "Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come."

  One of the firms that are part of the 863 Program is Goldwind Science and Technology Company. It operates a plant and a laboratory in a cluster of high-tech companies in an outlying district of Beijing called Yizhuang, which has been trying to rebrand itself with the name E-Town. (China has been establishing high-tech clusters since the late 1980s, after scientists returned from abroad with news of Silicon Valley and Route 128.) Yizhuang was a royal hunting ground under the last emperor, but as E-Town it has the sweeping asphalt vistas of a suburban office park, around blocks of reflective-glass buildings occupied by Nokia, Bosch, and other corporations. Local planning officials have embraced the vocabulary of a new era; E-Town, they say, will be a model not only of e-business but also
of e-government, e-community, e-knowledge, and e-parks.

  When I reached Goldwind, the first thing I saw was a spirited soccer game underway on a field in the center of the campus. An arti ficial rock-climbing wall covered one side of the glass-and-steel research center. I met the chairman, Wu Gang, in his office on the third floor, and I asked about the sports. "We employ several coaches and music teachers," he said. "They do training for our staff." A pair of pushup bars rested on the carpet beside his desk. At fifty-one years old, Wu is tall, with wire-rim glasses, rumpled black hair, and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. ("I can do the butterfly," he said.) For fun he sings Peking opera. Wu said that he had not been a robust child: "My education was very serious. Just learning, learning, learning. I wanted to jump out of that!"

  Wu integrates his hobbies into his work life in the manner of a California entrepreneur. He once led seventeen people, including seven Goldwind employees, on a mountaineering expedition across Mt. Bogda, in the Tian Shan range, in western China. "We Chinese are very weak in this field—teamwork," Wu said. He recently put his workers on a five-year self-improvement regimen; among the corporate announcements on Goldwind's website, the company now posts its inhouse sports reports. ("All the vigorous and valiant players shot and dunked frequently," according to a recent basketball report on a game between factory workers.)

  Wu was born and raised in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to vast plains and peaks that create natural wind tunnels, with gusts so ferocious that they can sweep trains from their tracks. In the 1980s, engineers from Europe began arriving in Xinjiang in order to test their wind turbines, and in 1987 Wu, then a young engineer in charge of an early Chinese wind farm, worked alongside engineers from Denmark, a center of wind power research. He immersed himself in the mechanics of turbines—"Where are their stomachs, and where are their hearts?" he said. In 1997 state science officials offered him the project of building a 600-kilowatt turbine, small by international standards but still unknown territory in China. Many recipients of government research funding simply used the money to conduct their experiments and move on, but some, like Wu, saw the cash as the kernel of a business. He figured that every dollar from the government could attract more than ten dollars in bank loans: "We can show them, 'This is money we got from the science ministry.'"