[Stoves] Leaping about

Frank Shields franke at cruzio.com
Tue May 23 16:45:11 CDT 2017


Dear Cecil, Stovers,

I enjoyed reading this and think it is very important. Not that I know anything about what I write I have always been suspect that we have contaminated our receiving site. That shown when a cleaner way of doing something is ignored by using the traditional ways. That contamination could be in the forms of the following:
1) The feeling of people trying to manipulate them.
2) visitors from 1st World countries coming in and telling them a better way of doing something they have been doing for many years.
3) pushing a ‘cleaner’ stove that tested using processed biomass only to find it smokier than 3-stone fire when using wild biomass.
4) Coming in for a week, leaving to their comforts then returning a year later to see how things are going.
5) 

If the site has been contaminated no matter how much better, cleaner, faster etc an introduced stove is it will not be accepted. I am wondering if that is what has happened? Reading your e-mail it seems that is just the attitude or approach that is occurring. How do we manipulate them to do what we think best - and what group is best to do the manipulating - wrong approach IMO.  And if it has….


Suggestion:
1) Move advisers out of the receiving site. On the way out grab an armful of biomass and drop off at the local certified lab (we already have them I understand!). Stove developers send them your stoves for testing using the right biomass. Passing stoves get pictured with happy family eating great food in a Sears Roebuck style catalog. Complete with ‘buy one get a second at half price’, ‘Spend $2 and get 500 green stamps to put int your book. When filled you get a pot that fits your stove’, ‘Convince your neighbor to buy a stove and you get a coupon’.  You know - the American way of marketing. Then mail the catalog to each family. This way THEY choose with NO pressure a stove we know works with what they are doing. Yes - manipulate without them knowing - just like we all are all the time. 

2) Work with the stoves they are using and like. Starting with Box 1 have all the fuel delivered to a center place where they exchange it for fuel prepared specially for the stove they are using. Then the wild wood delivered is cut, split, chipped, dried, chopped and prepared for the different stoves being used. I think that will improve air quality without much change to the way they like doing things.  


Regards

Frank


 







> On May 23, 2017, at 1:16 PM, cec1863 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> Dear stovers,
> 
> CPP's remarks have reminded me that anthropologists deserve to be given equal standing with physical scientists, engineers, air quality experts, earth first environmentalists, gender rights advocates‎ (feminists?), result based economist, and energy policy wonks when it comes to assessing performance of baseline stoves and figuring out what stove innovations are most likely to  be well received and adopted by particular communities of stoves users, Anthropologists are almost essential when it comes to understanding the subtle dynamics of communities and households where biomass and/or coal stoves are widely used and often preferred - sometimes alone or together with electricity, LPG, kerosene, or even locally sourced renewable energies to perform cooking, heating, and many other agricultural and income generating functions. 
> 
> The unknown question for me is who is willing to listen‎ to me when I try to act as an advocate for different categories of the stove using public or when I have been hired as a member of a team which is composed of mostly western educated urban residing, upper middle class techno-centric professionals. Such professionals typically know best what needs to be done to promote improved stoves in particular target markets! When such professionals are hired to advise USAID, the WB, GIZ, DFID, etc. about what technological improvements should be considered, innovated, tested and incorporated into improved stoves for X, Y, or Z stove using publics it is my experience that we all have trouble listening to each other and we do not understand the stove culture and stove use practices of the target populations. 
> 
> My position as an over the hill anthropologist is that in the end the indigenous stove makers, users/operators, fabricators‎, sellers, and buyers of the world will have the last word on what kind of stoves they will welcome into their homes and communities.  This stove list like the WB and USAID and most other stove development agencies is obviously stove technology centered. One must speak the language of the physical, natural and biological sciences to have standing in these discussions. People like myself who pay more attention to the cultural, social, economic and environmental functions of both traditional stoves or are asked to evaluate innovative stoves typically concentrate on the cultural matrix generated by the food, fuel/forest, fabrication,and family parameters (the 4 F's) of stove performance. Any proposed advance in stove hardware has to improve a candidate stove enough to substantially out perform the traditional stoves with respect to the 4 F's! 
> 
> The stove "techies" who apparently constitute the bulk of the members on the bioenergy list are not that interested in ‎the cultural and operator variables which are prerequisites for widespread uptake and quick adoption from the customers point of view. Tragically, the stove customer is not a king. He or she is a subsidized "peon" who will receive the modern stove that we teckies and members of the cosmopolitan professorate deem to be the best for the:
> 
> 1). world carbon balance,
> 2)  the local and regional health of family and community,
> 3)   the bio-dynamic health of the local and regional eco-system, and
> 4)  the long term well being of the global economy
> 
> The pre-modern small scale and pre-industrial economies of the planet must be coercively straight-jacketed into the Euro American conception of modernity. And let's face it folks there are so many other wonderful way to be modern, most of them unexplored and "beckoning". 
> 
> For some strange reason Crispin takes my stove culture centered readings of village and urban stove users in Mozambique, Malawi, the DRC, Zambia, Namibia, Swaziland, Botswana, Xhosaland, Mongolia, Indonesia and Cambodia SERIOUSLY even when the technologists, economists and the politicos promising "happy days are here again" or just around the next corner do not want to take the time to understand the sophisticated systems of food, fuel/forest, fabrication, and family institutions of values, symbols, skills, ethno-sciences, and interdependence which such systems represent. 
> 
>> From my perspective, it's the 4 F system that we must understand more than the stove technology. But what do I know? I don't seem to fit into the WB's knowledge system and administrative processes very well or at all. So it is better for me to wait and watch patiently from the sidelines and to have off the record conversations with Crispin.
> 
> Come to think of it thank you Crispin for listening to a backslide applied stove anthropologist. It has been a pleasure being part of your stove culture and ethno-science team.
> 
> In search & service, 
> 
> Cecil Cook
>> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
>   Original Message  
> From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
> Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 10:03 AM
> To: 'Stoves (stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org)'
> Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> Subject: [Stoves] Leaping about
> 
> Dear Improved Biomass Stove Fans
> 
> From
> 
> LPG fuel subsidies in Latin America and the use of solid fuels to cook
> Karin Troncoso, Agnes Soares da Silva (Energy Policy 107 (2017) 188-196)
> Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization, 525 23 St. NW., Washington, DC 20037, USA
> 
> “In Mexico, despite the fact that most of the population has physical access to LPG, it has been documented that some people stop using LPG once they have an improved biomass stove (Masera et al., 2005; Berrueta et al., 2007). From a health perspective, this is a leap backwards.”
> 
> While the sources are a little dated now, the fact that people switch to biomass once it is made ‘acceptable’ is valuable information. I think it is a bit of a leap (false statement) to say ‘it is a leap backwards’. The ‘energy ladder’ is an abstract construct that exists in the minds of the Development Set.
> 
> First, there is no field assessment included in the statement that ‘health was negatively affected’ by using an improved biomass stove. In most cases the improvement includes a chimney, not so? Aren’t these 100% improved plancha stoves with a chimney? If all the ‘emissions’ are put out side, then the health impact between using LPG in an unventilated kitchen and wood fuel in a ventilated on are probably comparable (anyone have measurements?).
> 
> Second, there is nothing ‘backward’ about biomass as a fuel. There are some bass-ackwards implementations of burning it, but deprecating an entire fuel class?? We can do a lot better than that.
> 
> So the old saw about ‘solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly enough to provide health benefits’ is once again on our table. Where does this nonsense come from? Who is sustaining this nonsense? In whose interest is this nonsense repeated and repeated as if it was true?
> 
> There has to be some accountability. If measurements are not accompanied by uncertainties, and claims are not based on measurements, there should be no expectation that funding will follow.
> 
> There is another aspect of this whole ‘cooking’ thing which is that many populations do not consider heating water to be ‘cooking’. A stove that is used to cook and heat water and heat the living space is a triple-function device, not doing double-duty. The separation of cooking from water heating is very obvious in many kitchens. I will be making a point of this in Warsaw. For stoves to be acceptable they have to perform the expected functions.
> 
> Famously the 2011 (?) national census in Indonesia asked the question, “What is you main cooking fuel” and 40% selected ‘biomass’ as the answer. Another 40% marked, ‘LPG’ and the rest chose ‘kerosene’ or ‘electricity’. What this single question did not unearth (but the stove anthropologist Cecil Cook did) is that 70% of that first 40% use LPG some of the time for cooking food or making tea (a cooking function and a water heating function), and 70% of the LPG users heat water with wood. Wow!
> 
> So 68% of the population uses biomass to heat water, not counting those using electricity and kerosene for cooking who were not asked about their wood fuel use. Certainly the total is above 75% using biomass.
> 
> Is all biomass fuel use a step backwards?
> 
> Asked why the use wood, the universal answer is, ‘to save money.’ Is saving money always a step backwards? If fuel costs more is it a step forwards?
> 
> There seems to be a smidgeon of arrogance in this matter of who is moving backwards.
> 
> Regards
> Crispin
> 
> 
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> 

Thanks

Frank
Frank Shields
Gabilan Laboratory
Keith Day Company, Inc.
1091 Madison Lane
Salinas, CA  93907
(831) 246-0417 cell
(831) 771-0126 office
fShields at keithdaycompany.com



franke at cruzio.com







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