[Stoves] Response to Ron (about Leaping)- role of stove anthropologists in empowering stove users/producers to form & ask own questions

Sun May 28 11:22:22 CDT 2017

Cecil:

So glad to learn you are not among the lemmings of physics.

I do fear that fact-finding by social anthropologists would not pass muster
with those who already have invented data and facts for their convenience.

While I am not convinced that it is just the discipline of social
anthropology and not a special practitioner such as yourself that could
prove valuable in "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", I am convinced that pushing out
- not comingling with - "physical scientists, engineers, air quality
experts, earth first environmentalists, gender rights advocates‎
(feminists?), result based economist, and energy policy wonks" is a minimum
condition to break out of the smoke and clutter we have inflicted on
ourselves and some five billion people in the last 50 years and counting.

I have been telling friends in the "energy analysis" business that poor
people's energy and environment get poor intellectual treatment, largely
because so little money is at stake.

For public investments in electric utilities or downstream petroleum
business, the share of the market for poor households is so small,
engineers and financial analysts don't give it much thought. Nor are social
anthropologists much use (though I wish there were social anthropological
research on electrification and the spread of oil and gas).

But when it comes to - aha, "biomass stoves" - product and systems
engineers are dispensed with, as are financial analysts. The world of
"biomass stoves for poor households" is peopled by physicists - who do
energy balance but not mass balance or a balance sheet. Contrary to the
impressions created by publications in Energy Policy or Lancet, very few
"stove engineers", "air quality experts", "earth first environmentalists",
"gender rights advocates" have really bothered with biomass cooking.

No air quality expert with hard experience in the development and
enforcement of air quality standards has paid much attention to the
purported plight of three billion people (used to be two billion people
twenty years ago, if you remember Doug Barnes' work).

And you only have to go through the World Development Report, circa 2010?,
on Gender, to see that serious gender analysts never mention the word
cooking or cookstoves.

I think Hillary Clinton went to Beijing 1995 UN Conference on Women, where
some groupies got a session on "women and energy". I don't believe the
official proclamations from that Conference even uttered a word about
cooking or stoves.

I am laying a serious charge -- that the "stoves" enterprise has tried to
persuade people that there is a problem to be solved and that they have a
marketable solution. No matter of how many papers are generated by all
those other "experts" you have had to deal with, the cumulative
contribution of all disciplines other than social anthropology is,
essentially a big zero.

I hold physicists particularly responsible for this sad state of affairs.

I am exaggerating, of course, but I think Western physicists – mostly white
and mostly men of a certain age group and cultural, moral predilection
(self-righteous do-gooders, to be blunt) – were the worst curse upon the
poor people of the developing world when it came to energy and
environmental issues that impinge on the lives of those poor people.

Be it deforestation or the Global Burden of Disease, physicists have
created cultist science – collecting “data” with such presumptuous theories
of poor people’s behavior and incentives, compounding them with “facts”
discovered by the most laughable censuses and questionnaires.

The sheer paucity of direct measurement of energy consumption and
production by the poor people didn’t limit these scholars – such as they
were called, if only by themselves – from churning out papers after papers,
building national and global “databases” out of polluted airs. To the point
of the first serious revision in 2008 of Global Burden of Disease that few
people took seriously. In the last ten years, physical scientists with a
particularly warped view of poor cooks and their environment have managed
to generate hysteria that I am sure will lead only to greater frustration
in the years to come.

Kirk Smith explains in his Millions Dead paper how the computed toll of
"premature mortality"was jacked up from around a million to four million.
Anybody who buys the definitions and methods of GBD should still be careful
about the results -- the "database" of direct measurements of
emissions,concentrations, exposures, diseases, and deaths is non-existent.

People who buy WHO's line of "database" to "Guidelines for Household Fuel
Use" should not call themselves scientists.

Whatever got published and marketed to students became the holy books to be
cited and quoted, recited and re-quoted.

In the meantime, the arrogant, self-satisfied agreed among themselves that
the best way to perpetuate the propaganda -- theories of stove science and
of the impacts of fuel production and use - was to make sure certain
questions didn't get asked.

I developed a definition of academics a few years ago – people who, having
witnessed a gruesome murder in their midst, would not accept it as real
until they jointly published an account in a peer-reviewed journal
(sometimes their own friends and family).

I don't think much would be lost if all the surveys and questionnaires of
poor people's energy use were efficiently burnt into char. Or e-char.

You, on the other hand, deserve a Nobel Prize for NOT using questionnaires
that only give answers to questions that are presumed to be relevant by
physicists and sociologists.

When questionnaires on household energy also cover all biomass balances in
relevant region, with fuel chemistry and air chemistry at all relevant
locations for a reasonably long period, and budgets and balance sheets of
biomass producers and users - analyzed in a way a power system of an oil
and gas system is analyzed - we might get out of the clutches of these
exajoules and GWP counters.

Challenges welcome. I think this whole enterprise of "stoves" needs to be
shaken from root to skies.

Nikhil

------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(India +91)909 995 2080
*Skype: nikhildesai888*

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Ron and list,
>
> Something went wrong with my post to the bio-energy list. Here it is
> cleaned up. Excuse me!
>
> I do not typically use questionnaires when I work because I find that they
> tend to generate false data which often  ‎does not tell us about what stove
> users and operators hold dear to their hearts. So anthropologists do their
> best to observe the behavior of stove users while operating their
> traditional stoves to heat their homes, cook food and perform other kinds
> of income generating work. My role is not one of asking questions. My role
> is to figure out what questions are foremost in the minds of the stove
> operators and buyers and to gradually assemble an overview of what the
> stove using/buying public  perceive to be important, what they most
> appreciate about their stoves or - what is the hierarchy of values which
> guide their judgments about good or bad stoves.
>
> So my methodology is to accompany stove users and households through a
> series of meals or discrete stove tasks which includes gathering, preparing
> and storing firewood, igniting and operating their stoves, dousing and
> turning off their stoves (how is the retained heat of the stove used?). The
> timing and duration of discrete tasks may be critically important.
>
> You notice what kind of biomass is used as fuel at different times of the
> year and how much work is involved in gathering and preparing these fuels,
> igniting them, and what kind of fire is produced. For example what is the
> ethnoscience of stove users about different kinds of biomass? What are the
> preferred fuels for particular stove tasks and you ask the stove operator
> to explain his or her fuel preferences in situ while face to face with a
> traditional stove
>
> So, not to waste time on the obvious, stove ethnographers try to discover
> what stove functions and performances are considered to be mandatory (and
> why these particular stove functions and attributes are demanded or
> preferred). Once these perceptions and preferences are understood from the
> perspectives of different types of stove users  - or the perspectives of
> the stove buyers, fuel gathers and preparers, stove makers, or stove
> sellers, then it becomes possible to construct a questionnaire that asks
> meaningful questions from the perspective of these different role players
> within the dominant stove - user- fuel - fabricator system(s).‎<br/><br/>I
> have only been hired by GIZ, WB, UNDP, etc for short periods of time to
> reconnoiter the domain of stoves and the many different tasks that stoves
> are called upon to perform. I used those brief periods when functioning as
> a stove anthropologist to advise Crispin about what I observed stove
> operators doing in  kitchens, houses, kiosks and pushcarts, small
> restaurants, etc.  And remember I was trying to piece together a very
> provisional overview of "culture" of stoves which embodies (1)
> Foods and cooking, (2) Family context, (3) Fuels & Forests  and (4)
> Fabrication (the 4 F's) . I decided my job was to understand the
> perceptions and performance preferences of "indigenous" stove users and to
> communicate their expectations and demands to the stove developers and
> fabricators, testers, funders, standard setters, and strategists.
>
> It is obvious I have not pushed the boulder very far up the hill -
> thinking here of the punishment of Sisyphus - and I admit to my several
> short comings as a stove anthropologist but it is not my fault that I have
> never been offered an opportunity to carry out enough ethnographic field
> work in a particular stove culture and system to understand its integrating
> patterns  and most powerful drivers. But for better or worse I have been
> privileged to work closely with one exceptionally receptive stove innovator
> who understood the importance of permitting the stove using public to tell
> stove engineers and testers and funding agents and economists and air
> quality experts what stove-fuel performance functions they want from their
> stoves!
>
> Like you Ron I am old and drooping in my saddle so the best use of my
> limited time is probably to work closely with the younger generation of
> stove experts to encourage them to realize that culture "trumps"
> technology ever time and therefore the first step on the path to innovating
> a better stove requires developers to discover what targeted stove users
> and customers  identify as non-negotiable performance characteristics of a
> traditional stove. That is the starting point.
>
> My contribution is to encourage stovers to deeply appreciate what the
> users of traditional stoves demand from their stoves. Once you have teased
> out the functional preferences of the stove using/buying public you want to
> serve (what size is the cooking surface and pot holes, what is the
> preferred height off the ground, what are the main dishes cooked and in
> what cooking vessels and what are the range of different fuels used for
> cooking and stove work at different seasons, and how long does a
> traditional stove last, how much does it cost, etc) then you know what the
> challenge is. If you can introduce additional benefits like faster cooking,
> smoke reduction, less fuel collection or lower expenditures on fuels, cell
> phone charging and led lighting, warmer indoor temperatures less inside
> pollution, water heating, additional cooking or stove work functions,
> greater durability,  reduced clean up work, etc then such innovation will
> surely speed up the displacement of the traditionally dominant & "old
> faithful" stoves.
>
> To repeat: all the stove anthropologist does is appreciate the many ways
> old stove are integral parts of old cultural systems and environments  and
> encourage stove users to truthfully communicate the performances they
> demand from their traditionally dominant stoves. What are the customers'
> non negotiable expectations of the dominant stove? The aim of stove
> anthropology is to discover what are the deep questions stove users ask
> about any and all candidate improved stoves. The question is the question!
> It is not the questions asked by the anthropologist that count. It is the
> questions asked by the end user and stove customer that count! At his best
> the anthropologist is a scribe who translates the preferences and demands
> of the indigenes into the languages of the modernizers and globalizers.
> Stove speak mostly speak local cultural languages!
>
> In search and service,
> Cecil the Cook
>
> From: Ronal W. Larson. Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2017 7:17 PM
> To: Discussion of biomass; Cecil Cook Cc: Nigel Pemberton-Pigott; Gosia
> (Biczyk) Malgorzata CIM-IF KG; Laurent Durix; Nikhil Desai; Xavier Brandao;
> Harold Annegarn<
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Leaping about
> List and ccs
>
> It would be a big help to this list to see the stove questionnaires and
> reports you produced. Are they available to this list?
>
> Ron
>
> On May 23, 2017, at 2:16 PM, cec1863 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Dear stovers, CPP's remarks have reminded me Subject 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. 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 I 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.<br/>> Original Message
> <br/>> From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott<br/>> Sent: Tuesday, May 23,
> 2017 10:03 AM<br/>> To: 'Stoves (stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org)'<br/>>
> Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves<br/>> Subject: [Stoves]
> Leaping about<br/>> <br/>> Dear Improved Biomass Stove Fans<br/>>
> <br/>> From<br/>> <br/>> LPG fuel subsidies in Latin America and
> the use of solid fuels to cook<br/>> Karin Troncoso, Agnes Soar
> es da Silva (Energy Policy 107 (2017) 188-196)<br/>> 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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