[Stoves] Support Potential Energy (my organization) this Giving Tuesday!

[Nikhil Desai]

Crispin:

Hah. So it takes some PhDs to find that people collect wood to sell.

You confirm my rebuttable presumption that "An academic is someone who
wouldn't testify to a murder even if it happened in front of him and was
filmed by reporters, shown on media, until there was a peer-reviewed
journal that published the findings."

I suppose next someone will discover that rapes in Haitian camps after the
2010 earthquake were reduced not just by the availability of solar
lanterns, the only form of lighting among the poorest (and could help
identify the rapist) but by improved stoves.

This is the same jiggery-pokery as we have seen all around --
attributability doesn't mean causality, nor does it mean that attributable
is avoidable by just that particular risk factor.

All things considered, there should be a significant, large-scale funding
program for contextual design and promotion of clean biomass stoves,
period. My sense is that grassroot organizations with considerable
experience - and technical designers on this list - are starved for
operating funds even when they have found marketable, usable stoves that
may not have this or that ISO certificate from ARC or anybody else. That is
where money needs to move, not to Washington, DC and Geneva.

I hope some serious academics take on this task of ethnography of academics
-- inventing claims instead of inventing solutions. Stoves matter because
foods matter, and local environments matter. Cooks matter - for nutrition
and satiation. Modelers can keep frying their snake-skins as a traditional
expression goes.

Nikhil



On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Friends
>
>
>
> What interested me about the ‘stoves prevent rape’ story was where the
> meme thrived and who was pushing it (fund raising using it). Their story
> boils down to, “Give me $35 or the next rape is on your head.” Emotional
> appeals are useful because they work, I guess.
>
>
>
> The major paper
> <https://academic.oup.com/ips/article-abstract/8/2/145/1794658?redirectedFrom=fulltext>
> on the matter (by Samer) looked at the topic in great detail pulling in
> material going back a couple of decades. I believe it too three years to
> produce (corrections welcome). It is brilliant and comprehensive. It was of
> course attacked and the answer in defense
> <http://www.humanosphere.org/human-rights/2014/08/cookstove-rape-prevention-myth-problem-simple-solutions/>
> was equally brilliant. I think the reply is posted on the C4D website.
>
>
>
> Back to my point: this meme/fundraising story is quite limited in
> geographical extent, meaning it has a cultural root: it is effective (at
> fund-raising, not rape-prevention) in certain cultures and not in others.
>
>
>
> A couple of derivative stories have come from the discussion. One is the
> point that women and children who scavenge fuel from the area around the
> camps do not limit their collection just because they have a stove that
> uses less fuel. The meme is of course that having a stove consuming half
> the fuel means half the risk of sexual violence. What actually happens is
> that people collecting fuel (a subgroup of the whole population of cooks)
> sells the surplus. So the stove provides a benefit, one unrelated to the
> claims. Others who buy fuel at the instant market (it pops up wherever
> people do) will probably not buy less fuel unless they too have a better
> stove. Again there is benefit in have a ‘good one’. No problem. If everyone
> has an improved stove, the income of those gleaning fuel drops or the price
> per kg rises.
>
>
>
> As reported in Samer’s paper, most of the predators live in the same camp
> as the victims. He used as an example a camp in Kenya where all fuel is
> delivered to by truck – no one goes out.
>
>
>
> All the same power relationships and vulnerabilities as exist in Hollywood
> also exist in the camps. I already wrote something here about taking stoves
> to Hollywood to reduce the risk of women having to expose themselves to the
> (male) hazards while trying to earn a living. The events covered in the
> media between that message and now tend to confirm my tongue-in-cheek
> analysis: keeping women at home cooking with improved stoves would reduce
> the problems they face getting their picture on the cover of a magazine. It
> would just be a different magazine.
>
>
>
> Regards
>
> Crispin
>
>
>
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