ei
Environmental Innovation
The Food Issue
in search of an environmentally-balanced diet
Paul Salopek on patenting crop genomes Fred Pearce on preserving wild relatives of food crops James McWilliams on reinventing fertilizer Jennifer Cockrall-King on industrial indoor farming
Des elibus ea solupta epersped que voloressum volore nobis volorporat lam nobis estium dolorro vitenie ndandebita dolesti ossimenihit min pratem qui abo. Tur sim inus, ullicima volendita con corerchici sum audit hilla quaesti scitame sit lis ut ut pore nihil ipis dem abo. Pudipictotat aturiorpos aut magnam, con pra quat prorest veleste ndelessi od maximillatur repera
ei Environmental Innovation
editorial
Welcome Des elibus ea solupta epersped que voloressum volore nobis volorporat lam nobis estium dolorro vitenie ndandebita dolesti ossimenihit min pratem qui abo. Tur sim inus, ullicima volendita con corerchici sum audit hilla quaesti scitame sit lis ut ut pore nihil ipis dem abo. Pudipictotat aturiorpos aut magnam, con pra quat prorest veleste ndelessi od maximillatur repera vellabo. Ut dolupisime offictiBust officiam quunt aut faci occuptios porerciis ea velent incte velenis ex expediae cus, te et doluptat. Hiliti in plabore cuscimusciis modis senda consequ atioribusa commolore expliqu iasperum quos erro inum dolorem ditius duciligent as rem que estio. Et lant et el estiore roraepudae occatem. Diones exerrore erias doluptatur? Rae. Ita con prestiu riore, ut pa corehen ducit, temporion pa is autat experissim esci cum hil eium hilloreium in rendaerum consers pelibusa cusdae qui tectent otature moluptibus eatur? Quiatessum ni inciist doloreperume doloris magnam eaqui occuscim alitas apic tectatur sernatum abo. Fernatur ab il moluptur re voluptatis eiurem sequas debis ut doloritem et dest demque sitiisciis que omnimus. Ceribus ra iliscii scienti temquia intia solorehenis aperum fugit lab id ut que cus dolores equatur estet, torehen imusae culpa de estio. Ut ullaut optat. Ehendem vendustisqui rere debis volupta tibus, none platurit, si natiis ipit re quianda epelessunte optas des ercius et eosti totatur alit, cus.Iquam, qui suntorem sit abore net elluptatquae volorei undaerepero tempele sequost od evelit, quosaperibus millantur?Id mos doluption conseceat. Daes accaesto mintorae. Ut exerum fugia qui doluptatem sint, officimod modit utet esti unt.Ur, sundae quas esti quia nam, ex et volupis voloris ero bea
Longform
16
To Build a Better Fire A kind of hippie Manhattan Project in rural Oregon tackles climate change, air pollution, and deforestation by bringing together the best minds in the field to invent cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people. By Burkhard Bilger editor: Frances Cairncross
34
Closed Source Crops When the genetic material in a seed can be privately owned, what’s the fate of biodiversity? By Paul Salopek editor: Kathryn Kohm
25
45
Indoor Industrial Farming
The Ecological Creed of Craft Beer
John Edel, a Chicago entrepreneur, has transformed an abandoned meat-packing facility into the nation’s first vertical farm. His goal is to bring large-scale, net-zero-waste food production right into the middle of the city.
A time-honored artisanal endeavor is quietly articulating a 21st century version of industrial production
By Jennifer Cockrall-King editor: david malakoff
By James McWilliams editor: andrew revkin
Data Collection
Idea Watch p62
13 2050 mountain forecast: Less snow, more rain 14 Air conditioning is making cities hotter
65 Literature Review
Is It Contagious?
Linking human health to ecological health by Jason G. Goldman
14 Which seafood guzzles the most gas? 16 In predator-human conflicts, the thing we have to fear most is fear itself 17 How much logging can tropical forests withstand?
12 Life Cycle Analysis
Butter Is Toast
in an environmental showdown with margarine
34 Think Again
17 Sunscreen: Good for People, Bad for the Ocean 19 How CO2-Committed Are We?
65 Data Visualization
20 Plants Have Unexpected Response to Climate Change
by Philip H. Howard
Consolidation of the Global Seed Industry
The Virtual Human Interaction Lab is changing the way we experience nature by Amy Westervelt
by Megan Molteni
53 Photo Essay
Vino Ecology
As vineyards expand worldwide, so is a new conservation science dedicated to balancing wine with nature By David Malakoff
22 Chilly cities demand more energy than balmy ones 23 Conservatives use power liberally; liberals use power conservatively
How desperation, iPads, and real-time data revived a fishery 49
80 Known Unknowns
Research priorities at the food, energy, water nexus
60 Book Exceprts
Solar wind energy tower
45
Int accuptasi sit, iunt eaquate ctecaec aboreperum quam rem ipsant quam sus.Lorro est et volupit autem res acearum demquod itissit ea quo ea voluptate raerum et et lab incillatem reptat.Destrup taspis debit, volorem. Nam re porentisciet escilla cearum remquis nos ut unt
generates power day and night by Dave Levitan
Feral
By George Monbiot
Adventures in the Anthropocene By Gaia Vince
80
Farming Food and Fuel Side by Side by Courtney White
84 One Last Question
What will fast food menus look like in 50 years? Scientists and entrepreneurs weigh in with creative visions.
Data Collection A survey of recent sustainability science
study of studies
Is It Contagious? Research linking human health to ecological health
Scientists have long thought that nature is good for human health, but finding strong evidence to support this isn’t easy. Now, a study has linked the decimation of about 100 million trees—killed by the invasive emerald ash borer—to higher rates of cardiovascularand lower respiratory disease–related deaths. One of the most convincing studies on nature and health found that patients in hospital rooms with views of trees recover more quickly. Making connections to long-term health, however, is tricky. For example, scientists can show that greener areas have
lower levels of human disease, but it’s hard to prove whether the effect is due to nature or to another factor. The invasion of the emerald ash borer, an Asian beetle, presented a unique research opportunity. First identified as an ash-tree killer in North America in 2002, the bugs spread from Michigan and Ontario to other states in the U.S. The team followed the insects’ path to see whether the invasion was linked to human health patterns. The authors focused on cardiovascular and lower respiratory
tract diseases, since people are more likely to suffer from these conditions when experiencing high stress, low air quality, and lack of exercise—problems that nature tends to alleviate. Economist Geoffrey Donovan at the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon, and his colleagues examined data on emerald ash borer infestations, tree cover, and mortality in 15 states from 1990 to 2007. The insects were linked with 21,193 additional deaths due to cardiovascular or lower respiratory disease, the team reports in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The longer a county had been infested, the stronger the relationship appeared to be. While the study couldn’t prove the bugs caused the deaths, it “adds to the growing evidence that the natural environment provides major public health benefits,” the authors write. Emoditas remo et etur as dolorro viduste corrum ut et aut essin comnihi liciis maiora corum vererna tintum fuga. Nemporum qui dipsunt re rehenistrum reperchitin ra conse volestio to core nonseque denda is qui totatemolor simolutam esti optas exero qui dolupitatet praes nossequ iscilitis sed quasperi officab iditatur? Aximus dollant, quae il idem et voluptatione alicabo reprepe voloriaepro con nis moluptus rempor aut parumqui que volorem rem fugias nusciis eruptatur sit hicatiorit autat dolorunt voluptiam quas magnati dolorectorum et ut ea comnit, quo te ium qui del molum volectis moloriae velecte re laut id ullecti andant voluptae est voleni dolupti sciatur eictor remquo beribus ipicipi endelibusda nis seditas perorrovit omnihil loreperum vit, sim fuga. Aliquia sam, quosae eaquias pediae volore, sam, accae pe volessunt quis quam rerio exceatem quos excerum voluptin conserae
One of the most convincing studies on nature and health found that patients in hospital rooms with views of trees recover more quickly.
voluptaero eum et mossi non es doluptatis erchit ligent harumquo officiam cus et faccusam que voluptae et quos es mi, sam faciaerovit offictum quodi quia velique alibus audam facipsus dolorum nimo te vid ea doloriberi repedio nsectat ibustrumet ut faccumquo et ipsanti orumquaeped essitiis aut prepeliquam labo. Nam ea sam facculliqui omnihilit earuptia cus molo testis eaquidit doluptate oditin commossunt, utem re id elest rem. Borum eossum de corempe dus vit moditiis as dolecae storess inulparum voluptates aut qui conemIm re andaes doluptaquae nam sus, volum eatibustior re sitata vellaborepe delignis endam simi, sunt fuga. Quidel mo duci berum voluptas sitiore pernati blautam, is erum, que volor sitibus di cume nati totate si cusaeseque reiumque rerundig La sapisquis aditatibus nos rectota nimaio et mi, nectotatia sita poribus vel et quatur, tem lante imil is molupid ullab ipis as nobis voluptae nus sus, niendem andignit ditat facea comnis sed est anihil evel ipiciis et deremporest aborem eicium evelest, int haria doluptatum re illab in essed modiciuri blaborpor restrum, impossit veliberum ipsae por aperior eperum abor re et quae lab ipiet reiunt dolupta turecte et qui conseque est que sequo esequi sed ut ratur? Quamus venda enis cusamusantis aute nonsequia dolorro excerem untibus adicius, voluptatus audam doles as aceperspe et volorem. Nam, ius ex eleserent plita prorerorum eum si bea eturerum fuga. Lab ipite ex et volestiate sint laces doloriam, sequi tem. Roriossimus adit odissi bearios estis adis doluptas maiorerferro dolumquas ex estrum eum fugit ea que porro doluptate velias pero que atibern atatur? Uga. Non perumque suntur rem quodis sita adit, is eum utem. Ust et voloAquae dolorepudis ad quasintur remquiatiis sunti con percipsamus.
Backround check
Butter is Toast in an environmental showdown with margarine
My father-in-law was in the dairy business for over 40 years, and—as might be expected—he had nothing good to say about margarine. He called it a synthetic product of the chemical industry. Butter, of course, was natural and therefore better. I mischievously delighted in pointing out to him the purported health benefits of margarine over butter. If it had been available at the time, a recent life cycle assessment (LCA) comparing butter to mar-
garine in the U.K., Germany, and France could have helped me make an even stronger case for margarine—this time from an environmental standpoint. (1) The comparative LCA found that margarine has a significantly lower environmental impact than butter in four important areas: global warming potential (GWP; i.e., carbon footprint), eutrophication potential, acidification potential, and land impact. Butter has a smaller environmental impact than margarine only with respect to its photochemical ozone creation potential, POCP. Margarine’s POCP is higher because hexane, which facilitates the formation of ozone in the lower atmosphere, is used in the vegetable oil–extraction process used to make
margarine. Making margarine from vegetable oil is undeniably an industrial chemical process! What makes the results of this comparative LCA so striking is that the impact differences between butter and margarine are so large. The carbon footprint of butter is over four times that of margarine. The large GWP for butter is attributable primarily to methane from dairy cows’ digestive systems, emissions from manure, and the production of feed for the cows. For the eutrophication and acidification impacts, the footprint of butter is at least twice that of margarine. Finally, land use for butter is about twice that of margarine because more land is needed to produce the feed for dairy cows than is needed to grow the crops for vegetable oil used to make margarine. Overall, this is not one of those comparative LCAs where the differences between the two products are slight and the results might change depending on a small improvement here or there. The researchers had no hesitation in decisively concluding that margarine beats butter by most environmental measures.
—David Tyler
(1) Nilsson, K. et al. 2010. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment doi:10:1007/s11367010-0220-3.
David Tyler is the Charles J. and M. Monteith Jacobs Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon.
Fisheries
Which Seafood Guzzles the Most Gas? 2,923 liters Shrimp and lobster
Although it takes on average just 783 liters of fuel to fetch a ton of Maine lobsters, Asian tiger prawns from Australia required 7,000 liters of fuel per ton in 2010, and Norway lobster from the North Sea has taken as much as 17,000 liters in some years.
1,612 liters Pacific albacore
Trolling takes more fuel than using nets. After dropping longlines with baited hooks, vessels race to keep up with the speedy predators.
886 liters
North American salmon Salmon are typically caught in rivers and bays with gill nets or purse seines. Catching them by hook and line takes more fuel.
434 liters Skipjack tuna
These tuna and other open-water finfish are caught en masse in a net called a purse seine. But the vessels must travel farther to find the fish, hence the bigger gas bill.
71 liters Sardines
Abundant forage fish school close to shore, and it’s quick work to catch them with huge nets. Icelandic herring and Peruvian anchovies are the least fuelintensive industrial fisheries known, caught with just 8 liters of fuel per ton of fish Parker, R.W.R. and P.H. Tyedmers. 2014. Fish and Fisheries doi:10.1111/faf.12087.
sponsors
the food Issue Des elibus ea solupta epersped que voloressum volore nobis volorporat lam nobis estium dolorro vitenie ndandebita dolesti ossimenihit min pratem qui abo. Tur sim inus, ullicima volendita con corerchici sum audit hilla quaesti scitame sit lis ut ut pore nihil ipis dem abo. Pudipictotat aturiorpos aut magnam, con pra quat prorest veleste ndelessi od maximillatur repera vellabo. Ut dolupisime officti
A timehonored artisanal endeavor is quietly articulating a 21st century version of industrial production
From the outside, the New Belgium Brewery, located on 50 acres near downtown Fort Collins, Colorado, appears to be an environmentalist’s dreamscape. Company-issued bicycles surround the facility. A parking lot next to the brew house has an electric car charging station. Solar panels layer the roof of the bottling plant. A well-worn biking path snakes across the property. This tableau of eco-correctness is impressive. So impressive, in fact, that I found myself feeling skeptical as I watched the brewery come to life on a cold January morning. After all, there’s a lot of what Robert Engelman of Worldwatch Institute calls “sustainababble” out there. Brewing is a quintessential artifact of rust-belt industrialism, so it is hardly the first place I’d think to look for environmental inspiration. It’s no secret that the brewing industry as a whole has traditionally had a dismal ecological track record. For decades big brewers, like big industries everywhere, followed the seemingly inexorable path of brute-force production. Natural resources were seen to be boundless and expendable, scale economies the Holy Grail, and pollution hardly an afterthought. Coors, for example, has a long rap sheet of environmental violations. It illegally dumped industrial solvents into Clear Creek from 1976 to 1989. The Sierra Club accused it of violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts 240 times between 1986 and 1991. In 1991 the company, under pres-
By James McWilliams
To Build A (better) Fire A kind of hippie Manhattan Project in rural Oregon tackles climate change, air pollution, and deforestation by bringing together the best minds in the field to invent cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people.
by Burkhard Bilger
T
wo men walked into a bar called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt, festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and spoke in a loud, unmodulated voice—like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely Biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sun-baked skin and piercing eyes. The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how they’d landed in the Oregon woods wasn’t clear, but they stuck stubbornly to their set list and met with only polite applause. Finally, near the end of the show, one of the performers—a spindly comedian with thick, black glasses and a T-shirt that said “Freak”—peered out from under the spotlight and fixed her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. “Do you have a job?” she said, almost to herself. 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 smallbut-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 technical-aid agency GTZ (now GIZ), Scott has designed or built some 400,000 stoves in 13 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, and 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 week-long 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: 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
The global warming impact of five cooking stoves Three-stone fire
Charcoal Jiko
Karve gasifier
Philips Prototype Fan Stove
Rocket Stove with Skirt
690
543
405
284
281
grams CO2 equivalent
grams CO2 equivalent
grams CO2 equivalent
Watching Water Boil After boiling and simmering water for 30 minutes on five different stoves, researchers measured total greenhouse-gas emissions (normalized here to grams CO2 equivalent). (1) Photos by Nordica MacCarty and holiday 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 U.S. Environmental Protection agency (EPA), contains fewer 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. 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 700 times as warming. Black carbon absorbs sunlight. A single gram warms the atmosphere as much as a 1500-watt space heater running for a week. Given that cooking fires each release 1,000 to 2,000 grams
grams CO2 equivalent
grams CO2 equivalent
of soot in a year and that 3 billion people rely on the fires, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet. The engineers of Stove Camp, in other words, found themselves suddenly, blinkingly, in the spotlight—like 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 definition of a good stove,” he said, turning to the whiteboard behind him and scrawling out some bullet points:
On the first morning of camp, the bleary-eyed par-
No stove had ever met all six criteria at once. “So this is what we have to do this week, my dears,” he said. “Save the damned 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
ticipants gathered around some mismatched Formica tables in the lecture hall—formerly a meat locker in a slaughterhouse. Dean Still stood before them in a baggy T-shirt and shorts, wielding a pink Magic Marker. He had the look and manner of an old hippie, with his mop of white hair and wide, walrus mustache; yet he had trained a generation of stove designers and built one of the world’s premier stove-testing facilities. “This is now
1. Reduces fuel use by more than 50 percent. 2. Reduces black carbon by more than 60 percent. 3. Reduces childhood pneumonia by more than 30 percent. 4. Affordable (US$10 retail or less). 5. Cooks love it. 6. Gets funded.
chamber and a cooking grate on top. You stuck some twigs into 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. 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 asked 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 such as 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, reducing 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, usually made of an ancient grain called teff, is 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 40 or 50 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; 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.” 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 Fahrenheit 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.” The trouble with tradition, stovemakers have found,
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
is that it can be remarkably thick-headed. Ignore it, and your shiny new stove may get turned into a flower pot. 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 sensitivThe optimist thinks the glass is half full. ity. “We’re highly dominated by elderly, white, engineering types,” The pessimist thinks it’s half empty. The a stovemaker who’d worked in engineer knows the real truth: the glass is Uganda told me. “So you get a lot of preposterous ideas that’ll never twice as large as it should be for optimum fly in the kitchen.” The other half utilization of resources. groused about “design drift.” Too many stoves start out as marvels of efficiency, they said, and are and porous clay—a combination that stovegradually modified into obsolescence. Once makers had been scouring the earth to find. the engineer is gone, the local builder may widen the stove’s mouth so it can burn larger “There, in this two-dollar coal burner, was everything needed to make the world’s perfect sticks, only to draw in too much cold air. Or rocket stove,” Still says. he’ll make the stove out of denser bricks, not The stove had a telephone number realizing that the air pockets in the clay are printed on it, so Still called it on his cell its best insulation. The better the stove, the phone. Two months later, he was visiting the tighter its tolerances, the easier it is to ruin. factory in eastern China where the stove was “When we first got into this, we had this built. Within two years, the factory was proutopian vision of working with local communities to build locally grown stoves,” Jacob ducing a stove to Aprovecho’s specifications. Sold under the name StoveTec, it isn’t much Moss, a stove camper who works for the EPA to look at: a hollow clay tube clad in green and started its Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, told me. “We’ve moved away from that—I sheet metal with an opening in front and a won’t say 180 degrees, but maybe 160. I don’t pot support on top. But it incorporates all ten rocket-design principles with a consistency really listen to small-stove projects anymore. that only mass production can offer. The When I hear Dean say that one millimeter
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 U.S., 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 Still’s six criteria.
crummy stuff,” he told me. “So we’re going back to Henry Ford.” Envirofit’s first new product was essentially a rebranded 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 The search for the perfect stove continues, in other shipped for a fraction of the cost of a fully words. Not long before Stove Camp, I visbuilt stove and adapted to local designs and ited an organization called Envirofit in Fort cooking traditions. It was mass production Collins, Colorado. Envirofit’s laboratories and appropriate technology rolled into one. are housed at Colorado State University in a “That’s the goose that laid the golden egg converted power plant from the 1930s. On the right there,” Bills told me. “That’s the Intel morning of my tour, half a dozen experiments inside.” He had nothing against groups like were going on simultaneously. One glass case Aprovecho, he said. They could continue to held nine stoves, all furiously burning pellets hold their Stove Camps and sell their stoves fed to them by an automatic hopper. Across made out of clay. “But Henry Ford didn’t stop the room, the smoke was being parsed into with the Model T. If we are going to make an its chemical components by a rack of blinkimpact in my lifetime, it has to be done at ing machinery. (Wood smoke may not be scale. And when you have a 3 billion–prodcyanide, as Still put it, but hydrogen cyanide uct opportunity, what is enough scale? One turns out to be one of its trace elements.) On million, 2 million, 5 million? I like to dream a catwalk upstairs, a programmer was model- big.” Thanks, hippies, he seemed to be saying. ing green-and-yellow flames on his computer Now, please step aside. while a biologist down the hall was subjecting live human lung cells to wood smoke. “We On the last day of Stove Camp, I stumbled out of bed grow them in the basement, but they’re fully late, in search of coffee—a timber train havfunctional,” I was told. “They even produce ing catapulted me awake, as usual, four hours phlegm.” earlier. Aprovecho was as busy as a science Envirofit’s CEO, Ron Bills, is a former fair. The pulmonologist from the National executive at Segway, Yamaha, and BomInstitutes of Health was putting the finishing bardier. His new company is technically a touches on a rocket stove made from an oil nonprofit, yet Bills believes that, for too long, drum. A Norwegian designer was running stovemakers have treated the developing emissions tests on a little tin gasifier. And world as a charity ward instead of a business another camper was watching emission meaopportunity. “A lot of the poor—call them surements unspool across a laptop. “Look emerging consumers—get inundated with at that!” he shouted. “It’s flat-lining! There’s
Chicago skyline August 16, 2000 fine particulate matter <10 micrograms/m3
Chicago Skyline August 29, 2000 fine particulate matter 34 micrograms/m3
For too long, stovemakers have treated the developing world as a charity ward instead of a business opportunity.
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 a far corner of the workshop, probing their injera stove with an infrared thermometer. Their week had seen a succession of setbacks and breakthroughs. When their first prototype, with its steel griddle, had had too many hot spots, Scott suggested that they try aluminum. It conducted heat even better than steel and was considerably cheaper. A few emails 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 one-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 1220 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 five degrees short 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 University, 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 30 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.”
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. ❧
Just before we broke camp the next morning, Scott came
Burkhard Bilger’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. Bilger is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. He served as senior editor at Discover from 1999 to 2005, and before that he worked as a writer and deputy editor for The Sciences. His book, Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
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
1. MacCarty, N. et al. 2008. A laboratory comparison of the global warming impact of five major types of biomass cooking stoves. Energy and Sustainable Development doi:10.1016/S0973-0826(08)60429-9.
Adapted from: “Hearth Surgery” By Burkhard Bilger. The New Yorker, Dec. 21, 2009
By Amy Westervelt
Reality is Too confining embedded in a large black helmet. Forest sounds emanate from various corners of the room: a bird chirping here, a breeze whispering there. She moves slowly around the room. On the wall, a flat digital forest is projected so observers can get a rough idea of her surroundings; but in her mind’s eye, this undergrad is no longer pacing a small, cramped room in a university lab. Thanks to that black helmet, she’s walking through the woods. In a minute, she’s handed a joystick that looks and vibrates like a chainsaw, and she’s asked to cut down a tree. As she completes the task, she feels the same sort of resistance she might feel if she were cutting down a real tree. When she leaves this forest and re-enters the “real” world, her paper consumption will drop by 20 percent, and she will show a measurable preference for recycled paper products. Those effects will continue into the next few weeks, and researchers hypothesize it will be a fairly permanent shift. By comparison, students who watch a video about deforestation or read an article on the subject will show heightened awareness of paper waste throughout that day—but they will return to their baseline behavior by the end of the week. The tree-cutting study is one of many that Stanford University researchers have conducted in its Virtual Human Interaction Lab over the past several years in an attempt to figure out the extent to which a simulated experience can affect behavior. And it’s part of a growing body of research that suggests virtual experiences may A woman peers through goggles
We know that nature experiences can change environmental behavior—but it turns out those experiences don’t have to be real.
offer a powerful catalyst for otherwise apathetic groups to begin caring about issues and taking action, including on climate change. That’s important, because even though time spent in nature has been proven to be quite beneficial to human health, whether or not humans repay the favor tends to rely on the type of nature experiences they have in their youth. A 2006 study on the relationship between nature experiences and environmentalism found that while those who had spent their youth in “wild” nature, defined as hiking or playing in the woods, were more likely to be environmentalists as adults, those who had been exposed to “domesticated” nature—defined as visits to parks, picking flowers, planting seeds, or tending to gardens—were not. (1) Given the unlikelihood of every child having a “wild” nature experience, researchers are on the hunt for other ways to cultivate environmentally responsible behavior. The latest work with virtual reality builds upon roughly