Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Ron and all, And to add my two cents.. I agree with Ron on Time spent tending the fire. Unless all testing is done in the field, that is take in a group of stoves and see which one works the best then take the group of stoves to another site, I think a big discrepancy will be the fuel. The rate required for adding fuel to keep a fire going will be based on age and rot, bark, moisture etc. Not very well adapted to lab test comparisons using high quality fuel. So my thinking is that lab tests should be based on energy input from the fuel as was the original idea. Then that energy value determined from lab tests converted to volume of biomass used at each specific site based on the energy determined in the biomass they are using. Then we have good lab comparisons and can make good(?) estimates of how much biomass volume a specific stove will consume when used at potential sites. Thanks Frank Frank Shields Control Laboratories; Inc. 42 Hangar Way Watsonville, CA 95076 (831) 724-5422 tel (831) 724-3188 fax fr...@biocharlab.com www.controllabs.com From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-boun...@lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Ronal W. Larson Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 12:00 PM To: Discussion of biomass; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott Subject: Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc. Crispin and List: Still in the spirit of having dialog before the ETHOS meeting (starts tomorrow). I see three items missing from your test procedures and wonder if you can report on whether they are all included in the test procedures you have been developing: 1. Time spent tending the fire. Maybe report test results for emissions and efficiency with different allowed times for tending? Of course trying to bracket what happens in the real world. My observations on the present test procedures is that they are unrealistic by encouraging no departure from adjusting the fuel. How do your test procedures (now or projected) handle this issue? 2. Some measure of expected stove lifetime. (maybe both years and cycles) 3. Annual cost of cooking with a particular stove. This to include lifetime, efficiency, and the sale of char. Maybe a way to include also health impacts? Ron On Jan 22, 2014, at 11:07 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpig...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Samer Again In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of deforestation and health. In order to complete the description and not leave the circle incomplete, I will cover also the major facets of the development of the new direction in testing. I refer of course to the technical aspects of the method. There was a large number of people who had input to this because it is an accumulation of small 'lines of code' that resolved lots of questions and where possible a clear definition obtained. The main ingredient to the successful performance test is to measure what the customer asked for and to report it in a manner they expected. It is communication of knowledge through the medium of numbers. This is the distilled version: The question most commonly asked is, What is the fuel saving ability of this stove? The answer expected, as so often discussed here, is the amount of fuel taken from the available supply (a forest in this case) each time the stove completes a set of daily cooking tasks. The second question is the level of smoke to which the user is exposed, which is defined as the PM2.5 and CO emitted. (Sometimes the heating efficiency is wanted, but another time.) These three simple requirements are, however, not sufficient to satisfy the questions posed by the social scientists who constantly reminded us that a stove assessment is a lot more than some narrowly defined technical metrics. I will leave the details out, but basically a technical evaluation will be followed by an assessment by focus groups, i.e. a two stage process. This protects the project in two ways: first it answers the technical requirements that are popular in the donor community. Quite why technical requirements dominate the popular notion of stove performance is worthy your investigating powers, but that is how it is at the moment. Second, it tests the social acceptability of one or more stoves before money is spent promoting them. The issues that arise for social acceptance are centered on the ability of a stove to cook the local meals properly, and that is a very wide ranging demand if you look across the world's cultures. So the first thing to do is to limit the test-cooking requirements to those in the area where the stove will be sold (obviously). We cannot be worried in the slightest how that compares with any arbitrary cooking cycle from somewhere else. Cooking is the application to food of heat that is already in the pot. The cooking power, the rate
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Dear FrankThe challenge has been to 'bring the outdoors indoors'.It is not impossible to be 'representative' of field use in a lab. What has been missing is a tailored social science survey that gathers exactly the right information needed to be representative.RegardsCrispinDear Crispin,I agree with all you say. Testing stoves really is an on-site and very site specific to reduce and control all the variables. But a lot more work and expense than lab tests.Nice going to all those working on this project. RegardsFrankFrank ShieldsControl Laboratories; Inc.42 Hangar WayWatsonville, CA 95076(831) 724-5422 tel(831) 724-3188 faxfr...@biocharlab.comwww.controllabs.comFrom: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott [mailto:crispinpig...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2014 3:07 PMTo: 'Frank Shields'Subject: RE: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.Dear FrankSome good points:Unless all testing is done in the field, that is take in a group of stoves and see which one works the best then take the group of stoves to another site, I think a big discrepancy will be the fuel. What fuel is used to test a stove makes a difference to the performance. It would therefore be odd to test a group of stoves with a fuel you know is not available in the market area. Obviously there is no way to choose a stove operated with unavailable fuel, and then announce, âThis is the best stove for that particular community based on tests performed using a fuel they do not have.âYou would have to test the stove burning the fuels they have available to get a meaningful answer.The reason people originally used a âwater boilingâ cycle to evaluate performance was that the boiling and simmering represents someoneâs cooking. In other words, the task was supposed to reflect typical use. The task and task length have a huge effect on the performance numbers. Similarly the fuel used has such an effect. If the purpose of testing is to make a prediction of performance when in use in a particular place, then the tasks and fuels and operating style have to match use in that community. For these reasons car performance ratings have a city and highway rating. They are different kinds of tasks. Some people need one, some another. The combined city+highway is not useful for someone who only does one or the other. When discussing performance with a car salesman the focus is on what use the owner will make of it. I just saw a commercial on TV where a truck vendor says their truck has the best combined mileage figure. The competitor says they have the best highway consumption figure. Both are correct but not directly comparable.The rate required for adding fuel to keep a fire going will be based on age and rot, bark, moisture etc. Not very well adapted to lab test comparisons using high quality fuel. Why is someone using âhigh quality fuelâ to determine performance knowing that in use it will be fuelled with something else?So my thinking is that lab tests should be based on energy input from the fuel as was the original idea. That does not solve the problems of performing a comparative performance test using an inappropriate burn cycle and a fuel that is not available. Do you want the test result to predict performance relative to the baseline or not?Then that energy value determined from lab tests converted to volume of biomass used at each specific site based on the energy determined in the biomass they are using. That doesnât solve the problem either. If the metrics are mass of fuel needed, and emissions per cooking task, you have to use that fuel and do those cooking tasks (or a proxy if it).Then we have good lab comparisons and can make good(?) estimates of how much biomass volume a specific stove will consume when used at potential sites. If you were to conduct an arbitrary task and use and arbitrary fuel, always the same task and same fuel, it would tell you nothing useful about how the stove will perform unless that community has the same fuel available and cooks using the same burn cycle.If your calculation method has errors, you wonât even have that! If you report using metrics that are not soundly chosen the result can be even more misleading.The results we seek are only valid for a stove+pot+fuel+user combination. That is just how it is. Vary one and you vary the final numbers. The CSI-WBT and CSI-WHT are designed to test stoves intended for particular communities or regions where the fuels and cooking cycles are reasonably known. Even the popular pots are known. That leaves the stoves as the only variable. Cooking typical meals with typical fuels in typical pots gives typical performance. Cooking atypical meals with atypical fuels in atypical pots does not. I think you have good parallels in your testing industry in answer to the question, âHow good is this fertilizer?â J RegardsCrispin
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Crispin and list: I have again added “stoves” back in. Your following is valuable in the discourse presumed for the ETHOS meeting. Re #1: I still think it would be relatively easy to run the tests with a maximum percentage allocation of time specified by the manufacturer (and reported). At the present time, I discount any test that doesn’t tell me something about time involvement. Another approach is to just have the tester report the percent time away from the stove. Re #2: We are talking here about a “Consumer Report” issue. Until something better is reported, the stove report could include anything about lifetime warranties (or left blank if none exists. I hear about stove lifetime of a few months. A valid stove test should include something - even an estimate of lifetime. Re #3: I still think stove testers could add something on expenses - even if for only one hypothetical set of fuel and char prices (but a simple Nomagram chart or two could do the job. If you don’t know an annual costing, a test report user is flying in the dark. Re the CBD - thanks. I will try to get to it. I can sort of understand rules to protect forests, but plugging LPG seems weird.Better to turn the non-renewable biomass renewable. Ron On Jan 23, 2014, at 3:43 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpig...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Ron Very good questions, and the Social Science people were really on top of those things. You would be impressed with the list of issues they raised. 1. Time spent tending the fire. Maybe report test results for emissions and efficiency with different allowed times for tending? Of course trying to bracket what happens in the real world. My observations on the present test procedures is that they are unrealistic by encouraging no departure from adjusting the fuel. How do your test procedures (now or projected) handle this issue? Because the stove tests conducted in the lab are done quite ‘attentively’ we are not in a position to measure our own performance – that’s unfair. However things like the attention requirement (and fuel preparation time which you didn’t mention) are evaluated during focus groups. This is not a chase for a number, it is an assessment of whether the cooks, when using the new stoves, are bothered (or not) by how the stove runs. This means that an increase in attention time might be more than offset by some highly desirable feature. Instead of trying to put numbers on everything, we just ask them what they think about the stove and what it is like to cook on. They can rate things from 1-5 and Cecil produced a spider chart of features which was in fact very useful for visually determining what people though, overall, about a stove. So the short answer is that Acceptance-related questions are addressed in focus groups. 2. Some measure of expected stove lifetime. (maybe both years and cycles) This is notoriously difficult. One way that works (so far) and was tried successfully in Mongolia is the producer is told that the stove must last x-years and they have to guarantee them, replacing broken parts for free. Then we are not tasked with testing durability at all. It becomes instead something guaranteed by the manufacturer or distributor. 3. Annual cost of cooking with a particular stove. This to include lifetime, efficiency, and the sale of char. Maybe a way to include also health impacts? We are not in a position to determine this, though projects are. In other words, it is not a matter for the test lab which just measures things. We would be able to provide all the numbers upon which such a calculation is based. Because local circumstances have very different economics there is really no point in the lab doing it. Simon Bell, the small industries coordinator, would take that up with the market aggregators who are creating the distributions chains. Please see also my message to Candela as it contains discussion about char and offset calculations that are relevant to your interests. Regards Crispin ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Hi Crispin, You are absolutely correct, a value chain and combined discourse (narrative, meme) analysis is certainly warranted. From my perspective it is really interesting to learn of the potential implications of 'internal' debates among stove developers, and how these relate to product design/management/marketing. The influence of this 'community' versus donors etc, and relationships among actors would reveal much about how technologies and protocols emerge as prominent and others swept aside. I've certainly looked closely at humanitarian/NGO advocacy and marketing, but what you suggest possibly has more profound implications for the diffusion of stove technologies and associated ideas. Studies of small-scale or rural entrepreneurs and stove innovators would also be interesting, especially with regards to their conceptions of the product/service they provide would also play an important role. You points about 'clean' and 'dirty' and other labels is interesting and not unrelated. In my opinion, such labels can mask considerations of energy alternatives and non-cooking causes of major problems (i.e. health, deforestation). This is also an issue of scale - these can be attributed more reasonably at the household level, but macro-social or environmental claims are another story. Your point about gasifiers also resonates. As a non-specialist (i.e. engineer, scientist) who has studied 'improved' stoves for years now, I have come to believe that the complicated science of fuels, energy, combustion, ratios, etc. may be simply too much for the general public to comprehend. These mysteries heighten the important role memes play, allowing stove benefits/costs to be divided along simple categorizations (again, clean/dirty, etc.). When you are ready to share I'd be keen to learn more about your team's Indonesia work, and to explore more 'grounded' assessments of stove value chains, and how to support more rhetorically viable (and sustainable) markets for stoves/biomass. Stay warm! Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Dear Samer Again In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of deforestation and health. In order to complete the description and not leave the circle incomplete, I will cover also the major facets of the development of the new direction in testing. I refer of course to the technical aspects of the method. There was a large number of people who had input to this because it is an accumulation of small 'lines of code' that resolved lots of questions and where possible a clear definition obtained. The main ingredient to the successful performance test is to measure what the customer asked for and to report it in a manner they expected. It is communication of knowledge through the medium of numbers. This is the distilled version: The question most commonly asked is, What is the fuel saving ability of this stove? The answer expected, as so often discussed here, is the amount of fuel taken from the available supply (a forest in this case) each time the stove completes a set of daily cooking tasks. The second question is the level of smoke to which the user is exposed, which is defined as the PM2.5 and CO emitted. (Sometimes the heating efficiency is wanted, but another time.) These three simple requirements are, however, not sufficient to satisfy the questions posed by the social scientists who constantly reminded us that a stove assessment is a lot more than some narrowly defined technical metrics. I will leave the details out, but basically a technical evaluation will be followed by an assessment by focus groups, i.e. a two stage process. This protects the project in two ways: first it answers the technical requirements that are popular in the donor community. Quite why technical requirements dominate the popular notion of stove performance is worthy your investigating powers, but that is how it is at the moment. Second, it tests the social acceptability of one or more stoves before money is spent promoting them. The issues that arise for social acceptance are centered on the ability of a stove to cook the local meals properly, and that is a very wide ranging demand if you look across the world's cultures. So the first thing to do is to limit the test-cooking requirements to those in the area where the stove will be sold (obviously). We cannot be worried in the slightest how that compares with any arbitrary cooking cycle from somewhere else. Cooking is the application to food of heat that is already in the pot. The cooking power, the rate at which heat is gained the pot can be expressed in Watts. It is not the heat delivered to the pot, only the heat retained and gained (a pot has losses). It is possible to determine the cooking power (I like the term pot-Watts!) by reproducing the firepower and heating pots of water and monitoring the temperature change. Any cooking cycle can be reproduced in two forms, actually cooking using the firepower people use, and the same fuels of course, or using that same firepower cycle to heat water and determine the rate that heat gets into the pot at every stage of the burn. Knowing this, the emissions per MJ in the pot can be calculated directly. Cooking tasks are selected and observed and the technical performance measured while reproducing the meal in the lab. Sometimes that takes practice, sometimes not. The cooking power is separately determined and the total heat gained during cooking calculated from that assessment. The result is the same metrics one gets from any popular water boiling test but instead of the complex manner of calculation so often applied, this is a direct measure of the heat gained by a pot that is put through an actual cooking cycle people use in the area. Combining two or more cooking cycles measured in this manner creates a lab test that can be reproduced quite accurately, and which is representative of the average cooking in the community. The cooking tasks selected (by the social science team) are chosen to be as different as possible while still remaining 'typical'. They can be 'frequency weighted'. If a new stove can cook properly, meaning reproduce the cooking power cycle in the pot, and on condition that the baseline cooking experience was acceptable in the community, so too the new stove will be acceptable to the cooks. One of the surprising findings has been that the rate at which heat enters a pot per square centimeter of heated surface is surprisingly constant over a range of pot sizes for a stove running at a constant power. People can try it to see. What this means is that it is possible to use watts per sq cm as a common metric to compare stoves cooking with different pots. It is surprisingly useful and I expect it will become a popular metric. If a stove can heat the maximum practical size of pot for that stove at the same rate as the traditional stove, it will have the same cooking power.
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Dear Erin, Thank you for the links provided. I've downloaded the documents and look forward to reading them. I can certainly appreciate the sensitivities surrounding the desire to address what is a pervasive and extremely complex problem, though attempts to do so often restrict appropriate definition of the problem and thus give a false (often well-intentioned, sometimes malicious) impression that the problem can be easily solved. Crispin, Thank you for your eloquent assessment of the paper as well as implications for future work. In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of deforestation and health. Warmly, Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Dear Samer It is my hope that Cecil Cook will wander through here one day because we spent a great deal of time looking into these problems In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of deforestation and health. By that I mean the problems related to the use of information generated by the specialists who do not individually have much administrative control over project design and management (in a lot of cases - there are exceptions). I recall some years ago at ETHOS expressing a view that we really needed more input from professional marketing people - input to the stove designers, backyard inventors and hardly-ever-do-wells who are trying to make the world a better place with what little they have. The value of this input is to separate developers of technology from their egos. No kidding. It is very disciplining to have in-your-face feedback about one's preconceptions for a product. Marketing people have enough power in the relationship to make the message stick. If the speaker is an individual objecting to a stove product, they (although the customer) are often dismissed as not realising what a wonderful device I have created for you if you would just learn to use it properly it will do wonderful things and make your life better and your whole family will celebrate. The next cold shower that brings benefit is professional traders who are the middlemen in the value chain. Sometimes we can stimulate their enthusiasm with storied stoves with creative claims attached, piggy-backing on their existing distribution systems and sneak a 'better product' into their display of wares. Let's say you can always do that once, but it had better work for them. They are pretty callous about viability and their depth of view is often not what is needed to launch a transformative stove product. They can make a living selling other things too so the product has to be viable, income-wise. Another group that has had sterling success in attaching themselves to the wonderful world of stoves (Disney Kitchen?) is the health community with their agenda(s). The clear link between cooking and health is easily shown in any community and the health sector has been a major proponent of improved, especially lower-smoke stoves. So these groups all have the capability to generate messages, and to receive and store them. They can create, store, modify, refute and extrapolate memes arising from 'things they heard' about stoves. The significant parallel I see in these collections of memes about what stoves do, can do, should do and really do and the significant paper you and Saeed have produced is that the complex world of stoves needs this sort of analysis in order to avoid falling into a variety of traps. These traps are the (often quite separate) agendas of a huge number of power centres always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing they can manage, prosper from, ride, lead, and ultimately benefit the generality of humankind through their good efforts. I have drawn attention to external forces and interests, but there is, were one doing the same type of analysis as you have done, an internal group of forces or interests that produce their own memes and circulate and evolve them entirely within the stove community. One easy example is that 'gasifiers are inherently cleaner burning than other combustors'. In fact all fires are gas fires. Teasing out the intended meaning from these words gets one into a repetitive semantic discussion that doesn't really mean much except to the participants. The meme continues, sailing along on the current of misunderstanding that there might be 'other fires' that do not burn gases and that those 'other fires' are inherently 'dirtier' that gasifier fires. Consider the remarkable examples (with hundreds of thousands of citations) of fuels themselves being given the attributes of 'clean' and 'dirty'! These curiosities are fun and harmless unless they start to impact policy and that policy impact is driven by a power centre that lies outside the influence of the stove making community that create the meme in the first place. That power centre is now 'misinformed' and begins allocating the distribution of resources based on their understanding. The result, in short, is that the projects which create, disseminate and promote improved stoves (however defined) and fuels (ditto) can be quite severely skewed towards goals that may actually be ephemeral. An alternative is that the goals are real, but low priority in the community of interest. So, what to do about it. That is where Cecil Cook and Tig Tuntivate, Veronica Mendizabal, Helen Carlsson, Simon Bell, Iwan Boskoro, Prianti Utami, Christina Aristanti, Yabei Zhang plus too many others to mention come in. Taking a comprehensive view of what happens in the community (behaviour and resources), the market as
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Crispin and list 1. Since we are a few days away from the ETHOS meeting, and there will be some funders there, I hope you can elaborate on this phrase from below: “…. the major pathologies have been excised …” 2. We have discoursed on your not measuring char production in the proposed test procedures for Indonesia. Is char-production still a “pathology” that you have “excised, or do you now measure char production when testing stoves designed to intentionally make char? 3. My question includes all possible “major pathologies”, not just char-production (my meme). Just hoping for a list we should be considering at ETHOS. Ron On Jan 21, 2014, at 10:06 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpig...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Samer It is my hope that Cecil Cook will wander through here one day because we spent a great deal of time looking into these problems In particular I will be keen to explore more deeply the ramifications for testing, actual fuel use, and the memes that relate these to problems of deforestation and health. By that I mean the problems related to the use of information generated by the specialists who do not individually have much administrative control over project design and management (in a lot of cases – there are exceptions). I recall some years ago at ETHOS expressing a view that we really needed more input from professional marketing people – input to the stove designers, backyard inventors and hardly-ever-do-wells who are trying to make the world a better place with what little they have. The value of this input is to separate developers of technology from their egos. No kidding. It is very disciplining to have in-your-face feedback about one’s preconceptions for a product. Marketing people have enough power in the relationship to make the message stick. If the speaker is an individual objecting to a stove product, they (although the customer) are often dismissed as not realising what a wonderful device I have created for you if you would just learn to use it properly it will do wonderful things and make your life better and your whole family will celebrate. The next cold shower that brings benefit is professional traders who are the middlemen in the value chain. Sometimes we can stimulate their enthusiasm with storied stoves with creative claims attached, piggy-backing on their existing distribution systems and sneak a ‘better product’ into their display of wares. Let’s say you can always do that once, but it had better work for them. They are pretty callous about viability and their depth of view is often not what is needed to launch a transformative stove product. They can make a living selling other things too so the product has to be viable, income-wise. Another group that has had sterling success in attaching themselves to the wonderful world of stoves (Disney Kitchen?) is the health community with their agenda(s). The clear link between cooking and health is easily shown in any community and the health sector has been a major proponent of improved, especially lower-smoke stoves. So these groups all have the capability to generate messages, and to receive and store them. They can create, store, modify, refute and extrapolate memes arising from ‘things they heard’ about stoves. The significant parallel I see in these collections of memes about what stoves do, can do, should do and really do and the significant paper you and Saeed have produced is that the complex world of stoves needs this sort of analysis in order to avoid falling into a variety of traps. These traps are the (often quite separate) agendas of a huge number of power centres always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing they can manage, prosper from, ride, lead, and ultimately benefit the generality of humankind through their good efforts. I have drawn attention to external forces and interests, but there is, were one doing the same type of analysis as you have done, an internal group of forces or interests that produce their own memes and circulate and evolve them entirely within the stove community. One easy example is that ‘gasifiers are inherently cleaner burning than other combustors’. In fact all fires are gas fires. Teasing out the intended meaning from these words gets one into a repetitive semantic discussion that doesn’t really mean much except to the participants. The meme continues, sailing along on the current of misunderstanding that there might be ‘other fires’ that do not burn gases and that those ‘other fires’ are inherently ‘dirtier’ that gasifier fires. Consider the remarkable examples (with hundreds of thousands of citations) of fuels themselves being given the attributes of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’! These curiosities are fun and harmless unless they start to impact policy and that policy impact is driven by a power centre
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Crispin, I take the liberty of responding to the whole list since 1) you didn’t ask me not to, 2) you wished you had on the last similar message to me, 3) because the stove list likely mostly wants to hear, and 4) because we both think the topics are important. I have added your and my previous two messages for clarity. See inserts. On Jan 21, 2014, at 11:00 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpig...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Ron “…. the major pathologies have been excised …” 2. We have discoursed on your not measuring char production in the proposed test procedures for Indonesia. Is char-production still a “pathology” that you have “excised, or do you now measure char production when testing stoves designed to intentionally make char? I am not sure what you think of as a pathology. You comment seems intended to create one. What do you think is a pathology in current tests on the matter of char creation? [RWL: I don’t see any particular pathology around. You (not me) introduced the term “ pathology” and my response (repeated below and a little above) was to try to learn your meaning of the word. I am happy with the way Jim Jetter is reporting char production. I do not get an answer to my question on whether Jim’s current reporting is a “pathology” from your response - maybe below. A customer is free to ask for anything they want to pay for in a stove. If they want one that creates char – no problem; similarly they may want to burn their collected fuel cleanly and completely. Stove programmes are also free to promote what they want. [RWL: No pathology here. We agree. It is not clear whether your stove testing will tell the person wanting to create char anything of value. The test method employed (SeTAR SOP 30.03 also the “Indonesian CSI-WBT”) reports fuel consumption, defined as the new fuel required to complete a burn cycle. The usability of the fuel remaining in the same stove (not just the char which is hard to define precisely) is considered in that calculation. [RWL: I sense a “pathology” here. No char reporting in these two standard tests, I gather.. A ‘pathology’ would be to calculate the energy production (actual or theoretical) and report that as the fuel consumption. [RWL: We’ll have to agree to disagree. I don’t know any other way to talk about stove inefficiencies (not efficiencies). Some users of stoves think the tradeoff with char in the picture in energy terms is worthwhile. If you want to know the char produced, ask and define what you mean by ‘char’. It will be reported. If you want to know the energy value in that char, ask and it will be tested and reported. [RWL: Yup - that sounds pathological. Not clear to me why a stove manufacturer has to ask for this, when it is (probably) labeled as a char-making stove, and may not even know his/her stove is being tested. 3. My question includes all possible “major pathologies”, not just char-production (my meme). Just hoping for a list we should be considering at ETHOS. I didn’t rate pathologies as minor and major. A pathology common to a long list of stove tests is to report the mass of water boiled as being that which was put into the pot during heating but only what remains in the pot after boiling. That is just plain strange. Errors like that have been removed. [RWL: I was just repeating your phrase (see below) “major pathologies”. Your description in sentence #2 doesn’t make sense (a missing word?). In any case, I see Jim Jetter’s always giving initial and final water quantities. It is not clear what modification you have made or want made. I consider the issue of measuring and reporting char production for all tests as a “major” disagreement (not a pathology). This second one on water loss seems minor until I hear more. “Correcting” the mass of water boiled by factoring in the difference between a fixed ‘local boiling point’ and the temperature the water actually reached is another. All the calculations are based on first principles and all terms are defined. [RWL: I guess these first principles and defined terms are all in the two test procedures you identified above. Can you give exact URLs and pertinent sections to look at? I conclude from your response that measuring char production you consider to be a major pathology and such measurement now has been excised in two national standards. Sorry about both parts of that sentence.Ron I would be pleased to have a presentation of it at ETHOS but that is very unlikely – no time and no ticket. Regards Crispin On Jan 21, 2014, at 10:42 AM, Ronal W. Larson rongretlar...@comcast.net wrote: Crispin and list 1. Since we are a few days away from the ETHOS meeting, and there will be some funders there, I hope you can elaborate on this phrase from below: “…. the major
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Pish posh Samer, I have read your paper and I find that it ignores the substantial contributions of the thinkers from the African Gender Insistute . The Feminist Africa Issue from 2010 titled Rethinking Gender and Violence is very good, and I think it would be a good one for you to read: http://agi.ac.za/journal/feminist-africa-issue-14-2010-rethinking-gender-and -violence One of the more cogent points is this one from Sexual Violence in Conflict: a Problematic International Discourse http://agi.ac.za/sites/agi.ac.za/files/3._fa_14_-_feature_article_eva_ayier a.pdf by Eve Ayiera blockquote This problematic construction of gender and sex is the platform from which the international discussions and responses to sexual violence in conflict launch. The resulting conceptual framework affirms a patriarchal social order which normalises the aggressive, heterosexual, dominant behaviour associated with masculinity and the subjugation of females. Violence against women becomes an integral part of exerting power over women and maintaining a system of male hegemony. Sexual violence is feminised - it happens to women because they are female. The current discourse on sexual violence has been astute in analysing the patterns of sexual violence in conflict, but has failed to interrogate the normalisation of patriarchy as the basis for human interaction. /blockquote To sum up and repeat the point, rape is a form of violence against women that happens because there is already a context that it's somehow to ok to be abusive to women. This is a global problem, and is not limited to any particular country. Specific instances of the crime tend to happen in a very specific cultural context, and to be deeply dedicated to understanding that context is an investment of considerable time and energy. Also it helps to have some understanding of intersectionality - which is the startling obvious idea that people are often subject to discrimination not just because they may be wealthy or poor, of some social standing or another, of some color or another, or of some other point of contention. They may be subject to discrimination for all or none of these reasons, and there is a considerable ripple effect on their lives and world outlook and may even have an impact on how they use something simple and utilitarian, like a cooking stove. I suggest that you read Eve Ayiera's whole paper. It is very good, and may help you with your thinking. I don't mind you raising the issue of marketing stoves. I actually have been tracking that meme or storyline that you've been talking about very specifically. I think it is a poor one, and I'm often surprised how it's managed to perpetuate its self, but that's not the reason that so many people build and distribute cooking stoves. Cooking and eating is a vital activity, it's really at the core of everything, and improving the well being of others is a vital, and often generous activity. Many of us work in this field for very simple reasons. Babies who grow up in households with good stoves don't die of pneumonia. Women with good stoves are less likely to die of lung problems. Children aren't marred for life by burns. Families are able to have time for other activities, often improving the economic life of the family. Children have time for school work. Children with good lighting have better opportunities to learn to reading writing and mathematics. Families with access to cell phones can communicate more effectively with far flung loved ones. Many of us have seen the impact of a good cooking stove, and it is profound, and in the best cases it has a long lasting positive change in the life of that family. In the worst cases, it does the opposite of that. I'd like to believe that we're doing our best as a community to contribute to the best case scenarios. Kind regards, Erin Rasmussen e...@trmiles.com From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-boun...@lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Samer Abdelnour Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2014 11:45 AM To: stoves Subject: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc. Otto, Paul, thanks for your comments, very helpful directions to follow up. Dear Erin, It might be helpful if you could explain your outrage. Some people have been outraged once they realize how the lives and vulnerabilities of poor displaced women and girls are relegated through the stoves-rape rhetoric. Others have reacted to the suggestion that underlying racial/gendered stereotypes have been key to mobilizing well-meaning people to a cause that stoves can do little to address. It seems you are reacting to the very idea that the conversation should even take place, which would be a first. If you read the paper you will find that I have certainly done my homework. The paper was certainly motivated by the disjuncture I witnessed in Darfur between the vulnerabilities of displaced people and the claims NGOs (in their marketing materials outside Sudan) promoted
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Dear Erin What exactly are you objecting to in your first response to Samer's post? I read the paper carefully and note that you agree on exactly these issues though Samer does not repeat the block quote because it has been well covered in other works. Samer's investigation is into exactly you wondered about the stoves/rape meme: I think it is a poor one, and I'm often surprised how it's managed to perpetuate its self, but that's not the reason that so many people build and distribute cooking stoves. Well, I think he does a pretty complete job of showing that it is why people fund at least some of the stoves (or whole stove programmes - not all of course). The leaflets, at least in the West, are very specific about this and the meme is repeated in many introductions to stove project documents (including the ones I participate in - I looked to see: prevention of rape is ubiquitous). He too was surprised and has investigated how a well-known, clearly defined and well documented social problem (rooted in gender issues as you say and well support) turned into something that can be addressed by us collectively giving one or all women a 'fuel efficient stove' so they need to collect less fuel. He investigates the problematization process and how a social problem with complex and deep roots became, in the West at least, something that it is claimed can be addressed, possibly solved, with a simple putatively fuel-saving technical solution that indirectly reduces the amount of time women are 'at risk'. The meme is in strong conflict with the reality of ordinary people, refugees or not. As you point out, the risk is continuous, not restricted to fuel collecting expeditions. Social research supports this view. It is the misstatement of the problem and the inappropriate claims made and the misapplication of 'cause marketing' to which he draws attention. He obviously thinks that social problems require social solutions. I think I can say that without fear of contradiction by him. He also documents the shift from a social problem to technical one which is called the 'problematization' or, finding a solution on one plane of existence to address a problem that exists on another. Human health problems, which you articulated well, are real and require improved stoves. Fine. Let's make health problems the reason people should get them. At least some health problems are directly caused by stoves. Others are made worse by stoves or have no effect. It depends. The overriding concern I have (as is well known) is that the claims made for 'improved' status are in many cases unreliable, inconsistent, and only true in particular circumstances which may not prevail in the home of an intended beneficiary, let alone the international community. One size definitely does not fit all. Who pronounced the stoves 'fuel efficient'? What measurements were made to determine this improvement in fuel consumption? Who thinks the distributed stoves save fuel? What comparisons were made against the background where the stove will be used cooking the things they cook? As the label says, Individual results may vary. Darn right they do. There has been to date a big gap in the stove testing community: the claims made for relative 'improvement' have to be made against some sort of standard, a baseline if you will. Unless the test applied compares performance relative to the status quo ante in situ, (the existing situation where the user is) all claims are abstract. There persists in the stove community a meme which holds certain things about performance to be inalienably true. One of those is that improved stoves 'save fuel' and that this is somehow a universal attribute that some stoves have and other do not. This is surely, if not untrue, a pretty big stretch of what is true. Obviously the same things applies to smoke reduction. My private comment to Samer upon reading the article was that he never challenged the fuel saving ability of the stoves being promoted, the rejection of which (by the users) is common. There are multiple methods for making that assessment applied by various players, but the fact that stove test methods for the most part don't predict fuel savings was not countenanced in the article. This is not a criticism of his analysis which still stands. It is a comment intended to drive home further the point that we can't turn social problems into technically solvable ones if they are not technical problems, and if we don't have a predictive method of assessing their performance in the first place. Samer's paper is about the illegitimacy of 'cause marketing' (for fund raising and fund-directing purposes) fuel efficient stoves as a solution to the problem of sexual violence against vulnerable women. It is not in the slightest an argument against the promotion of improved stoves to solve solvable problems. Some NGO's have tried redefining the problem as one of access to fuel (not
[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Hi Ronal and all, I'm glad you like the research. I'll do my best to clarify your questions where I can. I see these as revolving around two subjects: charcoal use and the potential consequences of employing stoves as being able to solve significantly complex problems using 'narratives' as evidence (as opposed to causal evidence). I'll start with the latter, as it is a topic I've been thinking about for some time. I will disagree with you on the point that no stove people are involved in propagating the 'stoves reduce rape' rhetoric. Most certainly, a number of (mostly US-based) stove designers and promoters (including NGOs, advocacy organizations, and networks such as the GACC) have used such rhetoric as a means to justify and direct resources to the promotion of stoves in humanitarian-conflict contexts. As I've shown prior, suggesting that i) there is relationship between fuel and sexual violence, and ii) stoves can manipulate this relationship, depends on a number of 'narratives' that verge on 'myth'. If sexual violence is indeed a complex and pervasive problem (i.e. women are at risk in camps as much as they are outside of camps, at hands of neighbors, while collecting water, while going to market, at work, etc.) then sexual violence is a comprehensive problem to which stoves can do little to address. Why? Because they depend on certain myths to be true (i.e. women are only at risk while collecting fuel, nowhere else). The consequences of promoting stoves as a solution to rape risk, for poor women, is quite serious. Why? This changes the fundamental questions humanitarian policymakers, donors, and workers ask, and the work they do. For example, the question 'how do we understand and stop rape?' is replaced with 'how do we develop the most efficient stoves?'. Millions of dollars have been raised in fundraising campaigns under the guise 'give $30 and stop the rape of African women in Darfur'. And today, many NGOs and UN agencies have picked up on the stoves-rape narrative and are handing out stoves in other countries. In doing so, these organizations actually believe (and they tell their donors also) that they are addressing violence, when they are absolutely not able to do so. Hence vulnerable girls and women are left in a situation where those who claim to serve them assume the problem is solved, when it isn't. If you can forgive my academic writing, I'll have you read the following from the discussion section of the paper: *The stove panacea is a myth: fuel-efficient stoves are deemed effective not because of empirical evidence, but from the powerful narratives that promote claims of what they are able to accomplish (i.e. ‘stoves reduce rape’). As stove promoters become increasingly dependent on the legitimacy of these claims, the actual effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of stove interventions becomes inconsequential. Regimes of truth are thus construed in ways that render them increasingly unquestionable (Introna 2003). The myth of the technical panacea enables its diffusion from an originating context to ‘everywhere’, or more accurately to ‘no-where’. We define this panacea effect as the propensity for a technical intervention to transform from a context-dependent response into a universal solution.The consequence of the panacea effect is an increase in the burden of poverty whenever user-beneficiaries are thought to self-emancipate through participation. According to stove advocates, through the simple act of cooking the global poor will decelerate deforestation, impede global warming, reduce sexual violence, improve family health, develop ‘sustainable’ markets, and produce an enduring stream of carbon offsets. On this latter point, through the intermediating efforts of carbon-certified stove initiatives, women across the developing world may soon—unknowingly and through utter necessity—subsidize the polluting activities of global industry. From a neoliberal perspective, technical panaceas justify the expansion of global industry and the conversion of poor beneficiaries into mass consumers of rescuing (western) technologies, techniques, and business models. This too is a gendered process: inherent in the global concern for women’s welfare is the belief that poor women will progress through the technologies of the liberated and developed west (Nader 1989; Wade 2009). The stove panacea inadvertently (and very subtly) transfers the world’s most serious problems into the private lives of the most vulnerable.* On the topic of char. I'm well-aware that charcoal markets are alive and well in Sudan. However, and though I've seen wood and charcoal being traded in Darfur's camps (there are large markets in the camps, since the time they were established) I don't have the figures you are looking for. What I can assure you is that point 2.e. is still wedded to the idea of an 'exclusive' relationship between fuel and rape. This is not so. In the Dadaab camps example (explained in the paper), agencies
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Samer, It's hard to explain to you in just how many ways that last email was offensive to me, both as a stove promoter and someone very concerned about improving the quality of life for women around the world. But I'm going to set aside my outrage and tackle some points you raised. Let's talk about that stove study from India. We've already analyzed it to death in this forum. Long story short, that India study rightly pointed out that if you disseminate a stove that doesn't address the needs of the women in the community that you are distributing stoves to, it will be abandoned. The legitimate point from the study is to make sure that you understand the needs of the community you are attempting to serve. It's a much more fair point to say that the community of people that use stoves (not just women) is diverse, that they prefer stoves based on metrics that are not obvious to those that are outside their community - but as Christa and others have proven over and over and over again those needs can be readily ascertained through careful cooperation with stove users. Improved stoves are tricky bits of engineering and must be tailored to address specific community needs. Often multiple stoves are needed. There are farm scale and household scale needs tasks that often must be performed by the same community members, and they may need a stove for each one. This particular email discussion is more than 10 years old, and the community of people working on these issues is a lot older. We've seen a lot of bad ideas come and go, and this particular meme (the rape meme) is probably one of them. I'd like to stop that particular discussion right here, and I'd like to encourage you, Samer, to go off and do your own homework into women's issues as I don't have time to explain to you why your email may have been offensive to the many women we have on this list. Erin Rasmussen e...@trmiles.com Computer wizard in charge of the software that runs the Biomass Stoves Discussion List ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Otto, Paul, thanks for your comments, very helpful directions to follow up. Dear Erin, It might be helpful if you could explain your outrage. Some people have been outraged once they realize how the lives and vulnerabilities of poor displaced women and girls are relegated through the stoves-rape rhetoric. Others have reacted to the suggestion that underlying racial/gendered stereotypes have been key to mobilizing well-meaning people to a cause that stoves can do little to address. It seems you are reacting to the very idea that the conversation should even take place, which would be a first. If you read the paper you will find that I have certainly done my homework. The paper was certainly motivated by the disjuncture I witnessed in Darfur between the vulnerabilities of displaced people and the claims NGOs (in their marketing materials outside Sudan) promoted. The paper thus demands accountability of the humanitarian industry to the claims they promote, while insisting that the genuine vulnerabilities displaced peoples face cannot be so easily disregarded. These issues are very close to my heart: my parents were refugees displaced by violence, I've spent many months living/volunteering in refugee camps in Beirut, and I've also spent over 2 years doing research in across Sudan. Perhaps it might reassure you that a number of gender scholars (including Sudanese) had reviewed drafts of the paper and have also been quite supportive of its direction. It is about to be published in a recognized scholarly journal, and the paper is already being included as required reading in courses in North America, the UK, and Asia. The recent short article has been widely shared, and I've had private encouragement from top officials working in UN agencies and NGOs in Sudan, including Darfur, and in New York, some of whom engaged stoves solely for its purported ability to stop sexual violence. With regards to your specific points about user needs (etc.): though design and testing around user needs may be 'old news', it seems that efforts to develop universal standards has resurrected this important issue as Paul and Crispin (and others) note. Warmly, Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Samer etal On Jan 18, 2014, at 11:03 AM, Samer Abdelnour samer.abdeln...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Ronal and all, I'm glad you like the research. I'll do my best to clarify your questions where I can. I see these as revolving around two subjects: charcoal use and the potential consequences of employing stoves as being able to solve significantly complex problems using 'narratives' as evidence (as opposed to causal evidence). [RWL: OK - but I am raising other issues as well. I am worrying about present charcoal-making, as part of char-using stoves. I also am concerned about some language you have employed at one place (repeated below). I'll start with the latter, as it is a topic I've been thinking about for some time. I will disagree with you on the point that no stove people are involved in propagating the 'stoves reduce rape' rhetoric. Most certainly, a number of (mostly US-based) stove designers and promoters (including NGOs, advocacy organizations, and networks such as the GACC) have used such rhetoric as a means to justify and direct resources to the promotion of stoves in humanitarian-conflict contexts. As I've shown prior, suggesting that i) there is relationship between fuel and sexual violence, and ii) stoves can manipulate this relationship, depends on a number of 'narratives' that verge on 'myth'. If sexual violence is indeed a complex and pervasive problem (i.e. women are at risk in camps as much as they are outside of camps, at hands of neighbors, while collecting water, while going to market, at work, etc.) then sexual violence is a comprehensive problem to which stoves can do little to address. Why? Because they depend on certain myths to be true (i.e. women are only at risk while collecting fuel, nowhere else). [RWL: I think if you go back, my claim was that the rape topic was never (? - at least rarely) a subject on this list. If it had been, this list would not have taken it up seriously - because we agree with you: rape prevention (with the possible exception of solar cookers and charcoal-making cookers with supplied fuel) is not something that most stove designers can significantly impact. I agree with your last two sentences. You have certainly convinced me that “stove people are involved.” Just none who communicate on this list. I think you are mistaken in believing many stove folk are promoting this rationale for stove improvement. The consequences of promoting stoves as a solution to rape risk, for poor women, is quite serious. Why? This changes the fundamental questions humanitarian policymakers, donors, and workers ask, and the work they do. For example, the question 'how do we understand and stop rape?' is replaced with 'how do we develop the most efficient stoves?'. Millions of dollars have been raised in fundraising campaigns under the guise 'give $30 and stop the rape of African women in Darfur'. And today, many NGOs and UN agencies have picked up on the stoves-rape narrative and are handing out stoves in other countries. In doing so, these organizations actually believe (and they tell their donors also) that they are addressing violence, when they are absolutely not able to do so. Hence vulnerable girls and women are left in a situation where those who claim to serve them assume the problem is solved, when it isn’t. [RWL: OK I agree. There is a tiny connection at best (but probably some for the stove types I have mentioned above (and liquid fuel stoves), where all (repeat all) fuel gathering is halted. I have spoken out in favor of liquid fuel stoves where the liquid is a bioliquid (especially if co-produced with char). If you can forgive my academic writing, I'll have you read the following from the discussion section of the paper: The stove panacea is a myth: fuel-efficient stoves are deemed effective not because of empirical evidence, but from the powerful narratives that promote claims of what they are able to accomplish (i.e. ‘stoves reduce rape’). As stove promoters become increasingly dependent on the legitimacy of these claims, the actual effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of stove interventions becomes inconsequential. Regimes of truth are thus construed in ways that render them increasingly unquestionable (Introna 2003). The myth of the technical panacea enables its diffusion from an originating context to ‘everywhere’, or more accurately to ‘no-where’. We define this panacea effect as the propensity for a technical intervention to transform from a context-dependent response into a universal solution. [RWL: Agreed, but don’t expect agreement that this is a common belief amongst stove designers. If it had been, we could find the topic in this list archives. If not believed by Sudanese officials, they should have indicated their displeasure. The consequence of the panacea effect is an increase in the burden of poverty
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Hi Ron, I do appreciate where you are coming from, and your strong interest in char. Again, I'm probably not the right person to continue a char-focused discussion, but it is certainly an area I will look into further. That said, and if a little humour is permitted on this listserv, I'm pleased to see that you've explicitly stated your meme! :) As I noted before, I've seen that charcoal is in widespread use, however I'm unfamiliar with cultivation/production techniques. Certainly a collective of blacksmiths I researched in Darfur were hoping to move from charcoal to electricity, but this coincided with a plan for proper concrete workshop space and generally better working conditions. They were also increasingly concerned about the environmental and health impacts of their work, but for them such considerations were a luxury of their success. Noted in the paper is the sheer inconsistency and difficulty of measuring sexual violence in conflict zones. Few international NGOs attempt to address domestic forms of sexual (and other) violence. As a result such is often missing in gender violence statistics etc. Reports that do (some mentioned in the paper) suggest that women are not safer from sexual violence in camps. This is a fuzzy space and more research needs to be done to understand it. As for the excerpt, it argues strongly *against* placing blame and responsibility on women. Warmly, Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Samer and ist - See below: On Jan 18, 2014, at 2:17 PM, Samer Abdelnour samer.abdeln...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Ron, I do appreciate where you are coming from, and your strong interest in char. Again, I'm probably not the right person to continue a char-focused discussion, but it is certainly an area I will look into further. That said, and if a little humour is permitted on this listserv, I'm pleased to see that you've explicitly stated your meme! :) As I noted before, I've seen that charcoal is in widespread use, however I'm unfamiliar with cultivation/production techniques. Certainly a collective of blacksmiths I researched in Darfur were hoping to move from charcoal to electricity, but this coincided with a plan for proper concrete workshop space and generally better working conditions. They were also increasingly concerned about the environmental and health impacts of their work, but for them such considerations were a luxury of their success. [RWL: I would give blacksmiths the right to as much char as they need. But I would strongly encourage their own production of char. I believe they will find plenty of uses for the pyrolysis gases (baking bread? firing pottery, etc), and will save a lot of money. Noted in the paper is the sheer inconsistency and difficulty of measuring sexual violence in conflict zones. Few international NGOs attempt to address domestic forms of sexual (and other) violence. As a result such is often missing in gender violence statistics etc. Reports that do (some mentioned in the paper) suggest that women are not safer from sexual violence in camps. This is a fuzzy space and more research needs to be done to understand it. As for the excerpt, it argues strongly *against* placing blame and responsibility on women. [RWL: I suggest you put this last sentence at the beginning and end of your papers.Erin and I missed it. Ron Warmly, Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/ ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
[Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Hi Ronal (and all), I realize I hadn't responded to all the points you had made, and had mostly clarified and expanded upon my initial points to Richard, and in doing so addressed your points 1 2 (again, these aren't a supplement to the paper), as well as 3 to some degree and 7. On Darfur (3) there were certainly numerous interventions being promoted. Various stoves and players. I've captured this in a published study you might find interesting, which explores the key players in the construction of the FES market in Darfur. It was what many called a 'stoves war', NGOs and battling out for donor favour, using the pretext of the most efficient stove (whatever that meant, see point 7), most of which under the pretext that better efficiency reduces rape (see point 4). So the current study builds on the foundations of this prior work, but digs deeper behind the market to explore the rhetorical justifications (memes, narratives) that purport stoves to be a panacea for rape. The market-focused paper can be accessed at the link below: Social Construction of Subsistence Markets Darfur paperhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/223513505_Fuel-efficient_stoves_for_Darfur_The_social_construction_of_subsistence_marketplaces_in_post-conflict_settings/file/e0b49525eecda2c181.pdf?ev=pub_int_doc_dlorigin=publication_detailinViewer=true Actually, a shorter version of the current paper (which does not capture all the empirical materials) can be found at the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog: If Stoves Could Kill bloghttp://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/if_stoves_could_kill Related points about charcoal/trees/deforestation. Practical Action in Darfur was doing incredible work on reforestation/planting. If there were 100 of these initiatives Darfur would be greener than it already is during rainy season (much of it is contrary to popular press). They specifically wanted to plant fruit trees which people could value for food/income, and thus might protect (is this another meme?) amongst other trees. Points 4 about rape. Rape has come up on this list before, I've posted some stuff on it prior. Given that the modern Darfur stoves market (i.e. not the deforestation crisis rage of the 70s-80s) was built on the topic of rape, and sexual violence is one of the 3 problems promoted by GACC as being solvable through stoves, I ask: Why isn't rape being talked about more on this list? Do stove designers/developers not have a responsibility or interest in grounding their stoves in the immediate contextual realities and user needs to which they are actually designed to do and capable of addressing? Rape is certainly no laughing matter, and it is a big selling point for many stove players. This relates to point 5 (health). Sexual violence is a significant health issue, one which has generational physical, psychological, social, legal and economic effects. Point 6, GACC. I have no vested interest for or against the GACC or Clinton's role. But it is certainly impressive given her political status. I'm quite critical broadly actually of the 'stoves reduce rape' narrative, not the technology. And why should I not be? The vulnerabilities of millions of poor women, many of whom are living in war-torn regions are being marketed as solvable through cooking. Again, my critique is to the extraordinary narratives that suggest by using simple domestic technology women can protect themselves from violence. I don't see how thoughtful critique is misplaced. Point 7 is something I'm likely unqualified to discuss, but I'm learning quickly. On this point I'm quite confused by the number of uses efficiency has come to be associated with. I've not condemned anyone on this list. But I am aware that there are questions with regards to stoves and testing methods alike with regards to fuel, smoke, and energy efficiency, and from a user perspective efficient use of time, resources, fuel, and how these may or may not impact the lives of users and their households, let alone more 'efficiency' reduce deforestation, climate change, rape in war zones, and all the other amazing things cook stoves are suggested to be able to accomplish. Hope this clarifies. Warmly, Samer ___ Stoves mailing list to Send a Message to the list, use the email address stoves@lists.bioenergylists.org to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org for more Biomass Cooking Stoves, News and Information see our web site: http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
Re: [Stoves] Fuel and Forestry etc.
Samer and list
1. The more of your papers you cite, the more I recognize that you have had
quite a long and active association with stove design and use. I wish there
were more people doing what you have done. Thank you for these efforts.
2.But you have not commented at all on any of the reasons that I helped
start this list - which have to do with charcoal-making and use. And this
interest started from my experiences in Sudan 30+ years ago (a time of peace -
I traveled to the South with the Southern Vice-President for instance). So
here are a few charcoal-related questions:
a. With the enormous use of charcoal in most of Sudan, were there ever
pressures to supply charcoal-using stoves in the present Darfur refugee areas?
b. Was anyone making char in the camp from wood they collected or bought?
Why or why not?
c. Anything you can say about both wood and charcoal prices in these camps?
d. There are a few char-making stove developers who are supplying both
stoves and wood (maybe pellets) to women in exchange for 20% (in one case) by
weight of returned char. Zero annual expenditures for stove or fuel. Assuming
a stove that is relatively well suited for the traditional meals, how would
this go over in the Darfur camps?
e. This, like solar cookers, would eliminate all gathering of wood;
would it be fair to say that this form of fuel supply would reduce rape?
f. When this list started, the intent was solely to get more meals out of
a tree. Now I and many are proposing to put the char in the ground for climate
reasons. Can you describe any ag/food system presently in place around the
camps - or is 100% of the food supplied by relief agencies?
3. a. There was apparently a supply for some time of LPG - still on-going?
What are the economics for the relief agencies?
See a bit more below.
On Jan 17, 2014, at 11:32 AM, Samer Abdelnour samer.abdeln...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Ronal (and all),
I realize I hadn't responded to all the points you had made, and had mostly
clarified and expanded upon my initial points to Richard, and in doing so
addressed your points 1 2 (again, these aren't a supplement to the paper),
as well as 3 to some degree and 7.
On Darfur (3) there were certainly numerous interventions being promoted.
Various stoves and players. I've captured this in a published study you might
find interesting, which explores the key players in the construction of the
FES market in Darfur. It was what many called a 'stoves war', NGOs and
battling out for donor favour, using the pretext of the most efficient stove
(whatever that meant, see point 7), most of which under the pretext that
better efficiency reduces rape (see point 4). So the current study builds on
the foundations of this prior work, but digs deeper behind the market to
explore the rhetorical justifications (memes, narratives) that purport stoves
to be a panacea for rape. The market-focused paper can be accessed at the
link below:
Social Construction of Subsistence Markets Darfur paper
Actually, a shorter version of the current paper (which does not capture all
the empirical materials) can be found at the Stanford Social Innovation
Review blog:
If Stoves Could Kill blog
{RWL: Thanks. Always good to see more.
I see Dean Still’s and Aprovecho’s names in here. I hope he, a fairly
active list member, can comment on any part of this.
Related points about charcoal/trees/deforestation. Practical Action in Darfur
was doing incredible work on reforestation/planting. If there were 100 of
these initiatives Darfur would be greener than it already is during rainy
season (much of it is contrary to popular press). They specifically wanted to
plant fruit trees which people could value for food/income, and thus might
protect (is this another meme?) amongst other trees.
[RWL: I am uncertain about your word ”if”. Has this all stopped? Why?
Points 4 about rape. Rape has come up on this list before, I've posted some
stuff on it prior. Given that the modern Darfur stoves market (i.e. not the
deforestation crisis rage of the 70s-80s) was built on the topic of rape, and
sexual violence is one of the 3 problems promoted by GACC as being solvable
through stoves, I ask: Why isn't rape being talked about more on this list?
Do stove designers/developers not have a responsibility or interest in
grounding their stoves in the immediate contextual realities and user needs
to which they are actually designed to do and capable of addressing? Rape is
certainly no laughing matter, and it is a big selling point for many stove
players.
[RWLa: I searched the list records before stating there was only one
“rape” stove report sent in by Tom Miles. Can you report the dates you
introduced the subject?
b) The first reason for non-discussion is I don’t recall it being brought
up But this list also has heard
