visiting RAEL and Hesperian

["Dean Still" <dstill@epud.net>]

Dear Friends,

Spent two days this last week visiting Dan Kammen's Renewable and
Appropriate Energy Laboratory and Hesperian, both located in Berkeley. It
was gratifying to walk into a lab at UCB and see solar cookers, biomass
burning stoves, UV water purifiers, etc. Dr. Kammen is a very approachable
guy, knows everything about stoves, and laughed at my jokes- pleasant and
discerning. Rob Bailis, who took a stove class at Aprovecho, showed me
around. I talked with Linwei Tian, who is examining emissions from different
kinds of Chinese coal. Everyone at RAEL seems committed to improving
technologies like stoves and adding this incredible resource to the
collective that is working on the problem of biomass related indoor stove
emissions strengthens the collaboration considerably!

Jeff Conant came to the first ETHOS meeting. He is now the editor in charge
of Hesperian's new book on Environmental Health. I looked at the first two
chapters which are great, stressing down to earth, simple solutions. IMO,
Hesperian is the best AT publisher, creating books that are field tested
before they are published, lots of illustrations, sold as inexpensively as
possible, practical information, etc. I taught classes in Mexico using their
"Where There Is No Doctor", 3 million copies, in 90 languages, if I remember
correctly. One chapter in the new book will explore solutions to breathing
smoke and I'm helping Jeff gather info. If anyone has simple solutions to
IAP, I'm sure that Jeff would like to hear from you.

Here's a quote from "Clean Energy for Development and Economic Growth:
Biomass and Other Renewable Energy Options to Meet Energy and Development
Needs in Poor Nations", (Kammen, Bailis, Herzog, 2002).

Reminds me of the importance of stove work:

"The strongest evidence of causal linkage between biomass combustion
emissions and ill health is with acute respiratory infection in children
(Smith, et al., 2000a; Ezzati and Kammen, 2001; Bruce et al., 2000). It is
the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in children under five, causing
more deaths and ill health globally than either malnutrition, diarrhea, or
childhood diseases like measles and mumps. Children of this age are most
affected because they spend a great deal of time indoors, close to the women
of the household who do most of the cooking." (page 12)

Best,

Dean


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