Mike Hatfield

Aprovecho Research Center's present manifestation on planet earth is focused mainly on two independent but interrelated areas. The first is our 40-acre home base near Cottage Grove, Oregon, where we get to play with all our schemes of making the world a more sustainable place. The second is our growing number of international projects working towards building fuel-efficient wood stoves for the 2-billion-plus people on the planet who cook with biomass. As well as consuming large amounts of wood, traditional stoves often smoke a lot, causing numerous health conditions for the user and any innocent bystanders in the immediate environment (i.e., children of users). Much of our funding comes from groups interested in both slowing deforestation and reducing the smoke that increases the probability of respiratory illness, which is the leading cause of death for children under five. Stoves we have designed are presently being built in about 15 countries, mainly in Central America and Africa. They do the cooking for only about 100,000 of those 2 billion in need, but our numbers are growing daily. Our projects vary in detail, from institutional-sized stoves in Africa for tea plantations that feed 40,000 people a day (the plantations, not the stoves) to small family stoves being built and sold outside Jose Cruz's house in Honduras. In all of the projects, we try to follow some common guidelines.