2004 Fall

I wake up when it's getting light out and the birds are beginning their morning chirps and trills. I gaze up through the window-screen opening in my bedroom wall towards the high trunks and leaves of the tulip poplars outside the tiny dwelling my mom and I call home. Now that it's summer, the leaves are full and luxurious. It's still cool at this hour. I love this mountain forest and these tulip poplars. I know the brace and curve of every branch I see from my bed in winter. I love how in early spring the branches wear the barest, most imperceptible hint of green for weeks and weeks, then sprout tiny buds for a few days, then become a lush impenetrable wall of leaves almost overnight.

I am 16 months old, and my grandmother, Nana, is writing this for me. This week, Nana and Grandpa have been visiting. They say that watching me and listening to me is better than any television show could ever be. This must be true, because they have never turned on the television, just the way Mommy and Daddy never turn on the television when I am in the room. (They say it might do something to my brain.)

I thought you might like to read about a morning in my life. Small as I am, Nana thinks that I am an interesting example of a person who lives a sustainable life style, although, obviously, my parents and I need to make some compromises now and then. Who doesn't?

I'm standing in the creek, watching the ripples move past me downstream. Raising my eyes above the surface, I see overhanging tree limbs swaying in the breeze. Reflected in the water, those same tree limbs turn into serpents, their curving bodies undulating rapidly side to side. Leaves outlined against blue sky turn into fantastic pulsating images in the water, moving both upstream and downstream at once, appearing and disappearing with each passing ripple. I am relaxed, and not anxious to fit what I am experiencing into any kind of preconceived box. I could identify those trees by genus and species, as well as the birds occasionally flitting in and out of them, but for now, I don't want to. Instead, I find myself wondering which is more "real": the concrete reality I see above the water, or the endlessly pulsing, equally beautiful web of vibrant patterns I see reflected on its surface? If the reflection is equally real, and if it's actually just one perception of a reality that is open to many other ways of perceiving and experiencing it as well, the whole idea of a separate me observing an objective external reality is an illusion.

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.