It was sometime in 2007 or 2008 when Catlin Powers — now CEO of One Earth Designs, whose solar stove was featured in the “Top Chef†episode — happened upon the issue herself. Powers was studying climate change in the Himalayas, and one day, a curious nomadic family asked her what she was doing. When she tried to explain, in broken Tibetan, that she was “studying smoke in the sky,†they laughed. What a ridiculous thing to do, they said, when the sky was blue yet their home was filled with smoke.
Sure enough, Powers’ team detected a level of pollution inside the family’s home that was 20 times as great as Beijing’s air at the time. (It would be three or four times as dirty as Beijing’s notoriously bad air today.)
A typical wood-burning stove might produce 400 cigarettes’ worth of smoke every hour, says Smith. In high-altitude regions, such as the Himalayas and Andes, lower oxygen levels mean that fires burn even dirtier. Women and children tend to inhale most of the toxic particles.
In addition to the direct health effects — among them heart and lung problems, and even suppressed IQs — the practice of cooking food over fire often means that women and children lose opportunities to work or to go to school. Many young girls forgo an education to help collect the wood used for their families’ meals. Some families pay for their children’s education in wood — and it’s usually the boys who go to school, while the girls gather the fuel to finance it.