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Low-tech Magazine
"Oven stoves are greener, more efficient, healthier, safer and cosier than all modern heating systems. Why are they gone and how do we get them back?"

Low-tech Magazine makes lovely leaps.

Even as they publish Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls, a lavish history, with a dozen or so great photos, of serious attempts at heating houses with large, radiant stoves made of stone or brick, they point to a Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune column, Confessions of an economic moron with no practical skills.

After a long recap of very recent economic history, Clay Jenkinson, director of the Dakota Institute and Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University, gets to the nut:

Here's the problem for me and for millions of others. My generation has never known want. We have lived on the froth of staggering prosperity and access, surfing through life as if it could only get better and better and better, and we have absolutely no psychological capacity, so far as I can tell, to face a grimmer world. Second, spoiled and mollycoddled as we have been, we have never bothered to learn any real survival skills. Our grandparents didn't exactly enjoy the Depression years, but they had excellent skill sets -- sewing, gardening, canning, carpentry, neighboring and squeezing the most out of a dime.

I've got nothing!

In a world of real poverty, I'm either going to starve or face a long, hard apprenticeship in basic living skills. Imagine the endless whine of the baby boomer in a Great 21st Century Depression. My mother has declared, with some emphasis, that I cannot move in with her.

He didn't bake bread, grow seedlings and fix old cars with the rest of the Whole Earth Catalog freaks? I recall a track that went through Thalassa Cruso, Helen and Scott Nearing, digest-sized Organic Gardening magazine and Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet.

Low-Tech sends us to a new iteration of all this: "Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew have written a book that reads as a practical interpretation of Low-tech Magazine: The book is "Toolbox for sustainable city living, a do-it-ourselves guide"; the blurb on the authors:

Stacy Pettigrew and Scott Kellogg are part of the Rhizome Collective, an educational and activist organization based in Austin, Texas. Its members recently received a $200,000 brownfield cleanup grant from the EPA, which they're using to turn a 10-acre dump into an ecological justice park. The bioremediation techniques they developed are being used to remove toxins deposited by the waters of Hurricane Katrina.

There's an excerpt, How to build a floating trash island, which includes both the Bambi scene at right and a photo of a working model with starker plastic parts.

This is far more sophisticated than the Whole Earth Catalog of a generation ago, but the same Access to Tools attitude applies, in a fresh new form.

Low-Tech Magazine is the brainchild of Kris De Decker (Barcelona, Spain), Vincent Grosjean (London, UK) and Shameez Joubert (Grahamstown, South Africa).

My intention here was to gush about the photos of designer oven stoves -- elegant simplicity -- including the one in Martin Luther's room, but I got off track.

Most people think that the metal stove was the successor of the campfire and the fireplace, and if you only look at the US, that is true. In the New World, there was never a shortage of firewood and therefore no incentive to improve the inefficient fireplace. But in Europe and Northern-Asia, there was an important and succesful link between the fireplace and the metal stove.

...Oven stoves are traditionally fuelled on wood, but today they can also be equipped to work on gas, or alternately on both fuels. They can even cooperate with a central heating system. An oven stove can take any form or dimensions: it can be almost invisible, built into a wall or underneath the stairs, or it can be an impressive work of art standing in the middle of the living room.

Unrelated bonus link: Web forum closed after sensible discussion takes place

 Tags  alternative energy design frugal low-tech tech

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