Word: stoves
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...Brown's two-room concrete house, students delivered water from local springs or rain tanks. She used a kerosene lamp and stove for light and cooking. It was "just a house and that's it," she says...
There was a time in the mid-'70s when wood-stove bores were a serious environmental hazard at parties, the way bullfight bores had been three decades before, sports-car bores were a bit after that and college-tuition bores are now. Some self-pleased gasbag was always bombinating lengthily about his new airtight Jotul 118 or Vermont Castings Defiant or Fisher Papa Bear. (Yes, suburban trendies, from South Carolina to north of Boston, would actually buy, and get all gooey over, a 200-lb. hunk of welded steel that some marketing genius had called a Papa Bear.) This ecological...
That, as seems to be said more and more these days, was then. I believe that I am now the only wood-stove bore still active on my mile of dirt road. My neighbors have concluded that full-time wood heating is dirty, dangerous (chain saws are worse tempered than alligators), economically foolish, a champion time waster and brutishly hard work. In this they are correct...
...longer true, alas, that the wood-stove bore can warm himself twice, once by bragging about the money he is saving and again by preening at the perfection of his environmental posture. Heating oil, for the moment, costs less per gallon than bottled no-lead spring water. Never mind economy, however. There are congested localities such as Aspen, Colo., and Missoula, Mont., where wood burning is immoral, toxically wasteful and severely curtailed. The sweet-smelling, picturesque blue-gray smoke rising from Grandma's condo on a crisp December morning simply loads the air with too much additional junk...
Thus the wood-stove bore is without defenses, except to say that his obsession is unlikely to melt down New England and that it adds no net CO2 to the atmospheric greenhouse (a fallen tree gives off the same amount of carbon and oxygen whether it rots or burns, and a new tree that spreads in its place takes CO2 out of the air as it grows...