Solar Cookers in Tibet

As the world's resources were being consumed over the course of the last century, a reciprocal awareness of the end arising from such environmental exploitation was prompted. From this awareness the creation of alternative energy and design systems have flourished and come to represent an enlightened perspective in the individuals, corporations, and polities that use them. While many of these innovations are celebrated by the international public, there are lesser-known grass-roots surrogates for the conventional methods of energizing and designing which are changing the lives of the people they affect and insuring for them a sustainable future.

One example of these homespun alternative energy designs that I have encountered on my travels is the solar cooker. The solar cooker is derived from a simple plan: a concave cement disc equipped with a layer of small mirrors, capable of directing concentrated solar energy into the base of a cooking vessel held by a thin tripod at an angle above the disc. The sun's rays then heat the vessel to temperatures suitable for cooking or boiling water. In this way one of the primary consumers of energy in many of the less-developed regions of the world – the preparation of food – can become environmentally friendly.



In the People's Republic of China's remote, windswept Qinghai province – traditionally the Amdo region of the Tibetan Plateau – solar cookers are changing the way of life of the Tibetan minority inhabiting the rural areas of the region. In Xining, the capital of Qinghai, I met the man responsible for this transformation.

Kevin Stuart started the English Training Program almost twenty years ago in Qinghai to aid in the creation of a Tibetan English-speaking demographic that could communicate with the outside world. Over time, the program came to include a number of projects the students were initiating and managing themselves, ranging from linguistic and cultural preservation, to the distribution of second-hand clothes, to the production of documentary movies and the compilation of Tibetan literary anthologies, to the solar cooker project.

The solar cooker is a manifold blessing to those who receive it. Fuels the Tibetans have traditionally used include yak dung and wood for heating, boiling and cooking. However, these basic necessities for continued existence have been more difficult to acquire as the population of Qinghai has increased and industrialization in the region continues unabated. The environment has become progressively more insolvent and numerous nomadic groups have gotten caught up in a cruel cycle of abject poverty, a cycle which affects their very ability to subsist.

Traditionally - sometimes from a great distance - Tibetan women gather firewood to cook the meals which feed their families. This process can take anywhere from a few hours to an entire day, depending on the proximity of woodland to the place where the wood will be used. As time passes, less wood is available and the trips take longer. After the wood is gathered it is then returned to the village strapped to the woman's back – an arduous task even for the healthiest of women, and one that is debilitating. Wood gathering is repeated every two days, since the capacity of a back is limited.

Once home, the women will begin burning the wood to cook. Due to poor ventilation in traditional Tibetan housing, this induces negative affects on the lungs which accumulate over time, leading to serious health risks. The solar cooker positively affects the lives of the Tibetan people through its reusability and health benefits, its liberation of the time formerly used to gather other forms of fuel, and its environmentally-friendly nature.

Environmentally sustainable, the solar cooker uses the sun's energy, seeing an end to the need for firewood and thus helping prevent the deforestation that has been endangering the scattered woodlands of Qinghai. Relatively cheap, the solar cooker promises a number of years of daily use, with none of the lung cancer, treeless hills and massive time requirements of fire-based cooking.

With their free time, Tibetan women who have acquired solar cookers through Dr. Stuart's organization can gear their endeavors towards producing handicrafts to sell, obtaining education, or fostering the health of their family, and thus their people, in a number of other ways. But the scope of advantages associated with the solar cooker ranges much farther than this.

Solar cookers have been given out to approximately 1,700 households through the organization so far, with an estimated 10,000 people benefiting from the dissemination. This means 10,000 people not collecting organic material from the environment and burning it – people not causing soil erosion, air pollution, and deforestation. It means thousands of girls are able to acquire education since their function as fuel collectors has been made obsolete. It means thousands of women's health is improved due to less exposure to smoky kitchens and less contact with yak dung. The simple device is a blessing to these Tibetans.

The solar cooker is a fine example of the changes alternative energy designs can impress upon the future of humanity. At roughly twenty dollars a piece, they're a steal. Considering the constructive social and environmental impact they have when introduced into an undeveloped social system, not to mention the awareness of the value of alternative energy designs they inevitably bring with them, the solar cooking project should receive wider attention and greater funding.

This article was published in Abroad View, the global education magazine for students, in May 2006, by China Center student, Josiah Johnston.

Back to Newsletter