If you can define a problem, you can solve it. Here, however, the big problem Warm Heart confronted – the big problem that long barred all solutions and stymied us, too – is that ‘the problem’ had never been defined correctly. It took a long time to recognize that the problem as defined was not the real problem, but instead simply a nasty symptom of the real problem. Insecure in our lack of expertise, we spent a lot of time thinking about the problem the way others did – only finally to discover that things did not work that way.
“What is the problem?” turned out to be a problem in itself. Where we live in Chiang Mai Province, ‘the problem’ is understood to be the smoke. Smoke is a big problem. For 3 months each year, smoke stops airplanes from landing, hospitalizes tens of thousands, kills thousands and costs Thailand billions. Like everyone, we started by assuming that smoke was the problem, or rather, that our smoke was the problem. However, our smoke is not unique. Our smoke is identical to the smoke suffered in China, Ghana, India, Iran, Kenya and Mexico.Footnote 4 As long as we focused on our smoke, we failed to understand the bigger problem.
As is often the case, ‘learning’ that our smoke is not unique, but rather is typical, merely an example of a bigger problem, resulted not from massive data crunching or deep research, but from a moment of insight. Standing in front of a screen full of NASA MODIS satellite images of crop waste fire smoke from locations around the world, it was suddenly obvious that Chiang Mai, Delhi and Lahore shared the same problem that required a similar fix. The lesson was that Northern Thailand is not special; it is typical (Fig. 2).
Our smoke, like the smoke plaguing the rest of the developing world, results from the open-field burning of crop waste.Footnote 5 Crop waste burning is not an issue in the developed world. It is, indeed, hard to imagine a German farmer firing his rape field after harvesting.) Burning, however, is endemic in the developing world. Farmers here grow ten billion metric tonnes (tonnes) of food crops annually ([4] See Attachments 1–3). These result in 21 billion tonnes of crop waste. (The term waste refers to residues in fields too steep or with soils too hard to be tilled in and used by farmers too old or too malnourished to chop or collect the residues in the heat of the hot season, residues such as corn that are so difficult to decompose that the bacterial demand for nitrogen can drain the soil of this precious nutrient and/or residues in the fields of farmers without domestic animals to graze on them. In most cases, farmers also do not own the land or have reason to care for it.)Footnote 6. Assertions about how much of this 10.5 billion tonnes farmers burn range from 50 to 90% and surely vary widely by location. If, on average, they burn just 50% – rounding down to 10 billion tonnes – these fires generate 16.6 billion tonnes of CO2, 9.8 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) and 66 million tonnes of PM2.5 [5, 6]. Put in perspective, 26.4 billion tonnes of CO2 and CO2e are equivalent to the annual emissions of over 5.5 billion automobiles driven for a year [7]. Sixty six million tonnes of PM2.5 are equivalent to the smoke of 4,714,314,000,000,000 cigarettes. [Author’s calculation based on industry figure of 14 micrograms of smoke per cigarette or the smoke of 71,429 cigarettes per kg of PM 2.5.] According to the World Health Organization (WHO), PM2.5 is the fifth biggest killer in the world. PM2.5 kills 4.2 million people annually, 90% in the developing world, more people than are killed annually by the well-publicized infectious diseases – dengue, hepatitis-A, HIV, malaria and TB – combined [8] (Fig. 3).
If the issue is smoke, then we confront two problems. First, it is essential to know where the smoke come from and who is making it? These are obvious from satellite images.
The second problem involves figuring out why these people burn and so what to do. How Warm Heart addressed these questions and the answers we came to are perhaps the most important and controversial parts of this story. Addressing the why question demanded understanding the logic of current NGO and government policies, recognizing that this logic is wrong and proposing a new logic. Warm Heart’s critical ‘learning step’ involved a shift in perspective, from viewing small farmer, crop waste burning from the outside looking in, to viewing it from the inside facing out. We changed perspectives because we went out into farmers’ fields to work, then went home to eat dinner and drink white whiskey on the floors of their homes. Experts do not do that. As a result, most experts know that poor small farmers burn, but assume that burning is discretionary. The experts generally believe that small farmers burn not out of necessity, but rather burn out of ignorance, laziness, customary practice or simple orneriness.
The common misunderstanding that farmers do not have to burn but burn for other, ‘unnecessary’ reasons drives the two most common, most misled varieties of so-called solutions. The benign version, based on the notion that small farmers burn out of ignorance, cultural beliefs or outdated agricultural practices (inaccurately labeled ‘slash-and-burn’), argues that farmers need to be educated about how burning hurts the climate, environment and public health.Footnote 7 The less benign version (seemingly embraced by governments everywhere), sees farmers as incorrigible lawbreakers who should be fined, jailed or shot.
Understood from the perspective of a small farmer, burning is not discretionary; burning is necessary. Poor farmers have fields often located on challenging terrain. They are too poor to afford tractors and most fields are not tractor accessible or too rocky and steep to plow. Most crops leave at least as much waste in the field as they provide edible produce, many much more. (Corn, for example, is 63% stalk, 11.1% cob, 3.7% husk – 77.8% waste and 22.2% kernel.) [Data from Mae Chaem District Agricultural Officer and farmers’ rule of thumb.] To prepare to plant, a farmer must clear the field of waste and accumulated weeds; given difficult terrain, lack of labor and heat, burning is the only option. NGOs may educate farmers about climate change and PM2.5, and governments may threaten them with fines, jail or death by sniper – but they still burn because they have no better option.
Warm Heart’s first real challenge was to define the ‘smoke problem’ correctly. Getting it right did not require new technology, data or analysis. It required only a change of perspective born of talking to small farmers and listening to what they said. The ‘problem’ was not the smoke, the accompanying climate change gas emissions or the public health damage caused by PM2.5, as everyone else argued; these were consequences. The problem was small farmers’ lack of alternatives when confronted with the necessity of clearing their fields of previous crop waste and weeds.
It took Warm Heart years to recognize the ‘problem with the problem’ problem. Smoke was so obvious. What did we know? When we figured it out, everyone told us that we were wrong, that we did not understand smoke in general or these little creeps, in particular, who are best stopped by a bit of good, tactical shooting to stop the fires dead, so to speak.