Burning Man: The Green and Black from Black Rock City
by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN on 09. 6.06
If the world started to cook, plants and animals died, and the earth became parched and lifeless, it would feel a lot like the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where Burning Man spring up each year. The Black Rock Desert becomes Black Rock City, a fully functional mini-metropolis based around self-reliance, free expression, and pyromania. The desert is about as unaccommodating a place as you could ever hope for, which makes it the perfect canvas for 40,000 people to be as outlandishly creative as they can muster.
From an ecological point of view, Burning Man is a knot of contradictions, melding earth consciousness, self-sustainability, and social harmony with flames, debauchery, and disposable resources. Black Rock City is a place of radical self-reliance where people bring with them what they need to survive and pack it out again when they leave (there are no garbage cans at Burning Man). The light and resistant living structures that spring up are so impressive that the military has been known to conduct research on the dusty playa (see Design Like You Give a Damn). Burning Man is also commerce-free. Only ice, tea, and coffee are purchasable. There are no vendors, no souvenir stands, no corn dog guys. Exchanges are on a gifting or bartering system only. It is also bicycle heaven. The flat, hard, alkaline surface of the wasteland is an ideal application for the bike, in whatever alien permutation it takes here. This year also saw a drastic increase in the use of vegetable oil and biodiesel fuels to where you’d think people had been using it all their lives.
On the flip side, Burning Man isn’t quite greenie paradise either. To prepare for the week-long excursion into beauty, survival, sexuality, and celebration, most people engage in a now almost ritual raiding of Wal-Mart for cheap camping gear, $50 mountain bikes, canned Indian food, and whatever other flavorful impulse buys the Reno area has to offer. Although very little of the waste stays out in the desert (the collection of moop, or desert detritus, is surprisingly vigilant) it all ends up somewhere, much of it unsorted and in the trash. Also, despite the spike in veggie and solar power, Burning Man is fossil-fueled, with most camps running on generators or car batteries. And, of course, the incineration of untold amounts of wood, fuels, explosives, and other incendiaries represents a significant carbon and pollution release. A project called Cooling Man has attempted to calculate and offset the emissions from the festival and let individuals determine their own footprint, but the sheer volume of burned material can be hard to stomach. This year, a structure dubbed the “Waffle House” (seen above), a temple fifty feet high and constructed of uniform pieces of virgin pine was burned the night after the Man himself was consumed. Spectacular, yes. But still a large sacrifice of resources in a place that strives to represent a desirable future.
Next year’s theme? The Green Man, humanity’s relationship with nature.
(Image credit: uchronia)
CORRECTION: We have been informed that the wood used/burned in the Waffle house was scrap wood “destined for the dump,” which is, of course, much preferable. I apologize for the false information, and thanks, LadyBee, for the correction.
a great account, cub. air quality, however, was great in Los Angeles last week. Must be due in part to the innumerable crazies reeking up the black rock desert. Jaja!
Jacob: Ya, I picture San Francisco looking like an Elks Club Lodge one week a year.
Looks like an interesting event. But yeah, no greener really then an outdoor rock concert.
There should be biological waste treatment instead of honey wagons and chemical toilets. I envision something like John Todd's vertical river of translucent tanks on a trailer, each one supporting a different ecology progressively processing the sewage and septage into clean water. One set of tanks for every thousand people?
That would work for me.
Virgin pine? I doubt that. I can't find any reference to them using virgin pine. I might be wrong, but it would be way too expensive to use anyways.
As a first time burner this year who is planning on going back, I can't say enough how excited I am about next year's theme!!
Thousands of overloaded motorhomes driving hundreds of miles, gaining thousands of verticle feet, running generators for a week, to burn wood and toxic materials is the tip of the melting iceberg out there. But the Burning Man organization itself has been using bio-fuel and recycled/reclaimed equipment - everything from carpet to computers - for years. It's time for the participants to wake-up.
Great to see an article on BM. I went for the first time this year and although the artwork was impressive, having to inhale all the exhaust while viewing it, was not. I do think the BM organizers realize change in fuel choice is paramount for the idea of BM to make sense - that is, to expand on the idea that self-reliance is not just a polluting hedonist adventure.
Jacob Gordon: I totally agree. Watching the Waffle House burn was a beautiful sight, but the cherry picker on which I sat had a generator that was stinking like crazy. Someone suggested to me that biodiesel be the 3rd purchasable. What do people think of that?
As a 12 year participant, I had mixed emotions about the 'Belgian Project' - yes it was amazing and large, yes it was the first time the 'deep playa' had been a destination, but wow - what a huge load of wood that was burned. This year seemed to be the year of excess - bigger everything. The number of gas powered scooters and other 'art cars' was way up. I do hope the event organizers urge future participants to rely less on petro powered transportation and generators. The 35kw gennie in our camp was powered by bio-diesel, as was our art-bus btw.
Next year's BM theme is "The Green Man" so they will be addressing at least some of the environmental concerns by calculating the carbon footprint of the event and sponsoring projects in 'the default world' to mitigate all the burning etc.
http://www.burningman.com/art_of_burningman/bm07_theme.html
I know that everyone has a comment on what they feel Burning Man needs to do, yes there are generators, but most of these 40,000 people are conscious of their energy use. Generators aren't used all day, mostly at night, Whats any different from all the energy I am using right now with the lights on in my house and my computer running the water heater heating my water, the gas stove, all the lights on my electronics, my house must have been happy the 10 days I was gone. VERY rarely did I smell exhaust, most of the time I smelled butane, ha, funny, but I am looking forward to an even more conscious burn next year anyway. Burning trash for a week is not that bad.
I heard that the Waffle cost $400,000 bucks in wood up in smoke how is that green?
TreeHugger! Get your facts straight - the wood used in this project was lowest-quality Canadian wood destined for the dump - not "virgin pine." In addition the Belgians are plantings trees in Belgium equal to what was burned.
LadyBee, Art Curator, Burning Man
A bunch of SECULAR gorpers. The 60's are OVER.