Diary: Eccentricities abound as Burners go green

Sun photographer Tiffany Brown just showed me a photo of a guy with a green outfit covered in green stuffed animals — bears, turtles, frogs, aliens, octopus — that he spent nine months un-stuffing before sewing them to his green fuzzy outfit. Eccentric, yes, but also a manifestation of the lengths people will go to for their Burning Man experience. The effort and devotion can be pretty shocking.

Burning Man organizers are trying to channel that sense of commitment to get Burners to look at the wider world and go green. One of the Burning Man principles is “Leave no trace,” meaning, leave no trace of yourself in the desert: no trash, no waste, no destruction. The question is whether Burners will begin to take these principles to the outside world, which is the ambitious goal. We’ll explore the dynamics of this attempt in Sunday’s Sun.

A walk or bike ride around the Playa, which is the vast desert expanse at the center of the festival, shows more of this commitment to the Burning Man experience: In the early morning hours of Thursday, Tiffany caught welders working on the Mechabolic, a giant snailish-looking vehicle that will be powered by trash. (Its tires came from the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.) Burning Man organizers hope these projects will evangelize alternative fuels, though, of course, in a quirky way only Burning Man could achieve.

So they’re working around the clock. All the while, a music and art festival is going on all around them, with people in various states of intoxication dancing to house beats, or riding their cycles naked past them, and the welding goes on.