Story: Burning Man sees green

Portraits by Tiffany Brown / Las Vegas Sun

At the annual Burning Man arts festival here in Northern Nevada, celebrants ritually burn a simple, 40-foot wooden sculpture of a man, an act of catharsis and celebration following a week of self-expression and self-reliance.

When last week an alleged arsonist burned up the Man five days early, the incident seemed to carry an uncomfortable metaphorical significance: Because of the fire, the science exhibits under the wooden man - meant to inform festival-goers about environmental crises and what they can do about them - were temporarily closed.

“It was a good metaphor,” said David Shearer, a Burning Man participant and a leader in pushing the festival toward environmental responsibility. Just as the arson suspect had vandalized the Man, Shearer remarked, so too had the festival become a stain on this dry lake bed about two hours from Reno.

For a few years, many of the festival’s more than 40,000 annual participants, called Burners, have become increasingly uncomfortable with Burning Man’s environmental portfolio. The thousands of cars driving in from all over the country, as well Burners flying in from around the world; the gas-powered generators that hum through the nearly five square miles of campsites and art installations; the from-the-dust city that rises where nature intended none.

This year, Burning Man organizers said, enough. For the first time, they decided on an overtly political theme. They would make Burning Man a green event and encourage the community to adopt the same standard.

On its face, the festival, which is one of the largest art gatherings in America and a boon to Northern Nevada’s economy, is an event that typifies environmental responsibility. Burning Man is billed as the largest “leave no trace” event in the world. Leave no trace is a term environmentalists use to mean leaving no evidence of human activity when visiting nature.

Festival - goers are given blunt instructions: Whatever you plan to consume, you must bring with you because, except for ice and coffee, you cannot buy it. Whatever waste you create, other than the bodily kind, you must carry it out with you. There are no overflowing trash barrels so common at other festivals. In fact, there are no trash barrels at all.

The festival has a term for litter: Matter Out of Place, or MOOP. A color-coded map shows where MOOP concentrations were highest last year, a kind of public shaming mechanism.

For weeks after the festival, volunteers and staff comb through the desert sand in search of the tiniest debris - like glitter - for removal. Burning Man’s Bureau of Land Management permits require it.

And yet, Burning Man should not be viewed as a back-to-nature event of Luddites or ascetic hippies. Participants include a cross-section of society, and the ticket cost, nearing $300 depending on when they’re bought, creates a high barrier to entry. Only people with fairly significant disposable income can afford to go. Many come from the Northern California culture of high-end consumerism. (Others come from punk, hard core and rave scenes that have no history of environmental activism.)

And so they arrive by the thousands in inefficient motor homes and sport utility vehicles. They run their generators to simulate the creature comforts of home. To stay hydrated, they drink sport drinks and water out of plastic bottles even as environmentalists are concerned about the effect of American bottled water and drink consumption, which creates tens of millions of new plastic bottles every year.

Burning Man is also very much a car culture, which cuts against environmentalists’ favored modes of transportation: public transport, bikes and feet. To be sure, most Burners cycle or walk everywhere after the arrive, and many of the art cars, which resemble everything from birthday cakes to giant insects, are run on bio-diesel fuel. But there is no mistaking the celebration of unique cars.

And Burners love fire and blowing things up and loud music. The night sky is filled with cylinders of propane gas shooting fire into the air, which can carry an odd resemblance to the fire of a refinery stack. Massive speakers pump out thumping house music.

All told, Shearer said, it amounts to nearly 28,000 tons of greenhouse gases, the pollution that causes global warming.

And so, it was time for the greening of Burning Man.

Whether it could be done might be seen as a microcosmic test of whether the environmental movement can change the behavior of the rest of the country, and for that matter, the world.

Practical side takes work

By Wednesday last week, Tom Price looked weary. Burning Man’s environmental manager was charged with conceiving and executing the practical side of the Green Man agenda, which was ambitious.

The festival administration has dozens of full - time employees and hundreds of volunteers. It requires significant energy, which this year was provided by mostly bio-diesel fuel obtained from french fry vats in Reno, and by a 30 kilowatt solar array.

Burning Man is also donating a 120 kilowatt array to the city of Gerlach, and a 60 kilowatt solar array to Lovelock. One of the 10 principles of Burning Man is “gifting,” so Burning Man also replaced Gerlach light bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.

Also, a wealthy donor contributed 1,000 bicycles as “community bikes,” replicating a program tried with mixed success in other cities, most notably Amsterdam. Burners were encouraged to use the specially painted bikes and cycle from one spot to another, and then leave the bike there.

The copious wood used to build art installations and encampments will be hauled away in nine semi trucks and used to build shelter for poor people. In 2005 and 2006, a group called Burners Without Borders used recycled wood and donations to help with Katrina cleanup for six months.

Burning Man also worked with Shearer and his business partner Jeff Cole and their Cooling Man project, which seeks to raise money to offset the festival’s carbon footprint. (Offsets include tree planting and donating solar power technology to Africans . A total offset would cost $270,000, Shearer said.)

Despite these programs, a skeptical press corps asked about Burners driving to the event in cars and drinking from plastic bottles.

Price responded by noting another common element of Burning Man’s environmental value: What other experience will these people have wherein they’re so intimately familiar with what they consume and how they consume it?

He also pointed to another Burning Man principle: radical self-reliance. “We could do everything for everyone, but there is no self-reliance in that.”

‘Not the most eco-friendly’

Michael Kang is intimately familiar with art and music festivals and their effect on the local ecosystems. As vocalist and mandolin player of the widely popular bluegrass-jam band String Cheese Incident, he has played at dozens of them.

He and his friends and band mates have been coming to Burning Man for years, and they have always thought “it’s a special event, but not the most eco-friendly,” he said. He called it one of the most consumptive of festivals.

Burning Man is dotted with theme camps, and his, Entheon, is marked by its environmental consciousness. They powered their 45 RVs with a bio-diesel generator, ate from a community kitchen where all the meals were prepared with organic food bought on the way, drank water from communal tanks and showered with water heated by solar power.

Entheon was also the home of Our Future Now, which is String Cheese’s environmental education and advocacy nonprofit group , which uses festivals to spread its message.

“It’s not the most difficult thing to do,” he said of greener living.

Bad habits slow to change

And yet, it can be difficult to change behaviors, as everyone involved in the greening of Burning Man acknowledged.

One way, Burning Man organizers think, is through art. They gave out thousands of dollars in grants to artists working with the theme. There was a giant oil derrick with stairs that allowed Burners a great vista of the Playa before the structure was blown up Friday night, a massive art car, the Mechabolic, run on garbage , and an interactive glass-blowing station that used recycled glass.

The thinking is that people are much more likely to respond to the immediacy and emotion of art than rational argument. So, for example, it was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Jungle” and “Guernica” that really changed consciousness, not rational argument about slavery, food safety or war.

For Carmen Mauk, an early founder of Burners Without Borders, this is the true beauty of Burning Man: a captive audience.

The experience can be so overwhelming for some, especially those not normally living a Bohemian lifestyle, that the week in the desert is a place where they learn and integrate new ideas, she said.

“In a real community, people see good and they emulate it,” said Larry Harvey, a co-founder of Burning Man and one of its hundreds of resident philosophers.

Or, as Mauk said, Burning Man principles are simple ideas that are hard-wired into the human experience and just dying to be let out.

Now, she said, Burning Man is ready to “move beyond this event.”

It is a theme repeated by Burning Man organizers, who are well aware participants now include investment bankers, technology impresarios, lawyers and doctors.

Harley DuBois, who is a kind of Burning Man city manager, said it would be beautiful if the event catalyzed change in corporate America.

Harvey, the Burning Man co-founder, put it this way: “It’s not enough for you to change. The world has to change.”

By Thursday, the charred remains of the man had been taken down, and workers were furiously cutting and hammering on a new one in time for Saturday’s burn. “It’s a story of redemption,” Harvey said.

And by that time, the exhibits, the ones with warnings about the future of the globe and suggested courses of action, had re opened.

J. Patrick Coolican can be reached at 259-8814 or at patrick.coolican@lasvegassun.com.