Burning Man Festival Goes Green

The fabled history of the Burning Man Festival seems like the kind of urban legend that promoters would use to draw people out into the desert. Twenty-one years ago, a group of friends gathered on San Francisco's Baker Beach and set fire to an eight foot man crafted of wood. Larry Harvey's explanation for the event was that it was "a spontaneous act of radical self-expression." Combine that with the fact that Baker Beach is a popular spot for nudists, and you get the basic theme of the Burning Man Festival, which moved to the Black Rock Desert, a spot in Nevada ninety miles from Reno, after a Baker Beach tangle with police that shut down the burning event in 1990.

Black Rock City may be a better locale for the extra long weekend over which the Burning Man Festival takes place anyway. The wooden man has grown in size, and so has the festival itself. The message of self-expression and artistic expression has broadened to include a focus on self-reliance as well, as participants must adapt to temperatures that can fluctuate between over one hundred degrees to near freezing in the same twenty-four hour period. There is no electricity, no shelter, no food, and no water on site. Black Rock City is a commerce-free zone for the entirety of the festival. Ice is the only available thing to purchase, and there is a bus that takes participants into the nearest inhabited towns for a fee to restock their supplies if needed. There is nothing available on the Burning Man grounds that participants do not bring to the location themselves, though, and when they depart, the "leave no trace" policy stresses that everything that is brought in is removed as if it were never there.

This year's Burning Man will take on a new meaning. With the increasingly real threat that global warming poses to our planet, a band of San Francisco based scientists have taken up the task of estimating how much greenhouse gases will be created by the Burning Man event and its participants. Whatever the amount is, a suggestion that participants can counteract any damage to the atmosphere by tree-planting and other energy-saving or producing activities, has been advocated. The Burning Man organizers have acknowledge the threat of global warming through the 2007 art theme, "The Green Man," calling for ideas on ways in which participants can contribute to taking care of the Earth. This year this celebration of freedom and humanity, which draws people out of their shells, as well as their clothes, may also inspire them to act as well.

To find out more about the events that take place at Burning Man, check out their website at http://www.burningman.com/