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.