GREEN MAN - Burningman black rock

Can 45,000 people journey vast distances to a lifeless Nevada desert and participate in an environmentally sustainable festival devoted to burning stuff? As strange as it sounds, during the last week of August 2007, the annual hedonistic celebration Burning Man attempted to do just that: go ‘green.’

What has Burning Man done to merit its theme, The Green Man? Is Burning Man making serious efforts to green itself, or is it all a front, a form of greenwashing? How will the Burning Man experience affect burners, and will they bring it home into their lives? What does the Green Man art theme say about the state of civilization and its trajectory? It was in search of answers to these questions and others unimagined that the author trekked to the playa this year.

A certain segment of the Burning Man community has long made respect for the environment a high priority. For years, event organizers have promoted a “leave no trace” ethic and encouraged all participants to scour campsites down to the tiniest scraps. This is 2007:

http://www.burningman.com/environment/green_man.html

The under-appreciated Earth Guardians work year-round to keep the playa clean and tidy, and ensure that “burn scars” don’t deface the desert. Burners Without Borders, a group of volunteers vowing to “bring it home,” journeyed to the Hurricane Katrina destruction zone in 2005 to provide an estimated one million dollars worth of free home demolitions to help property owners clear away wreckage from the disaster. Last year, the same group salvaged six semi trucks full of reclaimed wood from the festival and donated it to Habitat for Humanity. (This year, a Burning Man spokesperson says it was even more).

But in the past few years, participants have demanded a much higher level of environmental responsibility. Just keeping the desert free from “MOOP” (matter out of place) was not enough.

According to Kachina Katrina Zavalney, volunteer coordinator for Burning Man’s Green Team, at last year’s burn, “I was walking around feeling unhappy — not like I had a chip on my shoulder, but more like, ‘Gosh, people think this place is so progressive, but yet it smells so bad from all the generators, it’s so loud, there’s not a lot that people can say about the environmental efforts or what’s being done out here.”

Read More http://blog.burningman.com/?p=1600

“The Green Man” … what does that mean?

Pretending that environmental problems don’t exist, or just running away from them, won’t solve them, but we think turning potential solutions into mind-blowing art has a chance to make an impact. This doesn’t mean we won’t be burning our Man (it’s “Burning Man”, after all, not “Composting Dude”) but we are going to pay much closer attention to the materials used on the sculpture, and we will examine our organization and the entirety of Black Rock City to analyze every opportunity to improve our approach and lessen our impact.

This theme also provides us the opportunity to bring these issues into the limelight, making them a part of our community’s ongoing dialog, and fostering environmental awareness in our day-to-day thinking, decisions and actions. And, very simply, artistic expression is a powerful way to communicate, to share, and to inspire - and it would be irresponsible to waste an opportunity to bring focus to one of the most critical issues we face.