Winter 2004
At the end of last summer, thirty thousand people gathered on the playa of Lake Lahontan, a dry Ice Age lakebed in Nevada’s Basin and Range. As we do each year, we brought enough food, water, and shelter to survive in the harsh and unpredictable Black Rock Desert for a week.
But this was Burning Man, so we brought a lot more. Monstrous sound systems, funked-out vehicles (a magic carpet, a Spanish galleon, a fire-breathing dragon), sod, pizza ovens, swimming pools, giant glowing bananas, colossal slabs of granite, bicycles, lasers, body paint, and bhindis. This massive collection of absurd gear conjured Black Rock City from the playa’s dusty void.
But it was all gone a month later.
In Burning Man’s infancy a decade ago, “radical self-expression,” the event’s defining principle, begat massive fires that left ugly scars on the lakebed, air sullied by burning couches, and abandoned equipment sunk into the alkali. Horrified, the BLM, which manages this land, threatened several times to halt the event.
But there was also a more profound kind of influence that came directly from the land. Here, the winter rains make this a shallow lake once more, erasing the tire tracks, footprints, and dust drifts. The expansive flatness of the Black Rock Desert, with its ring of rugged mountains and its uncertain sky is restored every spring, pristine and trackless. Human detritus is not absorbed or overgrown as it might be elsewhere. Instead, it is put on display—a mute accusation from the lakebed itself.
Under the leadership of a group within Burning Man who call themselves Earth Guardians, a new ethic of responsibility was appended to its chaotic culture. Like all things at Burning Man, the pack-it-in-pack-it-out ethos quickly escalated to surreal and extreme proportions, and this mirage soon became the world’s largest Leave No Trace event, by far.
A practical ethic that holds that any sign of a passing human presence in a wild landscape is a desecration, Leave No Trace has, since its articulation in the 1970s, become as central to the American wilderness experience as bandannas and water bottles. This vision moves us to scour our own Burning Man camp areas for the tiniest bits of “moop”—Matter Out Of Place. Volunteers put in countless thousands of hours in minute examination of the twenty square miles of our city.
We walk amidst the meager dross of our vanishing empire like archeologists—dusty, ragged figures stooping again and again to retrieve a sequin, a clump of hair, a bit of tape, a sunflower seed, or even a small pebble that did not originate here.
Collecting all these relics, compressing and packing them, then bringing them back into the world invites us to wonder what happens to these treasures next. Off to the landfill? Into the air? Are we keeping the desert clean only to sully some other part of the planet? The exercise of being conscious of waste in one place necessarily raises questions about waste—and wastefulness—in all places.
Considering every one of our possessions carefully, even if only for one week, is now an essential part of the creation of this dreamland. But it is a dream from which we can wake and let the desert be the desert: radical self-expression becomes radical self-control. In the tension between the two we are at our most creatively alive.