WebUrbanist » Burning Man 2007: Can the World’s Largest Temporary City Go Green?

Burning Man 2007: Can the World’s Largest Temporary City Go Green?

Burning Man Images

Burning Man is an amazing annual event that takes places for one week a year in the remote Black Rock Desert. This location, also dubbed Black Rock City, is home to art and artists from around the world. While it lasts, Black Rock City is the 7th largest urban environment in Nevada. Burning Man is both an art festival and survivalist experience, and has been compared to Mardis Gras and Rainbow Gatherings. This year, however, sustainability has become the focus, epitomized by the theme: The Green Man.

The Green Man Theme

The Burning Man festival has a dubious reputation at times, promoting a leave-no-trace ethos of environmental sustainability, while drawing crowds by carbon-producing land, sea and air vehicles from around the world. Starting today, however, participants are working to offset the environmental impact of the event in a variety of innovative ways.

The Cooling Man Project

Projects like The Cooling Man have been raising participant awareness about ecological impacts for some time. With this year’s theme, however, the interest in environmental activism has spread to on-site art projects like Mechabolic. This interactive piece of art allows people to walk through it while it processes festival garbage into biofuels.

Mechabolic

As Burning Man continues to grow and become a recognized wonder of the world, will the festival be able to keep up with environmentalist criticisms both from participants and the outside world? It is hard to be sure, but The Green Man theme seems like a good place to start. For more art related to this year’s theme visit the Burning Man website. Also check out this book of amazing Burning Man photography.

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Posted by Urbanist August 27th, 2007
Environment, Urban, Urban Art, Urbanism
Comments: 12

Comments

Comment from CaptainPlanet
Time: August 28, 2007, 2:17 am

That last pic looks like a guy with morning wood.

Comment from Ken Wedding
Time: August 28, 2007, 10:38 am

The Burning Man was set alight early this year. See laughing squid

Comment from Web Urbanist
Time: August 28, 2007, 11:47 am

Breaking: commenter Ken Wedding is right - the Man burned early this year. The jury is out on whether this is playful subversion in the spirit of the festival or destruction of property. Either way, someone has been arrested and there are plans to rebuild the man in the next 72 hour.

Comment from ilker -=- The Thinking Blog
Time: August 28, 2007, 2:58 pm

Shouldn’t the Burning Man be… you know, burning?

Comment from David Houston
Time: September 3, 2007, 3:07 pm

I am a 7yr BMan participant and am as guilty as most. I gotta say that Burningman is anything but green. I find it slightly offensive that GreenMan was chosen as this year’s theme.

From the time that 40,000+ people gas-up to drive hundreds, sometime thousands of miles to reach the event to the millions of Gatoraid, beer, water bottles that are used, to shooting-off of hours of fireworks, burningman creates more pollution than probably any mass entertainment event on the planet.

This year there are some Green camps, displays etc, but they are still overshadowed by what the event is really about……. Shock, doing something that has never been done before, while entertaining, interesting, and wouldn’t miss it for the world, definately Not Green.

As I say I am guilty as all……..

Comment from markofando
Time: October 1, 2007, 7:56 pm

Want to start your private office arms race right now?

I just got my own USB rocket launcher :-) Awsome thing.

Plug into your computer and you got a remote controlled office missile launcher with 360 degrees horizontal and 45 degree vertival rotation with a range of more than 6 meters - which gives you a coverage of 113 square meters round your workplace.
You can get the gadget here: http://tinyurl.com/2qul3c

Check out the video they have on the page.

Cheers

Marko Fando

Comment from Jerrexakesque
Time: October 5, 2007, 2:19 pm

There’s one special secret Sale link on Amazon:

http://tinyurl.com/2r7ldr

[b]This is open every Friday and ONLY on Fridays! [/b]

You can find very good discounts here, although some Fridays you can really get
lucky and make off like an Amazon bandit - I´ve seen discounts there as low as 75%
off sticker Price.