Climate Culture

Lessons from Burning Man 2007

A man in a hardhat just dropped off his chicken for me to mind -- a Japanese Silkie who watched me with one surprisingly smart eye as I typed this post. I reassured her I was a vegetarian, and she seemed to relax. After a few minutes, the man in the hardhat returned, thanked me, and said he was off to find a blowdryer so he could give the little hen a bath. Playa dust has coated her feathers.

If it had been Monday, I might have thought this strange. But it's Sunday, and along with nearly 48,000 other people at Burning Man I've weathered two battering whiteouts of several hours each, and ingested some things I probably shouldn't have, and it was only after he'd walked away that I reflected back on the incident as unusual. That's what's great about this place: The Playa cracks your mind wide open. The spectrum of reasonable behavior widens. You question old prejudices and drop useless restrictions. Your mind frees up to learn.

So what better place to learn new tricks for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? For coming to understand -- in a visceral, tactile, immediate way -- what it means to produce and expend energy?

This, I assume, is what the exhibits under the Man, in the Green Pavilion, were supposed to accomplish. There was a game you could play, in which you threw hacky-sacks at little boards painted with images of oil rigs and smoke stacks, hoping to knock them over. There was the "Single-Cell Solution," an exhibit by the Chlorophyll Collective, which takes up exhaust from biodiesel generators in fluid-filled tubes, feeds those nitrogen-rich emissions into a pond where it feeds algae. The algae can be used to make more biodiesel: A closed fuel cycle. A marvel. Why aren't we doing this on a large scale? What would it take?

Smeg me

Pardon me a little gadget porn as I ogle these Smeg refrigerators, which have made it to the states at last. Despite the unfortunate name, it’s on my Christmas list: They’re extremely efficient, too: 305 kWh / year. I know, I know. If I was a real enviro I wouldn’t refrigerate food.

From DIY to Dirty

The perfect dorm Attention back-to-school shoppers: nothing impresses a sexy coed more than a DIY chair made of recycled six-pack rings. So get to … studying. Photo: Adam Johnson Stick ’em up People who live on the sticks follow strict rules. Lollipops, corn dogs, and kebabs in the morning; pick-up sticks and pogo-ing in the […]

Travel site sends out eco-themed newsletter

You know when you’re searching for airline tickets and you get that feeling that there might be a cheaper flight somewhere if you just check one more discount-airfare website? Yeah, I hate that. Which is why I like using Kayak.com, an aggregator that finds the prices at a number of different discount sites as well […]

Are you trying to buy more American-made products?

Are any of you green-leaning types trying to buy more or all U.S.-made products these days, perhaps inspired by the toxic-toy scandals, fair-trade concerns, buy-local movements, exuberant patriotism, or anything else? Let us know.

A mysterious World Cup goes green

The sporting! It continues to go green! Solar panels on stadium roofs, recycled pitch-watering systems and fair trade snacks for half time should make the World Cup a model for environmentally friendly sporting events, French officials said on Tuesday. It’s the rugby World Cup that they speak of, by the by. You’d have to search […]

College residence halls trending toward green … and not-so-green

I’m excited about this new trend toward green dorm design and decor, such as the Green Campus Program in California wherein new students can tour a dorm room pimped out with, for example, "hemp towels, organic cotton sheets, a reusable elephant grass shopping basket, and bed frames made of recycled train tracks." But I’m bummed […]

Bloggy backslapping

Adam Stein is never wiser or more perspicacious than when he’s, uh, agreeing with me.

Is Burning Man living up to its Green Man intentions?

The headline refers to a sign that appears as you drive (or as I drove, in a huge white pickup truck) into the Playa at five miles an hour, and it's not a bad summary of the enviro discussion here at Burning Man. How can you really be green at an event you have to drive hundreds of miles to, mostly through desert, with all your heavy crap in the car? Where will all those plastic water bottles end up? Is there such thing as a petroleum-free camp? What about all those Zip Ties, the preferred technology for securing dome coverings and lights on your bike?

Is Burning Man this year anywhere close to carbon-free?

No, says Andie Grace, the woman who ably answers the media here. "We're doing everything we can to lessen the footprint, but we can't make it disappear. After all, to do that we'd all have to sit home, strip naked, and eat grubs."

Which is not to say there isn't good stuff going on here. Says BMan's enviro czar Tom Price, "We are at or slightly ahead of our expectations. We switched 90 percent from red diesel, which comes from places like Saudi Arabia, to biodiesel that comes from Minden, Nevada." (Problems with biodiesel clogging generator filters -- which is does, because it scours out previous petroleum deposits in those gennies -- have been resolved by changing filters.)

The Man, which is currently in the process of being rebuilt, is lighted with neon powered with a 30 kilowatt solar array, which also powers the entire man complex. It's also powering the power tools the powerful construction people are using to rebuild the Man (which burned unexpectedly early Tuesday morning during the lunar eclipse. It was epic and historic, and a good time was had by all).

When that solar array, donated by Renewable Ventures, MMA, comes down on Saturday before the burn, "we're going to build 120 kilowatts in the town of Gerlach," says Price, "and 60 kilowatts in the town of Lovelock. That's two million dollars in free renewable energy."

Plus, once you get here, you ride your bike everywhere. Or your scooter. Or something. But you don't drive your car for a week. As Burning Man founder Larry Harvey said, "that offsets something."

I will take this back after I've been home for a month, but right now, sitting here in my skimpy pink dress, using a solar-powered WiFi connection on my solar-powered laptop looking out that the spectacular Esplanade full of solar-powered art and just digging the ambient laughter and music of strangers, it seems like Burning Man really could change the ... okay, okay. I'll stop now.

Next post: How Albertson's grocery store became a beacon of environmental ethics after its execs visited the Playa last year.

Animal-rights groups point out the climatic effect of meat-eating

With which instrument do you cause more greenhouse-gas emissions: your car key or your fork? It’s a question asked in an advertising campaign by the Humane Society, which, along with other big animal-rights groups, is striving to open consumers’ eyes to an oft-overlooked connection: the climatic impact of eating meat. Bolstered by a recent United […]