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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.

Wildfire breaks out at Burning Man

Strange fires are happening everywhere: California, Europe, and Burning Man.

Somehow, this morning, the giant effigy at the center of Black Rock City -- the site of the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert -- went up in flames this morning at 3 a.m. This is the "Man" I'm talking about, the one that burns at the end of the event on Saturday. The neon -- and this year, for the first time ever, solar-powered -- creature that you orient yourself with to find your way home ... he's gone.

(photo: Focal Intent, via Flickr)

A little skin for ice shrinking thin

Saturday in Switzerland, hundreds posed naked for a photo shoot on the shrinking Aletsch glacier.

Greenpeace said it hoped to "establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body."

Legendary Burning Man festival gets an eco-conscience

Armen Zeitounian leads the way up the staircase of the house he’s living in, a two-story colonial nestled in the smoggy hills north of Los Angeles, complete with a view and a pool and a black Ford Explorer in the driveway. In a room on the top floor, a two-by-six-inch plank, painted white, protrudes about […]

Making climate destabilization into art

Artist Chris Jordan portrays our culture's excessive waste and consumption.

It’s hard out here for a glacier

Feeling down? Probably not as down as the Arctic’s melting glaciers. And now you can listen to their sob story by giving the Icelandic glacier Vatnajokull a call, thanks to an art project that helps folks “connect emotionally” with Europe’s largest glacier. With the help of Virgin Mobile and DolphinEAR, Peterson dropped a hydrophone into […]

She discusses her new environmentally themed show

This spring a small-but-innovative dance company in Southern California called TRIP Dance Theatre premiered a production about what poet Gary Snyder calls "the war against nature." The dance was called "Poisoning the Well."

Using delicate, Asian-flavored music, played live, the dancers first appeared carrying water and gathering around a well. Slowly the audience could watch the grace and beauty of these dancers, four of them women, literally turned upside down by human desperation, greed, and the raw flow of our "effluent society," including elegantly simplified depictions of "red tides," the vast gyres of plastics in the oceans, and "drunken" trees.

The dance was both gorgeous and upsetting, but required very few words words. To better understand, and to introduce TRIP Dance Theatre to a wider audience, I asked company founder and choreographer Monica Favand Campagna to talk about her work:

“It is green thinks nature even in the dark”

It took [artist Mary Ellen] Carroll about three months to come up with that phrase [on behalf of the Precipice Alliance] and, she said, “It should be something you should think about.”

Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park brings nature to a city setting

Alexander Calder’s Eagle against an Olympic mountain backdrop. Photo: iotae via flickr I’ve never seen the Pacific Northwest. I mean, I live in Seattle, and I look around, but I’ve never really seen it. I came to this realization while walking the zig-zagged trail at Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park with Grist mascot Chip Giller […]