I suspect a lot of Burners would be irate at being called Democrats heh.
Silly BLM doesn’t know what a political compass is.
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I wonder if local security guard businesses, waste management companies, and construction firms had a hand in this.
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The dumpsters are also a security risk, if that is really a concern. The first thing that goes when there is concern over terrorism is garbage receptacles. In this case they want to add them as a security measure?
But really this is probably all just a bargaining gambit so they can withdraw some demands and point to how much they compromise.
From a Canadian point of view, it’s not that much further south to Mexico. They, too, have a bunch of empty desert.
Also, you could try to queue up all 30,000 cars on the way home into the form of a gigantic CARAVAN, and thus be greeted by a US Army on full alert. How annoying that they’d all have passports…
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the Burning Man org purchases carbon offsets in tree plantings for all the big burns on the playa every year. they’ve done that for many years now.
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White guilt money.
I mean it’s a nice thing to do, but it’s not better than not wasting in the first place. It’s like drinking a diet coke with a cheeseburger in the name of “calorie offset credits”.
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The demands read to me like “we can’t legally shut down the event, but we can make up a bunch of rules that make it effectively impossible to actually run.” Strangle it to death with red tape.
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Just set up a oil drilling rig in the middle of camp and keep the kelly spinning for a few days. that should take care of permitting…
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easy for you to say. they are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. i prefer that they do.
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I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but you can’t really overlook the wastefulness of building and burning a massive temple and the man every year. There are undoubtedly more wasteful things going on in the world, but few done by crowd I think largely considers itself environmentally responsible (and is in many other ways).
Welcome to the bullshit the Rainbow gathering has been going through since forever.
Yeah, I know there’s a lot of scrubs with them, but I’d dare say Burn has the same percentage.
I’ve never been able to get to the desert, but I feel your pain.
Maybe the multimillionaire clientele can help get the screws off of your back, so to speak.
Not enough cash in the Rainbow community to do so, for sure.
I’m keeping hope that the (generally) better educated and affluent attendees can help keep the Burn alive and well.
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this conveniently overlooks the good that the Temple burns and the burning of the Man do. granted, the Man burn is more of just a simple big party, and perhaps carbon offsets are a simplistic justification, but the Temple burns are incredibly healing on a human scale. i’ve seen every temple burn, and they never fail to move me. it’s one thing to write off burning man as “a big party in the desert.” it’s quite another thing to sit in silence with thousands of other people year after year who are grieving, some sobbing openly, while mementoes to loved ones burn. yes, it’s “wasteful” by some numeric reckoning, but i think the emotional value to countless people over the past 19 years is priceless and worth it.
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Is there anything “local” to burning man? I thought it was in rural Nevada?
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Consider just the human waste. Every gallon of black water is hauled back to Reno to get pumped into their sewer system.that’s a hundred miles, for a hundred thousand people’s poop for a week. Plus the fuel spent to get the empty trucks to BRC in the first place. Thats a carbon load that doesn’t exist for people who stay close to sewer lines.
From a martian colonists’ perspective, all this sewage should be a valuable natural resource. Youve got a full year to process it, ample sunshine, and lots of space with no neighbors. All that biomass could be doing something useful instead of being thrown away at great expense. But thats just not an interesting problem if all you want to do is dance and burn and take drugs.
Burners are quite proud of the policy on litter, but that’s been a contractual obligation from the very beginning, they arent doing it just because. Its vastly more effort and fuel to keep volunteers out there picking up after litterbugs, than to convince people to clean up their own mess.
Theres no such awareness of noise pollution or air pollution or conspicuous consumption, those are just given as part of the vibe of the place. (By the time you crowd 100,000 people into one campground, its no longer the middle of nowhere)
And the hell of it is, Western Pacific railroad runs right through Gerlach, just a few miles from Black Rock City. If traffic congestion, carbon emissions,road litter were an actual concern, it would be totally doable to take the train. As much money has been spent on gas over the years, a custom built train station would have paid for itself, many times over. There is so much heavy lifting from and to the playa, doing most of it by train seems like it should be a no brainer. But thats not the kind of logistics problem BMORG is interested in solving.
I have no doubt that the event will continue to improve and evolve. Its just from what Ive seen, it takes many years for problems to get worse, before it becomes a priority. Lasers were such a problem for years before a ranger was blinded… at which point they were banned. “Its all fun and games til someone loses an eye”.
I don’t trust BLM to understand the legitimate problems of Burning Man, but neither do I trust BMORG. All of these would be so much easier to address if the event were a more managable size.
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PHS-3 – They need the physical barrier, which could be comprised of packed tires or tumbleweed bales, because of what might happen if a toddler were to wander unsupervised into the event, and then the ensuing liability of having to re-educate the toddler of modern societal norms of our current cash-credit system of monetary exchange, not to mention clothes, for crying out loud!
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They have to start the Wooly Mammoth acclimation someplace, it may as well be…oh, yeah maybe not super relevant without steppe and forest.
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Is this better or worse than global leaders flying to Climate Change Conferences, that could be carried out via Skype? Heck, they could all meet up in Fortnite and make an event out of it.
@ax11 “It’s about 9.5 kilotons in real-world units.” So that’s about half a Hiroshima, or two Olympic Sized Swimming Pools to put it in to everyday terms?
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Global climate leaders flying = worse IMO because they do (or should) fully understand the consequences of their actions. Prof. Kevin Anderson (a climate hero of mine) calls them the “climate glitterati”. He’s someone who walks the talk, taking trains and ocean transport rather than flying. He can do that because he’s in Europe as opposed to the States, where that’s harder to do. Prof. Katharine Hayhoe has been delivering presentations and interviews by Skype much of the time. In general, I suppose you could argue for leverage, with a few highly-influential people flying and emitting to save a whole lot more emissions overall.
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For the life of me, I don’t think I understand why Black Lives Matter cares this much about burning man.
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A similar strategy is taken by anti abortion legislators. In places where it is legal, but the politicians are hostile to it, they demand from abortion clinics that they have doors and hallways wide enough to accept medical gurneys. Most buildings are not constructed in this manner, so they can shut down abortion clinics (but not knee surgery clinics) on this basis.
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