Mud, Art, and Trash at Burning Man 2023

          On the night of the June 1986 Summer Solstice, an eight-foot-tall wooden statue of a man burned on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. Two artists, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, had built and set fire to the statue to celebrate the Solstice and the impermanence of life, while a crowd of 20 hovered around watching curiously.

          In the following four years, this tradition was repeated with both a larger effigy and crowd, till the police barred the event from occurring in 1990. Thus, the festival was permanently moved to a dried lake bed, also called a playa, in Nevada’s rural Black Rock Desert. Since then, the festival has taken place annually, with different themes each year, spanning the week leading up to Labor Day. Attendees (called ‘Burners’) have grown from 35 people in 1986 to 78,850 in 2019– the largest crowd yet. Each year, a temporary city of concentric circles surrounding the effigy is set up in Nevada, with attendees creating streets, stages, and communities with tents and camper vans. As members of a counter-culture movement, Burners at Burning Man do not use money, but trade for anything they want—there are no vendors at the event either. There are 10 principles that are foundational to Burning Man, the most important being self-expression and leaving no trace on “the playa.” As such, the whole festival is taken down each year.

          In addition to the Burning Man statue, attendants frequently create large-scale and interactive art pieces scattered around the desert, and other forms of self-expression, such as dancing, are common as well.

          While the festival may seem like a benign gathering of artists to celebrate creativity, it has also received a lot of criticism. Mainly, due to the usage of fuel and flame to burn art pieces, large carbon footprints from attendees arriving by car, and heavy plastic usage, the festival has a multitude of adverse environmental effect. Although they claim to leave no trace, Burners discard mounds of trash on the playa each year. In fact, this year, climate p r o t e s t o r s bloc ked the single road into Black Rock City to protest the event’s lack of sustainability. S e c o n d l y , b i l l i o n a i r e s , many of them f rom Silicon Valley, have recently had a strong presence at the festival, and have created their own lavish, expensive camps while getting flown in on pr ivate jets, an action that directly counters the principle of self-reliance on which Burning M a n w a s founded. This has created a rift between the affluent groups and some more traditional Burners in the last couple of years.

          This year’s Burning Man has been far from ordinary. What started with a chaotic beginning due to the environmental protest ended with 70,000 people stranded due to weather. Last week, rains drenched the region, and the water mixed with the playa’s silt to create large swaths of swamp-like mud. Vehicle tires could not move through this sludge, leaving most Burners stranded in the camp with no way out. Attendees were instructed to conserve food and water last weekend as water and mud accumulated in the playa, a geographical feature with poor drainage. Walking was almost impossible, and people took to tying plastic bags around their legs as shoes and tires merely sank into the ground. The highlight of the event, the Burning, was postponed. When the driving ban was finally lifted, people in cars, vans, and on foot left in droves as the festival ended on Monday, September 4.

          Nevertheless, many people remained at the camp, demonstrating Burning Man’s core values of selfreliance and creativity. The art and festivities did not stop, and people could be seen singing, practicing yoga, or even creating mud sculptures. The incidents brought much of the Burning Man community together as they socialized and shared resources to get through the week. Yet many fled as soon as they could, leaving behind mountains of trash and overflowing portable toilets for others to clean up. Burning Man 2023 presented us with a stark duality of Burners: a group of people neglecting the values on which the festival is based, and others finding community and creativity through the grueling, muddy week.