The essential history goes like this: After a few years of this weird little summer solstice beach party called Burning Man, the San Francisco police cracked down, so its stagers and supporters moved the event out to the Black Rock Desert in rural Nevada, a desiccated ancient lakebed now affectionately known as The Playa. And there, it grew and grew, every year, eventually morphing from scattershot frontier filled with freedom-loving freaks into a dynamic city of about 50,000 colorful souls — Black Rock City — that burns brightly for a week in late August and then disappears into dust after Labor Day.
Well, it doesn’t really disappear — it sort of decamps. The theme camps and art collectives that make Black Rock City so dynamic — making its art, creating its soundtrack, offering its amenities, building its culture — have come to transcend the event and form year-round bonds back in their communities. After a quarter-century of annual events, these tribes have become the essence of Burning Man, perhaps more significant than the San Francisco-based company that stages the event, Black Rock City LLC, dubbed The Borg by some.
The Man for which the event is named, the effigy that burns as the week reaches its climax, has no meaning, deliberately so, even as it has spawned a vast network of disparate, deliberate tribes, imbuing the central void with layers of meaning and purpose and helping to define the largest American counterculture of the new century — and maybe the most enduring one in history.
I have been fortunate to enjoy a unique perspective on Burning Man just as it was entering its renaissance — which I and many others consider to be the years 2005-2010 — when the frontier town finally became a real city, with a vibrant, well-developed urban culture and a basic ethos that is embraced by a greater percentage of Black Rock City’s population than anywhere on earth. As that unfolded, I was in regular communication with everyone from event founder Larry Harvey, who was trying to nudge Burning Man toward greater sociopolitical relevance and impact, to countervailing forces like showman Chicken John and mad creator Jim Mason, the pair who led an artists’ rebellion in late 2004 that triggered my deep journalistic engagement with the event. I was taken into the bosom of the Flaming Lotus Girls to learn the fire arts and I helped build the party camps that hosted world-class DJs and seas of undulating dancers.
I remember when I realized that Burning Man was having a profound effect on American culture, particularly in the countercultural realm that it draws from and feeds, those who feel they can create a better society than the one they’ve inherited. It was a moment that came in two parts, months apart from each other starting after the event in 2005, in telephone conversations from my office at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
“I’ve been to 20 Burning Mans and I’ve never seen a better one,” Larry Harvey told me after the event in 2005, during a conversation that later proved to be the first half of my revelation. But it wasn’t just the mind-blowing art, the great weather that year, the mushrooming crowd, the joyous party, or any of Burning Man’s physical features. “The group that came this year was a bit more noble in their intentions than any I’ve ever seen in a city this size,” Larry explained. “They’ve really absorbed the idea of participation.”
Participation, that central tenet of the burner ethos: No Spectators. This city is created almost entirely by those who buy tickets and spend hundreds of dollars each for the privilege of building a city from scratch, so it is a reflection of their effort and intention. And the intentions of many who attended Burning Man 2005 were channeled in an unforeseeable and strangely fortuitous way when Hurricane Katrina slammed into Mississippi and Louisiana on the first day of the event.
This natural disaster, compounded by the inept and uncaring response of President Bush and the federal government, resonated with the citizens of Black Rock City, a place filled with people who had turned themselves into experts in creative construction and destruction. After all, as Larry told me, the very skills, tools, and motivation needed to stage Burning Man each year were exactly what the Gulf Coast needed.
So when a crew of committed, resourceful, and capable burners established an encampment down there, hundreds of burners followed, pitching in their time, sweat, and money to a nine-month project that became known as Burners Without Borders. “If that isn’t applying our ethos, I don’t know what is,” Larry told me then. “The very skills needed to survive at Burning Man are the skills needed to respond to a disaster.”
It was indeed an impressive and empowering project, as I saw firsthand during a reporting trip down there, the details of which are in this book. But what was even more notable is what the experience spawned within the larger Burning Man experiment, changing it into something new and more purposeful. After Hurricane Katrina, BWB organized cleanup and rebuilding projects following massive earthquakes in Peru in 2008 and Haiti in 2010, each time doing countless hours of free work over many months for people in desperate need. But even those high-profile and headline-grabbing disaster response efforts were only a small part of what BWB was becoming, and BWB was only a small part of what Burning Man was becoming.
“What we found in the wreckage of Katrina was anyone can make an enormous difference if they just choose to. Burning Man is such a key part of that experience,” said Tom Price, a BWB founder who called me in early 2006 to say, “Dude, we’re still here. It’s happening just like you wrote. We’re doing it,” luring me to the Gulf Coast to see what Larry had explained to me a few months earlier, which I wrote about in a series-capping article entitled, “Epilogue as Prologue.” It was those two conversations that awakened me to the larger potential of this community that I’d been enjoying and chronicling.
“Going to Burning Man and learning how to interact with people the way that we do there is an incredible education in how to be effective in the world. Because you get to create your entire world. Everything you experience is created by you and the people around you,” Tom told me later.
The value and potential of that can-do spirit that Burning Man cultivates was echoed in San Francisco that same fall, when it manifested in the art of Black Rock City finally returning home to the city where the event was born, thanks to another new burner offshoot known as the nonprofit Black Rock Arts Foundation.
“It felt like there was a lot of serendipity at that point in time, and for BRAF it was a launching venture,” Leslie Pritchett, BRAF’s first executive director, said of the rapid series of events that saw three high-profile burner sculptures — David Best’s Temple at Hayes Green, Michael Christian’s Flock, and Passage by Karen Cusolito and Dan Das Mann — placed in separate showcase spots around San Francisco within a six-month period.
By doing temporary art placements using fundraising and volunteer labor from within the Burning Man world, BRAF was able to break through the slow and bureaucratic process of placing public art in San Francisco, convincing city officials that they were easily able to tap into something real cool, in the process elevating the stature of what some had started calling the “Burning Man School of Art.”
“The biggest issue was cost, but we were able to handle it because of the Burning Man networks. A lot of people came together to make this happen,” Leslie later told me. “It demonstrated to me and a lot of people that art projects can bring a lot of energy to a city.”
That energy could even be applied to the emerging field of clean energy. Tom went on to become Burning Man’s first environmental director, then founding a burner-staffed organization called Black Rock Solar that figured out how to build renewable energy projects for public agencies and nonprofits at little or no cost. Meanwhile, BWB co-founder Carmen Mauk continued to guide that group and expand its reach into a wide variety of micro-projects around the world, from an anti-poverty project in Kenya to a sustainable commerce network in New York City to artist-created fire circles on the Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
“This is what Tom Price and I were talking about in the very beginning, when we were standing on a mountain of rubble after Katrina, that if we do this right and seed this idea right and we seed this creativity, then it’s possible to make a difference and solve problems on this side of the trash fence,” Carmen told me, using a phrase referring to outside the borders of Black Rock City that has become increasingly common among burners, a way to start talking about the impacts of the event on the rest of the world. “It’s going to start to change the event and it’s going to start to change this community in ways that are totally unexpected.”
After more than a quarter-century of Burning Man events, more than 300,000 people from around the world have attended and taken the experience back into their communities. People have developed a larger view of themselves and what is possible, forming into tribes to pursue huge art projects, pool their resources and expand their social circles, or to create entirely new lifestyles and ways of relating to each other and the world. From San Francisco to New York City to Denver to Oakland to New Orleans to Los Angeles to Austin, Texas — places you’ll visit in this book — Burning Man is helping to shape the new American counterculture in interesting and promising ways.
Black Rock City and its citizens have evolved over the years, growing from a strange and indefinable gathering into something that is now best understood as a city, one of the world’s great cities during the week it exists, and as a culture that continues year-round in other great cities around the world, affecting them in ways large and small. And it is a story that is still continuing to unfold.