Opinion: Be careful when you laugh at Burning Man

Opinion by Jill Filipovic

(CNN) — One of the 10 principles of Burning Man, the festival of art and creativity (and, increasingly, influencers, celebrities, and monied tech entrepreneurs) out in the Nevada desert is “radical self-reliance”: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources.”

That principle was certainly tested this year, as torrential rains stranded thousands of Burners on the playa for several days. Luckily, the rains tamped down, and authorities said on Monday that participants could begin leaving — although organizers urged people to wait, given traffic jams that extended for hours.

Many of us (myself included) raise an eyebrow at Burning Man. Burning Man is no doubt a lot of fun — some of my best friends, as the saying sort-of goes, are Burners — but even many long-time attendees have noted the event’s shift from counterculture mecca to a see-and-be-seen desert drug party for influencers and Silicon Valley sorts. Coverage of the event paints a picture of a festival that has in recent years come to embody the worst of libertarian tech-bro culture: A radically elevated sense of self coupled with profound shallowness and narcissism masquerading as creativity; a promise of rugged self-reliance only enabled by access to tremendous resources; lofty ambitions and the performance of significance but very little in the way of actual depth, morality, or greater purpose.

But as easy as it might be to shrug off this narrowly-averted disaster — either because the worst didn’t come to be, or because Burning Man is admittedly insufferable — it should instead be the latest in a long list of warning signs: Climate change is here, and it’s coming for all of us.

It’s perhaps difficult to feel too bad for people who spent significant sums on a drug-fueled desert bacchanal that promises radical self-reliance and a community that can take care of itself, and who then found themselves staring down the possibility of not having anywhere close to the necessary resources to adequately take care of themselves.

Heading out to the desert to do drugs, have orgies, and set things on fire — or, in the milder version, wear a silly costume, make art, hang out and burn a giant wooden man — sounds like a lot of fun, I can think of many worse ways to spend Labor Day weekend. Burning Man would feel much less annoying if the festival just said, yeah, we’re a bunch of idiots who want to party in Mad Max costumes. Instead, it purports to be something much more significant, life-changing, and ideologically ambitious ‑ and then fails to live up to its own stoned-in-a-freshman-dorm-room principles.

So much about Burning Man reads as rank hypocrisy, from an ethos of “decommodification” that somehow accommodates billionaires flying in on private jets to a principle of “leaving no trace” that pledges to “leave places in a better state than when we found them,” and yet is inevitably followed by leaving places from California to Utah totally trashed.

This year seems even worse: According to an email to the San Francisco Chronicle from Sheriff Jerry Allen of Pershing County, Nevada, festival-goers routinely leave “large amounts of property and trash strewn from the Festival into Reno and points beyond.” But, he wrote, “This year is a little different in that there are numerous vehicles strewn all throughout the playa for several miles.”

He continued, “Some participants were unwilling to wait or use the beaten path to attempt to leave the desert and have had to abandon their vehicles and personal property wherever their vehicle came to rest.”

So much for leaving places in a better state.

This year’s theme, “Animalia,” is intended to “celebrate the animal world and our place in it.” And yet, in order to make the Nevada desert accessible and hospitable to human animals, Burners had to drive for hours in largely fuel-burning cars or fly from many corners of the globe; some careened in on private jets, which Burning Man has so far refused to ban (same with single-use plastics); and generators ran AC to keep participants sufficiently cool. By one 2019 estimate, Burning Man’s carbon footprint reached 100,00 tons of CO2 a year.

Lucky for this year’s Burners, the rain stopped, festival-goers were able to leave, and true catastrophe was bypassed. And it seems like, in the short period when people were stranded, some took it upon themselves to leave anyway, hiking or driving out, while others stayed put and shared resources. But a few more days of rain could have left the Burners in serious trouble, stranded and soaked in the desert with dwindling food, water and fuel.

One wonders how long “radical self-reliance” would have lasted as circumstances grew more extreme for the tens of thousands of people who came to the playa for a few days of sex and drugs and great Instagram content, only to find themselves dirty, hungry, thirsty, sleeping in molding tents, and unable to charge their dead cellphones. One suspects that, had the rain not ceased, radical self-reliance would have quickly segued into begging emergency workers for help.

The Burning Man organizers wrote in a statement: “Burning Man is a community of people who are prepared to support one another. We have come here knowing this is a place where we bring everything we need to survive. It is because of this that we are all well-prepared for a weather event like this.”

One also wonders if many of the Burners fully appreciate what happened here: That while the festival is largely about the wealthy cosplaying Survivor in an inhospitable environment, this weather disaster made clear that climate change is making the way many of us live actually unsustainable, and many people’s homes, communities and creative spaces actually inhospitable.

The Burners could all leave and go home. People whose homes are destroyed by flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters caused or made worse by climate change don’t have that option.

And so this should indeed be a wakeup call for those Burners who want to play act artist in a desert utopia, but who don’t want to engage in the boring but much more necessary work of civic and political engagement — of making sure that their resources, and their votes, are going to those who are fighting to keep our planet livable.

But it should also be yet another loud wake-up call for the rest of us. Whatever you think of Burning Man — whether you think it’s awesome or ridiculous — the narrowly-averted disaster in the desert could have cost many, many more lives (one person died, although reportedly not because of inclement weather). And it is the kind of catastrophe we’re only going to see more of as our planet becomes less and less livable.

The Nevada desert flooding caps off a summer of extreme climate catastrophe, from raging wildfires that turned the skies orange in coast-to-coast American cities, to storms that forced evacuations and leveled homes, to flooding that wiped out roads and train tracks and houses. For years, environmental activists have warned about the burning, flooding future that awaited us if we didn’t cut emissions and rein in the biggest polluters. Now, that future is here.

On a planet that is increasingly desertified, it feels less and less cute for some of the world’s wealthiest people to decamp to the desert for a big party, just to prove that they can (of course they can, with generators and cars and planes and AC units and a limited timeline). And so it’s tempting to see attendees of a festival that adopts the mantle of cleanliness and responsibility, yet has done so little to protect the environment, as having gotten their just deserts.

But in truth, climate change will spare few of us, and its ravages won’t be doled out proportionately to those who most deserve it. Those with the fewest resources will inevitably be the least equipped to respond — and to survive. One hopes that events like the flooding at Burning Man will be galvanizing, both for those who experienced it and those who watched in horror from afar.

It’s easy to sniff at Burning Man, which seems at once so self-important and so very insubstantial. But the unpredictable mayhem of climate change means that in the future, the wet, hungry, scared and stranded could be any of us.

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