The Environmental Impact of Music Festivals - TENTS

Tens of thousands of tents are discarded at festivals - and I know why

  By Karen Luckhurst, June 2014                                                                                                                                                The Guardian

"Oh to have been a tent manufacturer with a crystal ball in the 1970s.

Back then, camping was in decline, due in part to holidays in the sun becoming cheaper and more available.

But then the sun came out for the likes of Vango et al – not literally, of course, you understand. The rise and rise of the great British music festival over the last couple of decades has made owning a tent a pre-requisite for any under-30. Meanwhile, camping came back into fashion for the over-30s, who rediscovered a cheap and delightful way to holiday with the kids.

Later this month Worthy Farm, near Glastonbury, will host 150,000 revellers, staff and performers. Latitude, in July, will entertain around 35,000: the Isle of Wight this weekend will play host to about 55,000; that's an awful lot of party-goers and tents – and there are many more festivals happening all over the UK this summer.

Each year, tonnes of rubbish are left at festival sites. A figure that includes thousands upon thousands of tents. In one year alone at Glastonbury, 20,000 tents were abandoned, according to Rob Kearle, the festival’s head of refuse and recycling. In an interview with recycling website, Resource, Kearle says the festival tries to recycle what tents it can, however, many still end up in landfill. “Last year, a local woman collected about 1,000 to use to make clothes, and groups like the Boy Scouts and Air Cadets also get to pick through the leftovers,” says Kearle.

Kearle lays the blame for this figure at a throw-away mentality and a change in the demographic of festival-goers from the original green-minded hippies. However, I personally would like to add another reason, which is that the damn things are so difficult to pack up.

I often go away with the kids on my own, and I have noticed over the years that quite a lot of mums do the same thing. I have just enjoyed a couple of nights on the south Devon coast with my daughter. Nearby a mum was camping with her two young children in one of those pop-up tents beloved of festival-goers.

I was interested to witness her attempts to pack up with the hindrance of her toddler and a baby who had crawled off to chew on some grass. She worked hard and long to get the tent to fold up – trying this way, then that, bending it into contortions it was never designed to be bent into.

Eventually she managed to fold it into the required circle, but just then the baby headed off for pastures new – literally. Poor mum looked from the folded tent in her arms to the disappearing baby and with an anguished howl let it go, whereupon it promptly pinged back into shape.

It was at this point that I felt I should offer my services. It is possible you have been thinking that I should have done this earlier. However, it was 7am and I was in my jim-jams reading a Buddhism book on the benefits of loving humanity and living in the present moment. Slowly, it occurred to me the moment had come to show my love for this despairing human.

Mum grabbed baby and toddler and forcefully strapped them into the car, where they screamed in indignation. Then we both set to and wrestled with the tent for a long time, hampered by mum's stress levels and my concern that the dubious elasticity of my pyjamas would not long survive this dance around a campsite with a pop-up tent.

Once tamed it took as long to stuff the billowing folds of nylon into its absurdly snug-fitting bag. "I'll have to do it again back home," said mum sadly once it was in the boot of her car. "It's wet on the bottom." I gazed at her with empathy; her children were still screaming, she looked completely done in, a three-hour drive to the Midlands lay ahead of her and it was not yet 8am.

I vowed not to repeat the same procedure when I left and stuffed our tent in the back of the car to be dealt with once home. I have unsuccessfully tried seven times since to fold it so it goes back into the bag from whence it came.

It appears to me that tent manufacturers seem to me to be overly focused on compact and lightweight tents that can be transported and put up easily but less concerned with how they get put away. Why, for instance, do the sleeves they come in have to be quite so tight fitting?

They seem to be unaware that people may not be folding up tents in ideal conditions – that it might be windy and wet for instance, or a woman might be camping on her own with small children, or a hapless and hungover teenager could be trying to deal with a sodden, mud-encrusted mass of nylon and bendy poles.

I'm not up to the maths, but if 20,000 tents were left at Glastonbury in one year – what is the total for all the festivals in the UK every summer?

Call me a cynic, but replacement tents every festival season must be big business.

Oh, for that crystal ball."

(from https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/she-said/2014/jun/13/tens-of-thousands-of-tents-are-discarded-at-festivals-and-i-know-why)

"4 new measures would tighten regulation of massive hog confinements"

"4 new measures would tighten regulation of massive hog confinements"
By David Jackson & Gary Marsh, March 2017

As pork producers exploit weak laws to build and expand large hog confinements across rural Illinois, neighboring farmers have complained their rights are being trampled while waste spills poison local streams and sickening gases ruin families' lives and property values.

But after years of frustration and legislative inaction, lawmakers on Tuesday announced four new bills that would tighten Illinois' lax environmental protections and give local citizens more input in the permitting process, as well as standing to challenge the massive facilities in court.

The bills, proposed in response to the Tribune's August investigation, "The Price of Pork," would represent the first significant reforms to Illinois' 1996 Livestock Management Facilities Act, which has been criticized for failing to keep pace with the dramatic growth of swine confinements. Holding thousands of pigs and sometimes producing millions of gallons of manure annually, the operations now account for more than 90 percent of Illinois' $1.5 billion in annual hog sales.

"What is going on in our rural communities and to many of our farmers and farm families is wrong and unjust and we can do better than this for them," Fulton County farmer Craig Porter said Tuesday at a Springfield news conference held by Democratic state Sen. David Koehler of Peoria, a sponsor of two of the bills.

Porter described his frustrating efforts to halt a proposed 20,000-head hog operation near his homestead — a facility planned by a Wall Street-traded real estate investment trust and an affiliate of leading pork producer Professional Swine Management.

"Repairing the lax rules, ambiguous siting criteria and other large loopholes in the (Illinois law) should have been done years ago to protect family farmers and residents," he said.

Flanked by several farm families from across Illinois, Koehler said he and other lawmakers modeled the new bills on existing laws in nearby livestock-producing states such as Iowa, Indiana and Wisconsin. "This is a common-sense approach. This is not radical," Koehler said.

One bill would require all confinements to register with the state Environmental Protection Agency. Koehler said he was shocked to learn that state officials have no idea how many large hog confinements are operating in the state, or where many of them are located — a loophole that makes it nearly impossible to monitor and regulate the factorylike operations.

"That is something I found alarming. We're going to try and correct that," Koehler said. "We think the state of Illinois needs to have a record of who's doing business in this state. That's not unreasonable. People in rural areas need to know what's really going on in their communities."

A second bill would close a frequently used loophole in Illinois law that allows new confinements to be constructed without a permit when they can be deemed an expansion of previous livestock operations.

The third would require that facilities file waste management plans before they are constructed, and publicly disclose these plans if county officials and local residents request hearings on the proposed operations. Currently in Illinois, any facility housing up to 12,499 grown pigs can begin operations without disclosing that kind of information. The waste plans concern nearby farmers because the facilities apply stored manure to nearby cropland as fertilizer, and overapplication can lead to toxic runoff and devastate the surrounding environment.

And the final bill would give neighbors standing to challenge the Agriculture Department in court if they think mistakes were made in approving a construction permit. Citizens currently have no recourse once the permit is approved, even if they believe the department's decision was flawed. The bill also would double the amount of time local residents have to request an informational hearing and object to a proposed confinement. Such hearings are held if a local county board requests one or if at least 75 citizens petition. But many farmers and small-town residents told the Tribune they felt the meetings were meaningless and their concerns were ignored or ridiculed.

Koehler said of the state's booming livestock industry: "We're seeing an increase in activity and an increase in frustration."

Both the Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Pork Producers Association declined to comment Tuesday on the four proposed bills, saying they have not reviewed the details of the legislation.

The two organizations carry significant political weight in Springfield and in 2014 shot down a similar, ambitious effort to overhaul the livestock act. They, along with other agriculture groups, argue that large livestock confinements provide jobs in rural counties as well as a market for local grain farmers, and help hold down the market price of the most widely consumed meat in the world.

The Tribune series sparked calls for reform from lawmakers including U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin as well as local efforts to halt or slow the construction of new facilities. The series found that hog waste spills accounted for nearly half of the 1 million fish killed in Illinois water pollution incidents from 2005 to 2014 and impaired 67 miles of rivers and waterways during that time.

Neighboring farmers also said their lives and property values were ruined by noxious gases from the giant confinements. Hog waste releases hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, which can cause respiratory illness when mixed with airborne animal dander and fecal dust, public health studies have found.

"Small-town America here in Illinois along with rural families and businesses are being sold out due to the lack of adequate laws for industrial animal confinement operations," said Heidi Foil, whose home and animal care business are located roughly 2 miles from a pair of proposed 20,000-hog confinements in Vermilion County. Foil said at the news conference that she also fears that waste released from the underground storage pits will ruin a stream that runs through her property.

She said of Illinois: "We've become a lax and cheap place for mass numbers of these factory farms to set up shop."

Matt Howe, an eighth-generation grain and livestock farmer, said he resigned from the Fulton County Farm Bureau's board of directors earlier this year to protest the group's apparent support of a proposed 20,000-head hog confinement about 3,000 feet from his farm and home.

"The land that we use is not just a tool to pad portfolios," Howe said. "It's a living, breathing thing rooted in my community."

After the news conference, Jennifer Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council, an advocacy group, said Koehler is working with a coalition of rural legislators to get the agricultural interests to negotiate.

She called the bills a solid first step. "There's more we'd like to do, but these are reforms we want to see enacted," Walling said.

(originally posted by Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/pork/ct-pork-legislation-met-20170328-story.html)

The Environmental Impact of Music Festivals - IT'S A DISASTER, KIDS!

Trashed: Music Festivals Are Environmental Disasters

By Katie Bain, July 2013

LA Weekly

"Beyond good vibes and heady memories, a primary export of U.S. music festivals is garbage. At the big events like Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, literally tons of trash are created by fans, vendors and artists. Add the mass energy consumption and weighty carbon footprint of 100,000 people driving to a venue, and these big events can be environmentally problematic.

It probably will get worse before it gets better, as the festival circuit continues its rapid expansion. Events like Coachella and Sasquatch now occupy two weekends each, while the trendiest promoters are taking their parties to sea. (And we all know how filthy cruise ships can be.)

Most festivals don't seem to be making big efforts to be green, as anyone who has seen their refuse bins overflowing with plastic water bottles can attest. The behind-the-scenes garbage pile at Coachella, which hosts some 160,000 folks over two weekends, is particularly mountainous, and other large events suffer as well.

"Sasquatch was more like 'Trashquatch.' It was awful," says Tucker Gumber, who attends festivals constantly — he hit 18 of them in 2012 alone — and reviews them on his website, thefestivalguy.com. "The grounds are so pretty, but inside there weren't enough trash cans, there were no cleaning crews coming through, and the trash next to my campsite didn't get emptied all weekend."

Some organizers, however, are focused on neutralizing the environmental effect of the pop-up cities they create. Take Lightning in a Bottle, the electronic music, yoga and arts festival, which has its eighth itineration this weekend in Temecula. Eco-responsibility is in the event's mission statement; organizers brag about stages made from recycled materials. Portions of the event — which hosts 14,000 people — are powered by solar energy, and there are local organic-food vendors. An extensive waste-reduction program is manned by a volunteer "green team," which is 120 people strong. Many can be found backstage, elbows deep in waste, sorting refuse. Not exactly most folks' idea of a wild party.

"A lot of volunteers complain at first," says Shena Jade Jensen, Lightning in a Bottle's sustainability director, "but we've had people say that it was life-changing because they realize, when they're in it, how much waste we're creating and how big a difference recycling makes when done properly."

Lightning in a Bottle's Temple of Consciousness area offers workshops on topics including permaculture, healthy eating and meditation. Attendees have the option to purchase carbon credits to offset their trip to the festival. (And many of them do — the festival also claims 100 percent participation among its organizers.) Rideshare buses travel to the site from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, and attendees who drive in solo must pay $30. Lightning in a Bottle also provides free filtered water, so long as folks bring their own containers. "Attendees should be upset when they have to pay $5 for a tiny bottle of water," Jensen says.

These types of efforts have earned Lightning in a Bottle top accolades from A Greener Festival, a U.K.-based nonprofit that judges events of this kind. The organization also praised Milwaukee's zero-emissions Rock the Green festival (which was canceled for 2013) and Nevada's Symbiosis Gathering.

Bonnaroo — which hosts 100,000 people in rural Tennessee every June — was the biggest U.S. festival to be highlighted by the nonprofit. "We've got an aggressive recycling program, yoga, meditation, free water and composting," notes Richard Goodstone, co-founder of Superfly Productions, the company behind Bonnaroo and San Francisco's Outside Lands.

Meanwhile Burning Man, the 60,000-person new age–y music and arts party in the northern Nevada desert, emphasizes "leave-no-trace" efforts; attendees are known to self-regulate in order to keep even the tiniest bits of trash off the ground.Coachella seems to be less successful when it comes to sustainability, despite recycling and carpool programs, free water for folks who turn in used water bottles, and other initiatives over the years. Eventgoers who try to dispose of their food waste have had trouble, for example: The recycling, compost and trash bins are confusingly labeled, and as a result many have been piled high with garbage. (A representative from the company that puts on Coachella declined to be interviewed for this article.)

In any case, it's easy to see how even well-intended fests might be tempted to hold back green initiatives that are too expensive. "If it's 10 times the cost, we may have to say that we're not going to do the most sustainable option," Goodstone says. "We can only do so much based on our finances."

Festival devotee Gumber says electronic dance music events tend to be the dirtiest, and indeed Electric Daisy Carnival and HARD seem to provide recycling bins as more of a token gesture. (While EDC parent company Insomniac had plans to launch a comprehensive recycling program, those efforts have been shelved for the time being.)

"Electronic music culture has always been about community, but green has been more fringe," says Janine Jordan, founder of the nonprofit Electronic Music Alliance. "It pushes some people away for some reason."

To help counteract this mindset, volunteers from the arts collective Do Lab — which puts on Lightning in a Bottle — have gone on to become sustainability directors at other festivals. Also helpful? When a festival owns its own land, such as Bonnaroo, which bought several hundred farmland acres at its location in 2007. This allowed Superfly to improve its water-filtration systems and install compost pads, among other improvements. The fest's "Clean Vibes" crew (born out of the earthy Phish scene) picks up garbage piles left by attendees at campsites. The crew also posts information at all the waste stations to teach folks what should be sorted, recycled and put in the trash. Coachella could benefit from some folks on-site like this.

Lightning in a Bottle even plays a song with lyrics encouraging folks to pick up their junk after the music's over each night, which ensures the grounds are kept fairly tidy. Festival organizers are looking into options for algae generators and — brace yourself — turning human waste into energy.While such initiatives might sound daunting, to say the least, for $350 A Greener Festival will come to your event and assess what can be done to make it more eco-friendly. The nonprofit emphasizes that these types of programs can help generate long-term savings, and considering that it can't be cheap to move giant piles of garbage out of exceedingly remote locations, this isn't hard to believe.

Of course, much of this is in the hands of those in attendance; not surprisingly, attendees at the more hippie-dippy events tend to be the best about cleaning up after themselves. But it's clear that organizers can change folks' behavior patterns. It involves providing the right incentives, the right penalties and, perhaps more than anything else, making it easy to be green.

"Thousands of people are coming to an event that's going to be one of the most memorable experiences of their year," Jensen says. "It's up to [festival organizers] to decide what kind of legacy they want to create in the world out of that." "

(from http://www.laweekly.com/music/trashed-music-festivals-are-environmental-disasters-2614424)

ANIMAL ACTIVISTS ARE SHOUTING OUT THEIR CRIMES ONLINE

By Josh Saul, April 2016

Nicole Kissane and Joseph Buddenberg spray-painted the word killer in red on the front of Furs by Graf in San Diego, glued the locks, and sprayed smelly butyric acid into the store. The animal rights activists then walked to the homes of the store’s elderly owners, where they spray-painted animal murderer in red on an old recreational vehicle and poured muriatic acid on the driveway to stain the concrete. From there, they went to the home of the owners’ daughter, where they painted her pickup truck red and dumped muriatic acid on her porch, according to federal prosecutors. About a week after the vandalism at Furs by Graf in July 2013, a website called DirectAction.info posted an anonymous dispatch.

"In the early morning hours of July 16, 2013, anarchists in San Diego took action on behalf of the millions of fur-bearing animals who are trapped, enslaved and killed to sustain the global fur industry,” it read, describing the damage done at each location. “These actions were taken to vocalize the cries of the millions of wild beings yearning for freedom. This is in vain unless it inspires others to liberate and sabotage. Every fur farm prisoner deserves a jail break.”

Later that month, Kissane and Buddenberg withdrew $300 from a bank in Escondido, California and drove for 18 hours to Plains, Montana, where they snuck onto Fraser Fur Farm in the early morning and freed a bobcat, court papers state. “Emaciated and filthy, his beauty was evident even through the matted fur and traumatized stare, with his bushy jowls and black ear tufts,” read the DirectAction.info dispatch that was posted about two weeks later. “This should be a lesson to Frazier [sic]. If you ever again hold wild creatures captive on your land, we will breach it to free them.”

Two days after releasing the bobcat, Kissane and Buddenberg cut the chicken-wire fence behind the Moyle Mink Ranch in Burley, Idaho, avoided the security guard who patrolled the property at night, snuck on the farm and released about 3,000 mink from their cages, according to prosecutors. “Their initial timidity quickly became a cacophony of gleeful squealing, playing, cavorting, and swimming in the creek that runs directly behind the Moyle property,” stated the dispatch posted on DirectAction.info the next day under the title, “First Fur Farm Raid of the Summer!”

Kissane and Buddenberg continued releasing mink and vandalizing businesses that used animal products throughout the summer and fall of 2013. The pair drove over 40,000 miles to free almost 7,000 mink from farms in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and did more than $400,000 worth of damage, federal authorities said. Dispatches were posted on DirectAction.info after most of their raids. When the pair was arrested and indicted on federal animal enterprise terrorism charges last year, the FBI press release said, “To publicize their crimes, the defendants drafted ‘communiqués’ describing their conduct and posted them on websites associated with animal rights extremists.” In court papers filed less than a month before Kissane and Buddenberg pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to commit animal enterprise terrorism, prosecutors described the communiqués in court papers that read, “This encourages others to follow in their footsteps.”

DirectAction.info posts dispatches from animal activists across the world announcing their crimes—or “actions”—with about 140 “communiqués” last year describing crimes in the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia. Sample headlines include, “Hundreds of Hares Liberated” in Italy, “Rabbits Rescued from Lab Breeder” in Brazil and “Partridges Freed” in Turkey. The page lists a West Palm Beach, Florida, address and a data encryption code, which activists use to securely send in their dispatches—often from public computers at libraries or FedEx office locations. Many of the same dispatches are also posted on the website for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office. DirectAction.info—which calls its webpage “Bite Back”—didn’t respond to a Newsweek email seeking comment.

Publishing online accounts of your crimes—even anonymously—brings significant risks. Federal agents check sites like DirectAction.info regularly to learn of animal rights-motivated crimes that local cops don’t always flag up to them. Publicity can increase law enforcement attention. And if the activist is arrested, their dispatches are noted in the indictment and throughout the ensuing plea discussions and sentencing. So why do it?

Two reasons, explains animal rights journalist Will Potter. The first is to release the animals and cause economic harm to the business. The second is to spark a discussion about how our society treats animals—and with that goal in mind, activists publish online accounts of their actions. “So part of [the goal of] these illegal actions and these communiqués is to point a spotlight on what is happening and say this is why we did this and we had no other choice,” Potter tells Newsweek. “It’s a guaranteed opportunity to have that voice heard. Whenever these communiqués are written and there’s an explanation for why an action took place, it’s overwhelmingly then referred to in the press or by the FBI pointing to that motivation.” The publicity can also make clear to business owners that the activists want them to close their doors, said Ben Rosenfeld, a San Francisco civil rights attorney who has represented many radical activists. “I can’t speak for anyone specifically, but generally sending communiques serves the purpose of letting these exploitive animal industries know that people are watching and some people are willing to take the law into their own hands in a nonviolent way,” Rosenfeld says. Tyler Lang, who was convicted of animal enterprise terrorism for releasing 2,000 mink and spraypainting “Liberation is Love” at an Illinois farm in 2013, toldNewsweek that activists publicize their actions so they can define their own motives and and goals. “The message ‘Liberation is Love’ was a response to groups like Fur Commission USA using their influence to try to paint activists as ‘terrorists’ rather than as individuals motivated by compassion to save animals who current laws have clearly failed,” Lang said in an email.

The communiqués have been vital to most prosecutions of animal activists—making them a “double-edged sword” that attracts the desired publicity but can also link suspects to specific crimes or be used by prosecutors to argue for harsher federal charges under the federal animal enterprise terrorism act, Potter says. “In this case, if there wasn’t a communiqué, if there wasn’t a movement affiliated with these actions, it would just be a property crime. But now we’re talking about terrorism because there’s a nexus and a connection to animal rights activism.” Potter also said the main tactic used by animal rights activists has shifted from releasing animals to filming undercover videos that reveal farm conditions, with those videos posted on DirectAction.info and the North American Animal Liberation Press Office.

The controversial Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was passed in 2006—critics say it wrongly brands protesters and vandals as terrorists—and applies to anyone who “intentionally damages or causes the loss of any real or personal property used by an animal enterprise.” After the passage of the AETA in 2006, there was a “dramatic drop” in the number of communiqués, as activists learned that their writing was used to classify defendants as terrorists. “I don’t think the number of crimes dropped off, but the communiqués changed pretty radically,” Potter says.

Buddenberg was one of the first people charged under the then-new AETA in 2008 for holding threatening protests at the homes of University of California Berkeley professors who used animals in their research, but a federal judge tossed out the charges in 2010 because prosecutors weren’t specific enough about the charges against him. They didn’t repeat their mistake. The January trial memo that outlined the case against Buddenberg and Kissane details everything, from how the unemployed duo funded their epic cross-country trips—stealing from stores like REI and CVS and selling the pilfered items on eBay—to how a chef caught Buddenberg writing “Directaction.info” on a bathroom wall of the University of California at Berkeley dining hall where he worked. The memo describes “militant environmental groups” like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front but stops short of saying that Buddenberg and Kissane are members. “These groups aren’t groups in the traditional sense. There is no leader, although there are influential individuals in the movement,” the memo states. “Like-minded people are encouraged to act for themselves and do what they can to effect change.”

An Idaho mink farmer said he didn’t mind the activists “bragging” about their crimes online, but he did object to them attacking the industry. “If you’re against abortion, you don’t need to go around blowing up abortion clinics. If you don’t like to hunt, don’t go hunting,” said the farmer, who asked not be named because he fears activists targeting his farm. “But the idea that we live in a country where people want to impose their values on you and force you to change your living, that’s completely un-American.” The farmer also said freed mink die quickly, with the animals getting run over by cars or starving to death when the sudden influx of predators exhausts the food supply. The recaptured animals also suffer: the farms keep mink penned in the same pairs their entire life, so the animals fight viciously when they are caught and thrown in with an unfamiliar new pen-mate.

Buddenberg is scheduled to be sentenced May 2 and Kissane will be sentenced in June. If the judge accepts the plea deal, he will do two years in prison and she will do six months. Defense attorneys for the pair declined to comment. But while Buddenberg was confined to home detention in November as his case inched forward, he showed an unabated desire to help animals and draw public attention online to their welfare. “For anyone who can help, there's a turkey in the middle of the street near my apartment. Oakland, 56th st and San pablo. I'm on house arrest so there's not much I can do,” he posted on Facebook.

(origionally postred by Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/13/animal-rights-activists-direct-action-bobcat-453253.html)

Phamily! -- RE-GROUP && RE-FOCUS !! We aren't going anywhere!

FROM HERE ON OUT . . . Well. as many of our readers may be aware we have shifted from our IRL (In Real Life, for the now-formerly-uncool others such as myself!) focus from criminal and family law to environmental and animal rights law activism and research the decision has finally been made:

Instead of closing down/retiring this entire blog, we will now be posting articles and accepting submissions and suggestions again related to the topics of environmental and animal rights, food and animal science, and (IDEALLY) our community!

Alrighty, folks, onward!!!

~Katie <3

Who the Hell are "Burners," Anyway?

By Caveat Magister                                                                                              April 2012, Burning Man Journal 

A few months ago I was asked, in one of those email groups where people ask each other things like this:  “what does it mean to be a burner?  What are the core beliefs that unite us?”

I didn’t respond, first and foremost because honest-to-God do I have that kind of time?  No I do not, and it is hugely irresponsible of people to ask me open ended questions.  It’s like offering a hypochondriac free medical advice.  His whole weekend’s shot.

But I also didn’t respond because I’d been wrestling with that question for some time … and had no good answer.

I know that the most common response is “The 10 Principles,” but … I don’t see it.  I bet 90% of the Burners reading this can’t name all 10 without looking them up.  Of that 10% who can, I bet 90% of them didn’t know all the 10 principles … or anything about the 10 principles … back when that magical moment happened and they first decided:  “Oh, I like this.  I want to be a part of this.”

It’s also commonly understood … though not often talked about … that most of us interpret the 10 Principles differently.  Some of us (I’ll raise my hand) believe that “Radical Inclusion” means “everybody can participate in Burning Man,” while others take it to mean “everybody should feel included and accepted by people at Burning Man”:  we’re worlds apart.  Exactly what “Gifting” means is not a matter of settled tort.  How “communal” does “Communal Effort” have to be?  You might as well ask how many Burners can dance on the head of a pin, except that this was settled by 2005’s massive art project “Dance on the Head of a Pin!”  It’s 82, and they light the pin on fire.  Man that really should have been funded.

The 10 Principles are great guides, very useful, and well thought out – but they can’t be the philosophical core that unites Burners if most of us don’t know what they are and those who do don’t agree on what they mean.

They may also be expanding:  several regional groups apparently have added an (unofficial?  semi-official?) “11th principle”:  Gratitude.

So I was stuck, and have been for some time.

What connects the sound camps to the Barbie Death Camp to the Heebie-Geebie Healers?  What connects the Thunderdome to hula-hooper camps to the solo camper way out at the “million dollar view”?

We’re looking for that magic, unifying moment where everything comes together – like the one where Rabbi Hillel is asked to explain the whole of Judaic thought while standing on one foot.  He lifts his left leg up, says “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.  The rest is commentary,” and puts his foot down.  Fuck yeah.

But for Burning Man I had nothing.  And while that used to be an academic question, it has now become one of some urgency: more new burners are coming in, fewer veteran burners can attend, and the nature of our community is at a crossroads.

It seems like we should have an answer.

Last weekend I sat in on Burning Man’s Regional Network Conference in San Francisco, listening to regional network reps compare issues, best practices, and thoughts about Burning Man’s future.  There were also free tacos.

Much of what I heard was inspiring (drama or not, there’s going to be *awesome* stuff happening on the playa), and edifying, and I’ll share some of it with you in future posts – and after processing the experience, two things have become clear.

First, I never want to talk about Burning Man that much ever again.  I mean, come on people:  enough’s enough.  Don’t you also watch Mad Men or something?

Second, I think there’s another approach to understanding what Burners have in common, and I’d like to present a rough draft of it here:  something to hammer to see if it holds up.

Burners are united by common actions and not common ideals:  the reasons we “burn” aren’t consistent, and don’t really matter.  What we think “burning” means isn’t consistent, and doesn’t really matter.  The fact on the ground, that we “burn,” is the only one that counts.

That may have been obvious to some of you, but I think the implications are important.

It’s consistent, first of all, with the way most of us encountered Burning Man and decided to participate:  we didn’t study up on the 10 Principles, or any other philosophy, and then say “Yes, this is for me.”  We came because we heard people were doing amazing shit:  and when we saw it we thought “I could do amazing shit too,” and changed our lives.

It’s also consistent with the way Burning Man actually evolved:  the Man burning came first, the Temporary Autonomous Zones in the desert came first;  art cars and theme camps and fire dancing came first.  It was only after Burning Man formalized and organized that the 10 Principles were developed as a way of trying to explain what the hell this is.  They were supposed to be explanations, but in fact they are aspirations:   the 10 Principles, loosely speaking, are our goals, not our commonality or raison d’etre.  They’re things we strive to be, and admire when we see in others.  They’re where we want to go … they’re our road map … but the Burn came first.  With Burning Man, the experience always comes first.  That’s key.

The idea that we’re united by our actions, rather than our motives, ideals, or thoughts, means that when we try to communicate Burning Man to the rest of the world, we do it by doing.  In many ways this is already happening:   Burning Man’s policy to the press has always been “come and participate” – never “come and watch and we’ll explain it.”  The Los Angeles area Burners have a brilliant tactic of explaining Burning Man to newcomers by having them join in the creation of a community garden … it’s much easier to get Burning Man across when you’re creating something special with others.

Perhaps most importantly, this means that there’s no restriction on our potential diversity.  While Burning Man is, as I’ve argued before, fairly homogenous compared to much of the country it pulls from, the fact that it’s about “doing” rather than “believing” means that we don’t need to ask people to leave their beliefs and principles at the door.  You can be a Christian Burner, a Hindu Burner, a Marxist Burner, a Neo-Conservative Burner (shut up, people:  yes you can).  How smart you are, or how well you parrot a few key phrases are irrelevant:  your “conversion experience” is about lending a hand, not changing your mind.

But if “Burning Man” is about verbs, not nouns:  what is that verb?  What does it mean “to burn?”  A convincing case could have once been made that it was to attend Burning Man, but that hasn’t really been true for a decade, if it ever was, and it’s certainly not true now as the Regionals pick up steam.

So:  “to Burn” can be defined as?

It comes in two parts.

Part the first:  here’s what happens.  Most of our lives are spent as agents of social control.  I don’t care how non-conformist you are, it’s generally true.  We spend our days and our nights implicitly saying “no” to one another in order to keep society functioning.  But then, for some period of time … at the burn, or a regional, or just on a good night out, we stop saying “No.”  We say “Yes.”   We stop acting as agents of social control and instead become agents of possibility:  we create possibilities that society does not normally allow, and then we participate in them – and open them up for others to participate in too.

To “Burn” is to become an agent of open possibility, creating a liminal space where something amazing can happen and anyone can join.  It doesn’t matter why you do it, what you think is happening, or what you want to get out of it.  You may not even get what you expect out of it, because you’ve given up acting as an agent of social control and have instead invited everyone to play:  you created the game but it’s not your game.  It’s a gift.

(Note that many of the principles are implied here, such as Immediacy, Gifting, Radical Self-Expression, and Radical Inclusion – but the precise meaning and exact ratio are irrelevant:  what matters is that people are doing stuff.  The principles are a road map rather than an explanation or reason.)

Part the second:  Possibility is messy.  But however messy the liminal space has gotten, you keep it from messing up the world around you.  You clean up after your possibility.  You … say it with me now … “leave no trace.”  Again, it doesn’t matter why:  whether you’re an environmentalist or a neat freak or a law-abiding citizen at heart.  What matters isn’t what you think:  it’s what you do.

So, what is a Burner?  It’s someone who Burns.  And what is to Burn, told while standing on one foot?  To Burn is to act as an agent of possibility:  creating a space where something amazing can happen, letting anyone join, and then cleaning up after it when it’s done.

The rest is commentary.

It doesn’t matter why you do it, what it means, or what you get out of it.  What matters is that you participate.

What's All the Fuss About "Leaving No Trace?"

To some, LNT stands for something very specific. For others, there mere thought that you would pay hundreds of dollars to attend an event of some sort and then you still need to clean up all your own trash, cigarette butts and all -- and (many times) no trash cans to be seen anywhere in the scene. So, before I say it all wrong, we begin our mini-series on "LEAVE NO TRACE," starting with the following from Burn.Life ...


LEAVE NO TRACE

You've heard this already, no doubt, but do you understand what it really means and why it's so important? What does it mean? "Leave no trace" literally means that - leave no discernible trace behind after the event, to all extents possible (sometimes nearly impossible). The only way this works is if each camp and each camper in that camp is responsible, completely, for their own waste, right down to that pistachio shell on the ground or that bit of clothing lint....or god forbid a feather. (Seriously - they're cautiously allowed out there these days but you're risking your life if certain Burners catch you molting onto the playa.) Why is it so important?

LNT is perhaps the most important of the principles Burners are roughly guided by because failure to follow it has a very formal and defined consequence: our inability to continue holding the event on federal land. The Black Rock Desert is federal, and is managed by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), to whom the Burning Man organization must provide satisfaction that it has indeed left no trace after the city shuts down for the year and disappears. If we fail that test, we will fail to get a permit to build the city. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. The Black Rock desert is a blank canvas, with nothing to hide or obscure trash besides the ground itself, and yet 70,000 people manage to collectively gather and clean up after themselves like civilized adults. After we all leave, a group of hardcore volunteers stay and literally search every single inch of ground that we touched to find whatever we left behind. So, not only do we need to LNT in order to keep having Burning Man there, but if we don't, volunteers have to clean up after us. That would make us assholes. Let's not be assholes!

Tips and Tricks for Leaving No Trace

1. Don't drop things on the ground. Simple as that. Control your shit.
2. When you leave your personal campsite, sweep every square inch of it, picking up everything that wasn't there, down to the splinter size. If it's visible, get rid of it. (Now you see why glitter is the mortal enemy of the playa!)
3. When your camp leaves its campsite, do a line sweep, meaning you walk through it while walking close to each other in a line, to make sure you miss nothing. Do it twice!
4. Remember, no grey water - water you've washed with, cleaned with, showered with, etc - should touch the playa. There are a bunch of options for getting rid of grey water.

Garbage Minimization
Because you need to pack out your trash, it behooves you to consider how you're going to manage your trash during the week - cans, paper towels, baby wipes (for you to clean dust off yourself), bottles, water jugs, and so on can really start to take up space and there are no garbage bins to put them in.

Burner ShiftyFox has some great recommendations:

 "If you do the trash system the right way, you can go home with almost nothing left and make a little money in the process. So here I am going to share with you beautiful people, my ideal form of a Burning Man trash system that works really great.

• Have a container for burnable trash such as paper and food scraps, etc.
• Have a container for recyclables such as glass and plastic.
• Have a separate container for recyclable aluminum cans.
• Have a container for non burnables such as plastic items, wrappers, plates, utensils etc.
• Another tip: Burner Matt Smalley recommends color-coding your bins and putting signs on them so you spend less time digging through your trash later to separate stuff that went into the wrong bin/bag.  Collapsible laundry baskets work well.
• Unwrap everything at home. The less packaging you bring, the less you have to deal with while there.

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Now toward the end of the week you can take your burnable garbage to a number of burn barrels and dispose of it there. Or you can do like we do and have your own fire pit in camp and just continuously put your burnable refuse and food scraps here, and burn it nightly throughout the week.

Now also at the end of the week you take your recyclable aluminum cans to this lovely camp here: http://burningman.org/.../infrastructure/recycle-camp/and that takes care of that. Maybe even volunteer to can crush for an hour if you feel so inclined.

Now all that is left to take back with you is non burnable garbage and your glass and plastic recyclables. When you get to Reno there are a number of places that will pay you good money for your glass and plastic recyclables. Boom! Money for the gas tank.

Now all you are really left with is the non burnable garbage, which really amounts to almost nothing if you did this system correctly.

I hope this helps."

-ShiftyFox

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Thanks ShiftyFox! That does help! You're not nearly as sketchy as your name suggests, despite my previous bad experiences with vulpine con men.

(origionally posted at http://www.burn.life/leave-no-trace.html)