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Monk on bicycle at Burning Man at twilight

Letter to America:
Burning Man in a Warming World

By Suzanne Roberts

Burning Man shows us that we can only survive the apocalypse with a fierce community connection, creative improvisation, and a serious devotion to play.

 
I don dust goggles and a face mask, ride my neon-flashing pink cruiser across the dark, dusty streets and into the open playa. I reach the Thunderdome, where cage fighters swing on cables from an open dome toward opponents; a delighted crowd clings to the metal ribcage, watching the dusty skirmish below. Tonight is even more lively at the Thunderdome because it’s DPW friends and family night (which includes those who work gate, perimeter, and exodus). DPW is Burning Man’s Department of Public Works, the group responsible for building, maintaining, and supporting the physical infrastructure of Black Rock City, the temporal city in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where Burning Man takes place. DPW comes out to the playa a month early to build the city, and then they stay after everything’s over, ensuring the adherence of leave-no-trace principles. Most of DPW are volunteers, and without them, there would be no Burning Man. The many jobs I’ve volunteered for over the nearly two decades of attending Burning Man are important—greeting at the gate, mixing drinks and tending bar, delivering mail, helping out with art tours, performing poetry and burlesque—but none are so vital as the hard and dirty work DPW does. And tonight, they’ve taken over the Thunderdome, adding to the fervor of the already post-punk Mad Max, hardcore vibe.

Thrash metal music blasts, the leather-clad audience dances and cheers, and a banner reads THIS AIN’T NO GOD-DAMNED COUNTRY CLUB. This scene might not be the picture Instagram spectators have of Burning Man—those scantily clothed sparkle pony supermodels arrayed in G-strings and floating, diaphanous wings, all glitter and dust. No, this is a scene straight from a post-apocalyptic novel or film, though the mixed-gender fighters wield soft bats, and the spectacle is more playful than anything else—a gladiator match set in the future, where scrappers emerge mostly unscathed, thriving on dust and adrenaline. I gaze at the feral scene, thinking, So this is how we do it—we can only survive the apocalypse with a fierce community connection, creative improvisation, and a serious devotion to play.

The Thunderdome on DPW friends and family night is only one version of Burning Man, as I could have easily spent my evening dancing to Motown, attending a sober spa party, learning the biology of fairy shrimp, or practicing inflatable goat yoga—all interactive events and activities that have been gifted by the community. Every year the week leading up to Labor Day, Black Rock City—a metropolis complete with a post office and radio station, airport and recycling center, mini-golf course and a roller-skating rink, boutiques and night clubs, and tons of interactive public art—is erected in the desert and then disappears, virtually without a trace.

On the high swings at Burning Man as the sun sets
Photo by Suzanne Roberts.
Burning Man isn’t so much a festival as it is a fully functioning, volunteer-run city, one more populous than Nevada’s capital city. At Burning Man, pop-up dance parties hosted by moving golden, fire-breathing dragons or Mayan warriors serve as symbols of our fleeting world—a celebration of human creativity in the face of impermanence—but also an object lesson on the ways we might live more sustainably, letting go of our outdated devotion to permeance. Burning Man culminates with a conflagration devouring a wooden effigy, the eponymous man and the quieter epilogue of the burning temple, a sacred space where people have left shrines to their dead. Both these spectacles celebrate impermanence and the fleeting nature of the things we build, proving we really can leave the land exactly as we found it. To date, Burning Man is the largest leave-no-trace event in the world.

Burning Man participants, or Burners, bring everything needed to survive one of the harshest landscapes in the world: intense sun and heat, freezing nighttime temperatures, dust storms, cyclones, and as you may have heard, intense rainfall and lots of mud. During rainstorms, the fine, alkaline dust quickly turns to muck that will clog bicycle tires, car and RV axles, and adhere to boots in a sticky mess, rendering a short walk difficult to impossible.  

Last year, it rained on an already-saturated playa. Exaggerated media reports heavy on schadenfreude and light on reality, as well as conspiracy-filled social media posts (cue Ebola!) made the situation seem like a disaster, and it might have been if the flooding had happened elsewhere in America. Yet Burners knew they weren’t at a God-damned country club: they understood that they were out in nature where weather happens. Despite missives from the outside world, many Burners praised the community that had pulled together; others claimed that the muddy burn was the best they had ever experienced because of the ways everyone shared food, water, and shelter, drawing people more closely together in an already bonded community. What happened during the flooding at Burning Man is an example of what’s already coming for all our cities in this era of extreme temperatures, drought, megafires, hurricanes, and an expanding Tornado Alley.

Beautiful lit sculpture tree at Burning Man
Photo by Suzanne Roberts.

The decommodification of our gifts at Burning Man means that we offer them in a spirit of playfulness and love, so unlike our late-stage capitalistic transactions where everything is for sale. While it’s true natural disasters often draw communities together, capitalism often divides us, making a situation much harder for the least privileged among us. In my many years of attending Burning Man, I’ve been invited into strangers’ RVs to escape dust storms, escorted back to my camp in whiteout conditions, gifted everything from showers and bicycle repair to snow cones, pickles, and free hugs. In return, I’ve offered meals, water and wine, rides off the playa, and even opened my house to people I had just met so they could regroup before traveling back home.

In contrast, during a recent wildfire evacuation from my home in South Lake Tahoe, the surrounding hotels quadrupled their prices, meeting the frantic demand with overpriced supply. During the rains at Burning Man, however, participants freely opened their RVs to those sleeping in tents. We already know that the consequences of severe weather events are not egalitarian, and if our society encouraged more gifting, those who have more resources might be inclined to help others in need. If we have any hope of getting through the Anthropocene, we should take Black Rock City as a case in point.

While radical self-expression might not seem important when we consider our response to natural disasters, the reality is that if we were allowed to present ourselves in our most authentic ways, and others were as well, our social groups would not isolate and neglect others we deem different from ourselves. At Burning Man, it’s allowable, encouraged even, to step outside societal constraints and norms, creating a safe environment among all participants, where camaraderie replaces shame. By celebrating each unique individual, we create a more caring collective. If we’re able to express our true natures, we are happier, and happy people make the world a better, safer place.

Fire twirler at night at Burning Man
Photo by Suzanne Roberts.
On our way back from the DPW night at Thunderdome, we rode the dark streets, neon-flashing bicycles glowing in the swirl of dust. My friend Marnee said, “Stop and check this out!” We pulled over to a man at the Rogue National Village playing a concert on an upright piano suspended high above by chains. A rope net stretched below him, presumably to catch him if he fell. Dancers spun fire at the camp next door, in time with the piano melody. Gazing up at the musician I knew that this moment in time would never happen again, not exactly like this. And that’s how Burning Man feels, moment after moment, where you happen to catch a concert played in suspension or join a dance party on your way back to camp after using the porta potty in the middle of the night. Face-to-face encounters feel like serendipity, because everything is a happy coincidence, a meeting of time and space that will never be repeated, not quite like that, ever again.

While it’s true that Black Rock City is a temporary city, whose elaborate social and physical infrastructure lasts only until the day after the temple burn, this fleeting city begs the question in regards to the actual permanence of all cities. Systems we take for granted—the power grid, clean drinking water, the ability to safely travel—may not be reliable during severe weather events. How might we reconsider our own communities and civic duties if we believed our towns and cities could disappear without a trace? How might we pull together in our own communities and use our collective creativity to improvise?

Burning Man provides visionary approaches to societal issues, and as a result, many world-wide community initiatives have already taken root at Burning Man, such as Burners Without Borders (BWB), founded in response to Hurricane Katrina. BWB has grown into a community-led nonprofit organization, facilitating disaster relief programs and supporting community resilience and grassroots humanitarian resources, including 32 groups comprised of 1,300 volunteers across the globe.

Mother and daughter at twilight at Burning Man
Photo by Suzanne Roberts.

Burning Man is often called counterculture. Maybe it’s time to take the lessons of this unique social experiment, examining the way in which our American culture has lived counter to both the environment and the basic tenets of our human communities. Burning Man enables us to envision a future where there’s more love for one another and for the planet, one that might even include post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style cage fighters in fishnet stockings and dusty leather chaps—a vision of the world that’s more friendly than frightening.

 

 

Suzanne RobertsSuzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award and published in a new edition in 2023), as well as four collections of poems. Named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic’s Traveler, Suzanne’s work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and included in The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, National Geographic Traveler, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno, teaches in the low residency MFA in creative writing at UNR-Tahoe, and lives with her husband in South Lake Tahoe, California. She’s currently at work on a creative writing craft book based on her newsletter: 52 Writing Prompts.

Read more work by Suzanne Roberts appearing in Terrain.org: “Dreaming in the Pyrocene,” an excerpt of Animal Bodies, plus “Women Writers in the Wild,” Lilace Mellin Guignard and Suzanne Roberts in Conversation; Letter to America; and two poems.

Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.

Header photo of Burning Man by Suzanne Roberts. Photo of Suzanne Roberts by Lauren Lindley.

  1. It costs hundreds of dollars to attend Burning Man. I can’t believe the cost of attending is not mentioned at all! My mouth fell open when I read this sentence: ‘The decommodification of our gifts at Burning Man means that we offer them in a spirit of playfulness and love, so unlike our late-stage capitalistic transactions where everything is for sale’ when it COSTS HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS to attend!!!

  2. Burning Man attracts elites to party and pretend they’re in a classless, moneyless society. Private jets flying in and air-conditioned domes burning propane for “fun”.

    I believe in play and community connection, too, but at what cost to the planet when Burning Man generates roughly 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually?

    1. I just got home from Burning Man tonight, and as I was getting ready for bed, I thought how glad I am to not have to pee in a bottle tonight like I did all week at Burning Man. Is that what it means to be “an elite” pretending to live in a classless society? Of course Burning Man attracts a billionaire here and there (especially those in high tech because of the extreme innovation that happens there), but most of us are not that. Frankly, your depiction of Burning Man is completely unfounded in reality. My guess is that out of 70k attendees, a handful arrive in private jets! I’m also guessing you have never attended? And if you have, I want to camp with you and all those elites with air conditioning—that sounds WAY easier than busting my ass building a bar in a white-out conditions in order to create an experience for my fellow attendees, which is exactly what I did this week.

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