Post event, it will all be hauled to the Jepson processing facility in Sacramento. The resultant organic compost will end up on vineyards in northern California.
It’s like some weird sister city program, and on the surface it doesn’t make any sense: why go all the way there, to haul garbage? The answer lies in who Burning Man/Burners are, our relationship to San Francisco, and the power of thinking outside the box. The city needs to increase composting, period. Doing so has huge benefits, all over the place. So they could do the usual–go to green events, hand out flyers, that sort of thing. Or, they can come to the event and let people see the benefit first hand, in an environment where they’re hyper sensitized to garbage. Figure 1/2 the people on the playa are from SF, that means thousands of people seeing and experiencing the benefit of composting, and taking that home with them.  Makes a lot more sense that putting up another bus billboard or the like.

Only in San Francisco would we have a bureaucrat who can see the potential here, then help realize it. Everybody wins, and again, BMORG isn’t stepping in to do it for people, rather they’re letting the answer spontaneously emerge. Someone will find a reason to criticize this, I’m certain of that, but then again, those that don’t often criticize those that do. I favor the later type myself.

So, back to it. Today we picked up another exhibitor, working on a display about seeding the ocean to generate plankton growth, which will absorb carbon. we’ll put em with the ship kite people, good combo.

Majana, Treehugger and Current TV will be promoting a contest to see who can come up with the best open source solution to the global environmental crisis. Winner gets to come to the event, show off their stuff, have it featured on Current’s coverage. Two media outlets, working together to get the word out on a completely unbranded, open source, best-in-class environmental solution. Talk about inverting the paradigm; it’s exactly the sort of thing we’d hoped this year would do.

And so it is.

On another note, amazing how the background noise falls off when you stop leaning out the window and listening to it, and instead focus on the task at hand. Actions speak louder than words, and are much more lasting. That Ted, right again…

But then I realized the degree to which some people have nothing better to do than constantly look for something to fear, something to criticize. I started fearing that my words would be thrown back at me, months later, and that people wouldn’t take the time, or the care, to differentiate between my personal, evolving opinions, and my public facing job.

Which is exactly what has happened.  There’s probably not a single person working for burning man who has been more open, more accessible, more willing to discuss this year’s event on the record than me, except perhaps Andie Grace. And in return, I’ve become a lightning rod for every complaint imaginable. Every slight. You name it, I’ve heard it.

Suspecting that would become the case caused me to stop reflecting in this space, a decision I now see was warranted. It’s too bad, really. It could have been a good place to see the evolution of an idea unfold. Instead, it’s become a monument to the banality of reflexive fear of change.

Doing it would have been easy-ish–call Waste Management, and for $495 they’d bring and drop one of those monster 30 yard ( cubic ) sorting bins, with all the slots for green glass and so forth. Interesting tidbit–those bins can’t actually be filled with glass, cause they’ll become to heavy to lift and will cleave open like a tanker on an iceberg.  But then we would have started down the deep dark path of not having people take care of their own shit, which is in part one of the fascinating, wonderful things about Black Rock City–we have no trash cans, so we have no trash. Kind of like London when they pulled them all so the IRA would quit stuffing semtex into trash bins, only without the crisp wrappers and cigs littering the streets.

So we decided not to, and then something interesting happened. You may know that each year our External Relations Team takes different public officials on tours of BRC–congressional staff, city council types, that sort of thing. Last year for reasons I can’t recall we extended invites to area managers for Albertsons in Reno. We had a nice took, they took photos, and that was it.

dramatic pause…

Or was it? Seems almost simultaneously with our deciding NOT to provide recycling bins ( lamentable, since virtually every dropoff point in Reno is closed on Labor Day ) those same area managers contacted someone in the Reno BM community, and offered to put recycling dumpsters on their lots, at their own expense, and then print thousands of little hang tags the greeters could hang out, showing where exactly to get to those drop off points on their way home. How cool is that? Very.  They came, they got it, they went home, they thought “hmm, how can we contribute?”, and this is what they came up with. At the same fracking time as we were thinking about it. Neat.O.

Our lesson? Don’t do it for em, and it’ll get done anyway, and in a way that creates community, instead of just outsourcing the problem solving. Little things, but they add up, ya know? We might just be on to something here..

Well, neither do they. Or rather, not in the stereotypical eco-neurotic way most hippies come across as. Yes, I’m using shorthand, get over it.

TH is more about real people, living real lives, of all time conscience, part time ability/desire to worry. Anyway, like their style.

So when she called wanting to do a radio interview, I was stoked. And here it is.

Google. Black. Saves several metric fucktons of power. Specifically, an estimated 750MW per year.

Simple. Powerful. Viral.

Read more here.  

I digress.

Here’s one from Ecorazzi,   and a really great story from Daniel Terdiman on CNET, seen via our little blog.

What it posits, in his usual three examples and a punchline style and obligatory mention of how things are flatter than they used to be, is that by rebranding the idea of ‘green,’ and with good old american know-how, we can beat this pesky global warming gang!

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.
Doesn’t that sound good?

“It’s about getting our best brains out of hedge funds and into innovations that will not only give us the clean-power industrial assets to preserve our American dream but also give us the technologies that billions of others need to realize their own dreams without destroying the planet. It’s about making America safer by breaking our addiction to a fuel that is powering regimes deeply hostile to our values. And, finally, it’s about making America the global environmental leader, instead of laggard, “

Hell’s yea! I’ll admit, it sounds pretty good to me, especially the part about America being a leader. The thought of going through the mental gear thrashing required to move from the idea of self as American (read=member in good standing of world-striding collossus ) to american ( read=some guy in a place that used to matter and how is home to old people and hollywood, plus some cowboys, nei how, Shanghai boss!) is extremely unpleasant, to say the least.

One final, somewhat related thought: it came to be in a blinding flash the other day, the absolute venality of the corporate titans and their shills who denied climate change for so long. They did the math and played the odds, and will win either way. Consider: either (a) they’re right, in which case spending all that money capping their industry would be unfair and wasteful or (b) we’re right, but they denied it to save money, drove the price of a more and more limited resource through the roof and made a fortune.  So now they’ve made their pile of cash, and continue to ( Etrade’s energy sector is up 32% in six months ), and will now have enough money to get early and deep into any emerging solutions that the rest of us will soon be SCREAMING for, regardless of who they come from.  Gotta give the fuckers credit, they play to win.