Green Year

Let the blowback begin. After fits and starts and plenty of navel gazing, a simple dinner with friends in Redwood City allowed us to get outside our  mental culdesac and realize our instincts were right. As Patrick put it, when asked if having innovators at Burning Man would somehow diminish his experience, “no, sounds great, i’d love to learn about that stuff. and if people have a problem with it, fuck em, you know? because if we don’t do something about climate change, there won’t be an event to go to.”

Word. Burning Man is a globally unmatched collection of early adopters, innovators, and change agents. It’s among the most fertile mental soil on the planet, and if we’re going to make a difference in the fight against climate change, then it only makes sense to bring the best, newest, most promising ideas to the desert and share then ( albiet in a non-commercial, non-commodified, un-branded way ). Delay or sticking our head in the sand simply won’t do.
We’ve had huge response so far. Melody Haller of the Antenna Group has, not surprisingly, several of her company’s clients who’re interested in bringing their widgets out to the playa for people to see and kick the tires of. But not all are interested, as it’s an interesting value proposition, to be sure. One CEO, who’ll remain anonymous, replied to her invite  ” Melody, Have you been to this event before? As far as I know it is a drug induced orgy from what my friends have told me who have attended. Is this something corporations want to be associated with? “ 

The answer, for many, is a resounding yes.
AG and I have both had a pretty significant shift on this in recent days. Too much time on Tribe, ePlaya, and other digital echo chambers have caused us to, temporarily at least, loose site of the big picture.  Her latest missive on it is here.

So, let’s start talking about some cool stuff you’ll see on the playa this year. The folks from Chlorophyll Collective have some mind-bending ideas on how to make algae eat generator exhaust and create biodiesel, a sort of snake eating its tail tale that may not be so far out there; an outfit called LiveFuels is proposing to do just that on a commercial scale (and are also an Antenna client–small world, non?)
Today and tomorrow from 12-3 Chicken John will be showing off his gasifier truck outside Ritual, giving rides and raising cash to buy a pelitizer so Ritual can become the first coffee shop anywhere to run on its own garbage.  The truck is part of a fleet of vehicles that are the demon spawn of the Mechabolic.

And of course we’re building a massive, 60kW solar array to power the man base complex, as part of our planned solar work that will hopefully when it’s done included 210kW permanent solar in Gerlach, and 90kW in Lovelock, courtesy our partnership with MMA Renewable Ventures. 

Meanwhile, from the “it doesn’t have to be green to be green” file, check this thing out. The Swarm is autonomous. The Swarm demonstrates emergent behavior. The Swarm will know you are there. The Swarm runs on green electrons. Hella cool, yo.

More to come.

What is Burning Man, when you get down to it? Alt world escapism?  Incubator for new social constructs? Just a fine place in the middle of nowhere to fuck some shit up with friends? Does it, to put a point on it, mean anything, and if so, what?

I’ll not even think of presuming to answer, but I invite you to read the following:

Burning Man is a uniquely evolving experiment - the only event in the world of its size/kind that is entirely created by its participants. The organizers and volunteers that help produce the event are an equal part of that creative process, and after long reflection, the Man Base team has decided to reach out to people that are presenting innovative, realworld solutions to the environmental crisis we’re all facing, and ask them to participate in creating the Green Man pavilion.This is one of the bigger chunks of the machinery that’ll make the Green Man either fly, or crater.

It is a dicey prospect, fraught with risk, inviting these folks and trying to figure out how to showcase the ideas without the branding. Are we selling out, inviting the Trojans into our citadel? Will this, as some have already suggested, be the crack in the wall of lawyers and money we’ve created around outselves that has thusfar kept the big bad marketing world out? Is burning man getting too serious for it’s own good?

Dunno. Hope not. I’m not even sure we know what it is we’re doing yet. We’re calling it a world’s fair or expo because that’s the language we have available. Before someone mashed up the words “theme” and “camp” we didn’t even have the concept of a theme camp. So world’s fair, expo-that may not be what this turns out to be.

We’re going to put a whole lot of smart people and good ideas in the middle of the playa and see what happens.

Could be nothing.

Could be something great.

We’ll see.  Your comments and thoughts invited.

Aww, shucks. On message and everthang:

Burning Man goes green

Local gearheads turned reluctant environmentalists?

By Steven T. Jones

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey chooses the theme for each year’s event — such as 2002’s the Floating World and last year’s Hope and Fear — but it usually doesn’t have much impact on the basic character of the event. This year’s theme, Green Man, is different. More after the jump