“Leave No Trace” has always been an honored credo of the Boy Scouts of America. The trumpeted tenet is supposed to refer to ethical guidelines which preach having a minimal impact on land, nature and wildlife. But according to a recent investigation, the Boy Scouts have been caught logging over 34,000 acres of pristine forest over the last 20 years, including 60 clearcuts and 35 salvage harvests. They’ve literally left no trace– of the forests.

Furthermore, the survey showed that most of the acreage was logged to turn a backdoor profit, and there’s evidence of corruption. A number of Scout councils submitted inaccurate and misleading logging plans, and allegedly disregarded rules and regulations which were in place to protect wildlife and the watershed. Some of the deals even involve cozy relationships with private companies and state regulators.

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"B-O-R-I-N-G MAN!" the guy next to me yelled, and the crowd erupted into laughter.
We all wanted them to burn the damn thing.

Thankfully, the dancing finally stopped, and a shower of sparks preceded a surprisingly benign fireworks display. It could have been any town in America on the 4th of July.
More sparks, and then suddenly - *BOOM*.

An immense fireball consumed the Man and the entire supporting platform. There wasn’t even time to hit the deck, and the shock wave knocked everyone back. In a split second of calm, about the time between the initial shock and sound of the explosion, the entire crowd was united in awestruck silence.

And then it was over. The Man was burned until the rest of the structure collapsed.

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Last week I mentioned the total CO2 impact of the Burning Man festival, and how an obsession with profligate pyrotechnic displays might not strictly adhere to a thematically ‘Green’ festival. But there was a considerable behind-the-scenes effort to make up for the party. For example, few ravers were aware that many of the discotheques were biodiesel-powered? Numerous camps this year used b100 biodiesel (or a blend) in their generators, including most of the main festival’s generators (11,000 gallons total) and one of the biggest music party camps on the playa:

For five years running, now, Taylor and some 80 friends have built a series of structures that host thousands of dance music enthusiasts every night of the week-long festival. This year, the music systems and lighting in Taylor’s elaborate domes, measuring 30, 60 and 90 feet in diameter, were powered by an industrial generator producing 2.5 kilowatts, driven by a B30 blend of biodiesel (30 percent biodiesel and 70 percent diesel.)

The power draw required by the dance complexes was staggering - literally the loudest music I’ve ever heard - and other forms of renewable energy just wouldn’t cut it. Since the generators were loners, organizers weren’t willing to use B100 (and presumably straight vegetable oil) and instead relied on diesel/biodiesel blends. Had I known that the music was "powered by biodiesel", it might have put more spring in my step.

Speaking of biodiesel, one of the biggest attention-grabbers on the playa was a CO2-to-algae display where exhaust from the gas generators was being fed to living algae. It looked just like the pictures we’ve all seen of algae-biodiesel displays: greenish plastic bags with a lot of churning and bubbling going on. The display was created by a group of scientists and industry types (called the Chlorophyll Collective), who are trying to put together open-source information for growing and harvesting algae. As per usual, it all sounded great, but to my knowledge sufficient amounts of algae for harvesting were never actually produced.

The playa was abound with other green-tech type exhibits, including one I wish I’d seen, the "mechabolic": a giant model gastrointestinal tract that turned just about any waste product into fuel via gasification. Apparently, you could walk through it and see "digestion" at various stages of completion.

Burning Man also had a plethora of scheduled events, including open discussions on green tech and several environmentally-related video series. Despite these events being ridiculously hard to find (especially in the afternoon dust storms), I managed to attend one biodiesel-from-algae forum with some industry types and Inside Greentech. According to these folks, algae biodiesel is a long way off because they can’t get yields even close to what would make it economical. There was also the usual biodiesel-is-great blather, such as biodiesel is "emissions free." Whoops, I guess they need to read my biodiesel mythbuster.

Obviously, the festival is an emergent property of what everyone puts into it, and "Burners" in general seem to maintain a greater-than-average ecological awareness. Litter was scarce to nonexistent, despite the festival offering no trash receptacles. Pack-it-in-pack-it-out was the norm, even to the extent of individual camps collecting greywater from coolers, bathing, etc. (I brought home 3 gallons). Most larger camps set up black tarp greywater systems to evaporate waste water, leaving relatively little residual impact on the playa.

So what’s the upshot when it’s all said and done, the Man’s been burned, and the last bicycle has left the playa? I would like to think that festival-goers had a renewed commitment to environmental activism in their own lives, but I’m not sure that would be true. We all continue to travel, eat, and party the way we’re used to, even if it’s in the middle of the Nevadan desert. Despite these tendencies, Burning Man provided some opportunity for expanding green conscientiousness for many, and reinforced personal aspirations for others . It may be cliche, but every year should be the Green Man, or at least maintain the trend toward reduction of the festival’s ecological footprint — even if Burning Man’s overall impact pales in comparison to other world events. If, however, in our efforts to reduce global warming and practice sustainability, we as a society decide to throw out the party, the art, the dance, the music, and other forms of personal expression first — well, that just wouldn’t make much sense.

Biodiesel Mythbuster
Behind the scenes biodiesel generators: Partying to biodiesel
The Green Man
Cleantech: Carbon and algae from the playa to you.

Yep, that’s right - a 1,000 ft. mushroom cloud, and no, that doesn’t mean above-ground nuclear testing has resumed in the Nevada desert. It just means that the artist who built Crude Awakenings - a 100 ft. tall oil derrick - wanted to blow it up at the end of the festival (to "dramatize the worshipful relationship and dependence modern man has toward oil"), and to do so he used 900 gallons of jet fuel (apparently off-spec fuel given to him by NASA) and 2,000 gallons of liquid propane, not to mention the timber and steel used in the structure. You can see it on YouTube here.

So how does such a staggering display of firepower — the largest explosion in the events history — contribute to an event thematically-focused on reneewable energy and green tech? Well, lets just say it’s "green in theme"…

"If you were really green, you would have walked."
- Posted sign at the entrance to Burning Man

Burning Man was founded on a novel concept: take a population the size of a small town, institute a gift economy (no vending or sales allowed) but maintain basic legal structure (state and federal laws still apply, mostly), and then demolish all regularly-maintained social conventions. Want to dress up like a samurai? Great. Don’t feel like wearing any clothes at all? No problem. Don’t want to sleep ever again? That’s a given. It’s like the Matrix meets Never-Never-Land.

So just how Green was this Man, anyway?

Now don’t get me wrong — I dig the theme. In fact, it’s part of the reason I went this year, and I drove to the festival without burning a drop of petroleum. But a remotely-located, 46,000-person party based on the primal need for really loud electronic music and torching large wooden effigies doesn’t strike me as particularly low-impact.

Consider the amount of road and air travel required by those attending the event (the kids next to me spent $300 in fuel to get there, and only stayed 2 nights). People attend from every corner of the globe, which involves considerable international travel, and thousands of road trips that otherwise may not have happened. Add to this the absolutely massive scale of pyrotechnic displays, and the total CO2 bill for the 8-days of Burning Man comes out to about 27,000 tons of CO2 each year (2006 data).

Seems like a lot, except when compared to the 23,013,698 metric tons of CO2 the US emits anyway in those same 8 days. (2005 data - EIA). In case you were wondering, Burning Man represents an increase of 1/10th of a percent over business as usual. And since many travelers are taking regularly scheduled work vacations to attend the event, it would be hard to claim this is a unique increase.

Even so, the festival has made some effort to reduce its impact. In 2005, the "Cooling Man" project was founded to offer carbon offsets for festival-goers. The project’s web site estimates that if 70% of burners (32,200 people) offset 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions, Black Rock City would become the first carbon negative city in the world. Of course, that depends on how you feel about carbon offsets, and who actually participates. Since offsetting 1 ton only costs $10, it’s unclear why they don’t just tack this onto the ticket price (tickets cost around $250 anyway). So far this year, the Cooling Man project has offset 627 tons of CO2.

As you may have heard, the big deal this year was the Green Pavilion underneath the man, with 30,000 square feet of decidedly science-fair-like green-tech exhibits, including solar and wind power, alternative fuels (a Greasecar SVO conversion), and one electric car plastered white with playa dust. At least 50% of the power for the displays came from a 30 kW solar array that was given to Gerlach, NV, after the event (which will generate $3 million of electricity over the next 20 years, at no cost to Gerlach/Lovelock residents). Two other solar projects were also designed and sponsored by Burning Man, including a 120 kW solar array in Gerlach, Nevada and a 60 kW solar array in Lovelock, Nevada. Burning Man also swapped out all of Gerlach’s (population 500) old light-bulb’s and replaced them with compact fluorescents.

These would be considerable investments for a group of partiers that didn’t really care about their impact, but I think it’s fair to say they do, and next week I’ll talk about more of the smaller-scale environmentally-minded steps "Burners" were taking, including powering their dance music with biodiesel. I’ll also hit on a few of the other cool exhibits, like the CO2-to-algae display, and have some general conclusions about this year’s fest.

To be continued…

"The Green Man" from WorldChanging

"Crude Awakening Arises at Burning Man" from Wired