The giant party just dumps their trash in the Reno Sparks area on the way home. Search for burning man at /r/Reno if you don't believe me
The giant party just dumps their trash in the Reno Sparks area on the way home. Search for burning man at /r/Reno if you don't believe me
There are some shitty Burners and those cause the most visible problems, but there are a lot of conscientious ones too (I think it’s the majority of them). Painting them all with the same brush isn’t quite right, a lot of us work hard to do things the right way (like spending hours in line to pay to dump trash at the Reno municipal transfer station). I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though, besides lots of public shaming. It’s hard to avoid having any jerks in a city of 70K people.
> I don’t know how to get the shitty ones to do the right thing though,
I know. Use the $600/person or whatever cost is now to have trash service out there. Ever think of that?
Yes, and it kinda defeats the purpose. The event is in large part about personal responsibility and accountability. Adding trash service out there would make it even easier for people to bring more than they need, consume more, leave shit everywhere, etc. And that money is already used for existing services and the BLM permit paid to the government, it's not like it's just sitting there ready to be spent on trash services. And at that point, increasing ticket prices makes it more inaccessible to people, and then cue the complaints that it's an event for such-and-such rich people blah blah whatever.
This is the fundamental contradiction of Burning Man values, and I admit to obnoxiously pursuing it around the fire these past three burns now.
Burning Man is a community and society, and often pitches itself that way, and attendees come away feeling that way - they're "Burners," any city in the world they go to they can probably find other Burners they've never met and hang out, and to truly understand the Burn you really just have to attend.
But the values, and event, and many attendees, reject this fact with the "radical self reliance" value. People try to work around it by doing Theme camps - tribes within a tribe. Oh you're self reliant all right, you and the rest of your suburb with whom you organized to bring water and toilet paper. But no no no, that line stops at the edge of your camp, beyond that lies only community WITHOUT responsibility.
In reality there is no community without responsibility. MOOP blows around. Your sound affects other people. And if someone is suffering from thirst or hunger at the Burn, you absolutely have a responsibility to them as a member of your community to share food and water.
This radical self reliance thing just shifts the burden of managing people to the theme camp level, without any guarantee that any given theme camp is actually itself a good member of the community (other than processes that take a while e.g. the MOOP map).
The Burn is big but so are towns. There's already infrastructure for sewage, there should be as well for trash, and imo food and shelter as well. That doesn't require violating any of the principles, and a form of "radical self reliance" can be maintained through "radical participation" wherein people can identify a problem they want to resolve about the Burn and resolve it, or organize a working group or syndic to do so.
The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
If you turn the event into a giant plug and play (if the org is providing food and shelter and trash and everything else), you've just created some variant of Coachella instead, and I sure as hell don't want that. The difficulty is part of the point and what makes it so worthwhile, the kind of people who self-select into doing all that work are people I want to be around. It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
> The Burners I've interacted with would happily help others in need and care about the community at large. That's the whole point of civic responsibility, isn't it?
Exactly my point, so why do we maintain this illusion through one specific principle that we are "radically self reliant" when that evidently isn't the case? Just look through this thread: multiple people rejecting the idea of shared trash bins as "opposed to the values." How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
> It's supposed to be a community of builders and doers (i.e. participants), not people who show up for a fun time while everything is catered for them.
Right, it already is that, and adding shared trash bins won't make it not that. We've just shifted responsibility for managing that onto the theme camps. And in any case, we don't have a magical enforcement mechanism for the values - nothing about changing what we consider a "shared community responsibility" causes our ability to gatekeep lazy people to diminish, the same mechanism of social pressure is there either way.
Meanwhile, our community is failing to handle the very real fact that people are dumping their trash in the streets of Reno, and Reno is, appropriately, attributing this failure to our community as a whole.
> Coachella is a for-profit event with Organizers and Spectators, I don't think it's a good comparison, just because of shared trash bins at the Burn.
My Coachella comment was more in response to your suggestion that even infra for food and shelter should be provided. FWIW I also love Coachella, but that's because I love music - many people there sure don't follow leave no trace principles and that doesn't sit well with me either.
> How is a shared trash bin opposed to the values when we very easily all share toilets that we all as a community keep clean?
I think it's a spectrum. From completely no services at all to everything provided. My view is that providing things like toilets and medical services are something that we all (or at least most) agree makes the city a better place with no real downside. Trash is more complicated - I believe that does compromise the principles too much because of how people behave if dumpsters were to exist. I think people would be more irresponsible than they are now, because "someone else will take care of it" on playa. You also end up with tragedy of the commons problems like some camps dumping way more than others and perhaps filling things up so much that other camps can't even dispose of their stuff, and at that point how do you enforce or manage that? You could start charging by volume or something, but then that just starts to degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it, even if it means that sometimes people do the wrong thing. How we manage the problem in Reno, I'm not sure - TBH, if people started getting in trouble for doing it in a real way, like getting charged with illegal dumping, that'd be fine with me. It would certainly be a disincentive to do it once enough Burners get in real shit for doing irresponsible things like that. I'd have no sympathy for them, that's a personal accountability thing.
> degrade the principles even more and commodifies things. I'd rather people figure their garbage problem out on their own and not expect someone else to handle it
Right, but that's not happening, because people are dumping in Reno so someone else has to handle it :p
I'm a bit confused by how you said "provided." This may be a USA Burn vs regional Burn misunderstanding - it sounds like the USA burn has a larger divide between Organizers and Participant? For Japan / Taiwan, if there's communal trash, that doesn't mean trash is provided, it just means we organized group trash handling, increased ticket price if necessary, added voluntary shifts to pick up around a dumpster or whatever.
Defeats "the purpose" - of maximizing profits? In this case I agree with you.
It’s run by a literal non-profit. You clearly have no clue what the event is like or how it’s managed.
Edit: You can even see their financials here
https://burningman.org/about-us/what-we-do/financials-public...
What I’m seeing in that link is that the organization pays 16 people a total of $3.6 million.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the ten principles. Trash service would undermine some of those tenets
I don't need to do that. I already see the scam. Socialize the waste and privatize the profit. The mask was blown off years ago.
You're right minus the profits, nobody's really making any money off the Burn except maybe fancy RV rental places or whatever.
Are you on the outside looking in or are/were you an active burning man participant?
This 100%. They only care about their playa. As soon as they are off, their considerations go out the window and they trash every other town they want to.