OPINION//OPEN FORUM

Burning Man is bordering on being out of control. And this problem has been years in the making

By Corinne Loperfido Sep 1, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)

Attendees walk through a muddy desert plain on September 2, 2023, after heavy rains turned the annual Burning Man festival site in Nevada’s Black Rock desert into a mud pit. Tens of thousands of festivalgoers were stranded Sept. 3, in deep mud in the Nevada desert after rain turned the annual Burning Man gathering into a quagmire, with police investigating one death. Julie Jammot/AFP via Getty Images

Burning Man started in 1986 as a small gathering on Baker Beach, where Larry Harvey and Jerry James built effigies of a man and dog out of scrap wood to burn down — an act of what they called “radical self-expression.”

Nearly 40 years later, that San Francisco beach party has turned into an unrecognizably huge gathering in the Nevada desert — one that’s in desperate need of reinvention to reclaim the spirit of Harvey and James’ original vision and purpose.

As an artist and performer, I have deep gratitude for the arts and culture that Burning Man has inspired. But now seems like an important time for self-proclaimed “burners” to be asking themselves: Is this really the right place to be putting my time, energy and resources right now?

I attended Burning Man in 2015 and was shocked by the environmental irresponsibility even back then.

Part of my work is upcycled fashion and costume design — and I went to the desert to understand my customers, who were asking for elaborate custom costume orders for the event. All around me, I saw synthetic fake furs and cheap LED-lit costumes, which were meant for a good time, not a long time. After the event, dumpsters in the small towns surrounding Black Rock City overflowed with fast fashion, single-use food packages, abandoned tents, sleeping bags and even huge couches.

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I wasn’t surprised that after last year’s catastrophic event, when heavy rains trapped attendees for days, Burning Man would confront shockingly low advance sales — to the point where the festival started selling tickets in person, something organizers haven’t had to do since 2011. 

Additionally, the resale market for tickets collapsed — those who bought tickets but changed their mind aren’t getting anywhere near face value in return. Burning Man didn’t even have a reselling marketplace set up because it barely needed one until this year. Now, those trying to unload tickets have resorted to haggling and name-calling in Facebook groups.

As this year’s event started, rains again forced a temporary closure of the entrance gate, wreaking more havoc on the playa that was already heavily damaged by last year’s rain. And on Sunday, a woman died for unknown reasons, putting yet another black mark on Burning Man’s recent history.

The reality is that Burning Man is bordering on being out of control. And this problem has been years in the making.

Burning Man claims “radical self-reliance” as a principle. Another is “leave no trace.”

But Burning Man barely received its U.S. Bureau of Land Management permit this year because of the scramble it took to restore the grounds after last year’s flooding (where there is likely still tons of debris buried below the dried mud). 

And it doesn’t feel very “self-reliant” when you consider the fossil fuels needed to travel to the event and power the big recreational vehicles and air-conditioned orgy domes. 

According to the Washington Post, Burning Man organizers estimated that more than 54,200 metric tons of carbon were released by the festival in 2019, the equivalent of burning 27,215 metric tons of coal, while Black Rock Labs, a nonprofit tech incubator, put the amount at 100,000 tons. About 91% of the emissions were from transporting 80,000 people and equipment into and out of the desert.

“That’s largely cars and recreational vehicles, but it’s also planes. Attendees visit from more than 5,500 cities across the world and the event sets up its own airport,” the Post reported.

We’re living on a burning Earth, literally and figuratively. Climate chaos is resulting in flooding, fires and heat waves that only seem to grow more severe with every passing season. Staging an incredibly expensive and environmentally damaging festival in light of this state of the world just feels wrong.

I am not proposing that all gatherings must end and all fun be canceled. I am calling for people to focus their resources and attention locally and take the inspiration and principles of Burning Man into their communities.

The nonprofit that organizes Burning Man also organizes a global network of regional events, where Burners can connect on a smaller scale, expending fewer resources.

Burning Man organizers should learn from this year’s failures and scale down the Nevada event. In exchange, they should redouble their efforts to support the regional Burning Man events, making them every bit as special and inspiring, on a scale that inflicts far less environmental damage and requires fewer resources to stage.

Rather than desecrating grounds, regional Burning Man events can make ecological repair their focus: restoring the Earth, cleaning lands and taking environmental and community action. They can educate the world about making responsible choices in everything from fashion to travel, to preserve the resources we have left, while there’s still time to do so.

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Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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Finally, thank you, Burning Man, for what you showed us was possible. The creativity and sheer imagination on display in the Nevada desert were inspiring and jaw-dropping in scale and originality.

But the old ways aren’t working and haven’t been for some time. So, let’s burn them down.

Corinne Loperfido is a social practice artist whose work spans visual and performance art, upcycled fashion and costume design, as well as community event production. 

Sep 1, 2024

Corinne Loperfido

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • Aug 30, 2024 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1993. It will remain public for only one week. One of the goals of martial artists is to cultivate an awareness both of their own subtle physiological rhythms and those of other people, according to Aikido instructor George Leonard. Leonard, one of the founders of the consciousness movement, discusses the history and theory of the oriental martial arts. The late George Leonard was an aikido black belt and developer of a psychophysical system called Leonard Energy Training. A senior editor of Look Magazine, he was also president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and author of numerous books including Education and Ecstasy, The Silent Pulse, The Ultimate Athlete, The Transformation, and Walking on the Edge of the World. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.

The Monkey Is the Messenger: Meditation and What Your Busy Mind Is Trying to Tell You

Ralph De La Rosa, Susan Piver (Foreword)

Hope for all those who want to meditate but feel they can’t because they think too much.

“My mind is so busy, I really need to meditate.”

“My mind is so busy, there’s no way I can meditate.”

Familiar dilemma? These days just about all of us know we should be meditating, but that doesn’t make it any easier to sit down and face the repetitive thoughts careening around our brains—seemingly pointless, sometimes hurtful, nearly always hard to control. Rather than quitting meditation or trying to wall off the monkey mind, Ralph De La Rosa suggests asking yourself a question: If you were to stop demonizing your monkey mind, would it have anything to teach you? In a roundabout way, could repetitive thoughts be pointing us in the direction of personal—and even societal—transformation?

Poignant and entertaining, The Monkey Is the Messenger offers a range of evidence-based, somatic, and trauma-informed insights and practices drawn from De La Rosa’s study of neuroscience and psychology and his long practice of meditation and yoga. Here at last—a remedy for all those who want to meditate but suppose they can’t because they think too much.

(Goodreads.com)

YouTube Movies & TV Karmageddon captures the spiritual journey of “Soulshaping” author Jeff Brown with 1960s counter-culture icon and guru Bhagavan Das of “Be Here Now” fame. Also starring Ram Dass, Seane Corn, Deva Premal & Miten, Robert Gass, Wah!, and David Life.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

― Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction. Wikipedia

Schwartz Rep • Premiered Aug 30, 2024 In this episode, we delve into the intriguing intersection of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and human consciousness. We examine the latest research and theories surrounding these mysterious phenomena, exploring how they challenge our understanding of reality and consciousness itself. Join us as we discuss the potential implications for science, technology, and the broader quest to comprehend the nature of our existence. Thank you for listening.

(beperiod.com)

SEPTEMBER

The Emotional Function as Given by Nature

September brings our third and last harvest, the harvest of grapes. Grapes symbolize the emotional function by which we experience emotions towards people, places, objects or events. This function empowers us with the ability to feel people’s moods, perceive the motive behind their actions, and in general blend into social situations. The complete spectrum of our emotions extends even wider than this, reaching to potentially transformative emotions that alter the way we see ourselves and the world around us, such as empathy, compassion, and remorse of conscience. This broad spectrum is reflected in the journey a grape undergoes to become wine. It is a journey of many stages that ultimately transforms the grape’s nature into an altogether superior end product. As we shall see, the highest reach of our emotional function is likewise superhuman.

Since the development of our Essence is typically arrested early in life, the emotional function—the function of Essence—is usually atrophied. We only take advantage of its basic emotional output of comradery, humor, and gossip, and rarely benefit from its higher and transformative range. In effect, we have in our possession an instrument of great force yet spend our days fiddling only with its most basic parts. It is as if we used our smartphone only to check the time and our car only to store our belongings. This is a serious waste of potential as well as an objective limitation to inner farming, because the only power that can overrule the instinctive inertia discussed in May and the mechanical momentum discussed in June is emotion.

When we try to study the different qualities of our emotions we stumble upon an underlying attitude that makes their observation particularly difficult. Their very arising sweeps us away. They come with a deep conviction that glues us to them and blinds us to their manifestations. This abandonment of our sense of self in the face of our emotions is called identification and it is here that our labor of September must begin. To be clear, the tendency to identify with any of our functions—whether physical, mental, or emotional—makes self-observation challenging. We are accustomed to calling all our impulses ‘I’ and associate their manifestation with our entirety. Nevertheless, identification exacts its strongest force on our emotional world, particularly in our dealings with others.

As a rule, our undeveloped emotional function distorts our perception of the world by placing ourselves at its center. Everything is about us, everyone is ignoring or conspiring against us, everyone should be considering or acknowledging us. Misled by this bias, we take everything personally and experience difficult emotions about things that need not stimulate any emotions in us whatsoever. “Why did they not think about me? Why did they look at me that way? What will happen if I am proven wrong? If I make a fool of myself? What if I am considered irresponsible?” Our struggle with identification reveals that these habitual considerations are the default state of our emotional function. We cycle through them endlessly. When we do succeed in obtaining this supposedly important validation from our environment, our emotional function quickly works itself into new doubts and concerns. It proves to be a state in search of an object, which means that we can only break free from these emotional considerations by severing the state of identification.

Any action that goes against the need for social validation achieves this: making a public comment we know to be incorrect; restraining our smartness and letting others take credit for coming up with a helpful solution; staying put when a traffic light turns green until the driver behind us honks; dropping our cup at the cafe to make us seem clumsy or careless. Or in short, any deliberate action that paints us as fools and sabotages our need for social validation.

If executed correctly, the effect is instantaneous. A space between ‘I’ and ‘my emotions’ opens up all of a sudden, sparking a brief out-of-body experience. All of a sudden we can observe in real time what was previously invisible to us. But this successful execution depends on the attitude behind our effort. We are playing the fool to sever identification. We are aiming to wedge a crack between our emotions and our budding ability to observe. The moment we lose sight of this, our vanity takes credit for having gone against our habitual reactions, and distorts our original aim. We break free of identification only to rebuild it elsewhere. The practitioner will have to bear this in mind and understand that some of their experiments will succeed, and others will fail. Moreover, the somewhat dramatic examples given above will not always be necessary. We will not always have to employ these extreme measures to sever identification with our emotions. As we gain expertise in inner farming, we will gradually learn more subtle ways of harvesting the same yield.

Harvest involves discrimination. Not all crops are of equal value. Some grape clusters may make fine wine while others need to be discarded lest they detract from our final product. The same applies to our emotions. We must study their different qualities and flavors, and ultimately choose some over others. For this, we must learn to struggle with identification. The farmer who can observe their feelings as they arise in real time—who can see ‘joy,’ ‘expectation,’ ‘disappointment,’ or ‘apprehension’ and resist the urge to call them ‘I’—is positioned favorably before the September harvest. Now can they attempt to fulfill the transformative potential of their emotional function.

Legendary Lore • Aug 8, 2024 • ✪ Members first on August 7, 2024 Is your government slowly becoming tyrannical? Aristotle warned us 2,300 years ago. In this eye-opening exploration of Aristotle’s analysis of tyranny, we delve into the timeless insights of one of history’s greatest political thinkers. Drawing from Aristotle’s great work “Politics,” we uncover the mechanisms of tyrannical rule that are as relevant today as they were in ancient Greece. Discover how Aristotle’s experiences with the Thirty Tyrants of Athens and his personal relationship with the tyrant Hermias shaped his understanding of unjust rule. Learn the tactics tyrants use to rise to power and maintain their grip on society – from manipulating public opinion to undermining social trust. We’ll explore the true nature of tyranny according to Aristotle, how tyrants differ from legitimate rulers, the ways tyrannies often come to power, Aristotle’s list of tyrannical tactics, many still used today, and why Aristotle believed all tyrannies are doomed to fail. Check out our Patreon:   / thelegendarylore   or find our books at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1P3LX2L Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:40 What is Tyranny? 3:58 Rise of Tyrants 5:59 Tactics of Tyrants 9:50 Downfall of Tyrants 12:10 Outro

Instagram video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9t4jrBO3Ea/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

(Courtesy of Steve Hines)