The Burning Man festival gave us a mushy parable on climate

It's climate unfriendly and needs to clean up its sustainability act

- LARA WILLIAMS

A parable about the perils of ignoring climate activists has just played out in the Nevada desert of the US. As Burning Man 2023 began on 27 August, protestors stopped traffic headed for the arts festival briefly by parking an 8.5-metre trailer across the road. Then, a few days later, torrential rainfall halted the festival.

Black Rock City, the temporary civilization that appears every year in the usually hot and dusty playa, was flooded with more than two months’ worth of rain in about 24 hours. An ancient lake-bed turned to mud. Driving around was banned. People were told to take shelter and ration food, fuel and water. The ‘burning of the man,’ the fest’s climax in which an effigy is sent up in flames, was postponed for a day. DJ Diplo and comedian Chris Rock decided to hike 8km out of the ephemeral city. Triops, sometimes nicknamed dinosaur shrimp, emerged from the bog to join the chaos.

By Monday, the ground had recovered enough to allow the mass exodus to begin. While attendees escaped mostly unscathed —there was sadly one death at the festival this year, but it was deemed unrelated to the weather—there’s still a sense of irony about festival-goers raging at environmental protestors just before getting mired in a climate-induced crisis.