Burning Man, a once modest beach get-together, has grown into a gigantic congregation on federally managed land that attracts some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
On a clear, mid-60-degree day in late June over three decades ago, a small function was held at Baker Beach; an exercise in community engagement, mental and physical well-being, and, above all else, boundless acceptance. Songs were sung. Art was created. Human connections were nurtured. And an eight-foot effigy of a man was set ablaze.
Welcome to what would become the global spectacle, the temporal metropolis of experimental art installations, the touchstone for left-of-center innovators, makers, and burgeoning artists that is Burning Man as we know it today.
With a gaggle of 35 bystanders, friends, and family of the “founding fathers,” Larry Harvey, John Law, and Jerry James, the 1986 summer solstice happening sparked what would become an annual tradition centered around accepting humanity. “What we had instantly created was a community,” Harvey told an effusive crowd at Hualapai Playa in 1997. The first Burning Man was a “spontaneous performance” that birthed something more substantial than what he described as a “second sun” on the beach that day.
This annual happening, which is expected to attract north of 100,000 people this year alone, was inspired by an emotion antithetical to connection: Heartbreak.
“I had a midlife crisis,” Harvey told the audience at Hualapai Playa. That midlife crisis, spurred by a break-up, lingered with him for two years. One day, he woke up—the day of the summer solstice in ‘87—and realized he was tired of the agony. “So I called up a friend [Jerry James] and I said, ‘Let’s…let’s burn a man,’” he added.
Harvey and James met through the “Latte Carpenters,” a group of intellectually curious lovers of discourse and woodwork. At the time, Harvey worked primarily as a carpenter and a landscaper. James was a construction worker and carpenter by day, an abstract woodworker artist by night.
Why Baker’s Beach? Harvey’s sculptor friend, Mary Grauberger, who was also a friend of Harvey’s ex-girlfriend Janet Lohr, held solstice bonfires on Baker Beach years before the inaugural BM, which Harvey had attended. When Grauberger secured having them, Harvey “picked up the torch,” putting his right-brain twist on those get-togethers, cobbling together scrap wood and creating an 8’ scarecrow-esque figure to burn.
And in that inferno, those friends and twenty-something beachgoers were drawn to the flame. The 10 Principles of Burning Man were catalyzed:
Radical Inclusion
“Anyone may be a part of Burning Man.”
Gifting
“The value of a gift is unconditional.”
Decommodification
“In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.”
Radical Self-reliance
“Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.”
Radical Self-expression
“No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content, it is offered as a gift to others.”
Communal Effort
“We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.”
Civic Responsibility
“Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants.”
Leaving No Trace
“We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather.”
Participation
“We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation.”
Immediacy
“Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture […] we seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.”
However, those beachside pyrotechnics were somewhat short-lived. Like the first Burning Man, the coinciding three carried out atop the sands at Baker Beach. The ‘88 Burning Man was the official start of the tradition, albeit with a few hiccups along the way.
Harvey entitled the group’s summer solstice ritual “Burning Man” in ‘88, inscribing flyers for the happening as such. Harvey also wanted to thwart any references to “wicker man,” referring to the practice of burning live sacrifices in wicker cages.
“That’s when the Man had his first encounter with the ‘Man’ [the police],” Jerry reminisced. The ‘88 burn saw a 30’ effigy light up the night, three times larger than the year prior. “Larry and I decided to talk to the cops, and after a short negotiation, they agreed to allow us to knock down the Man and finish burning it. We sawed him in half in a few places, threw him in a pile, and finished burning it.”
By 1990, the Golden Gate Park Police (GGNRA) considered the emblazoned sculpture a fire hazard. This was due in part to concerns of it starting widespread wildfires akin to the ones that plagued Los Angeles, especially during the arid time of the year when Burning Man occurred. The effigy was deconstructed and put into storage. A couple of months later, the Man ambered the skies above the Black Rock Desert in Nevada on Labor Day Weekend, which remains the time and place of Burning Man.
By 1991, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) required a permit for the Black Rock Desert, and the event continued there through 1997; come 1997, attendance had grown so much that organizers moved the event and what had become Black Rock City (BRC) to Hualapai Flat and Fly Ranch. That same year, too, the first year that BRC was planned and organized like a real urban area. Since BM affects one of the largest urban areas in all of Nevada, every year, over the late-August, early-September celebration.)
Fast forward nearly 30 years, and Burning Man has morphed into a phenomenon synonymous with Silicon Valley, big tech, influencer culture, and, ironically enough, climate crimes — the latter criticism gaining particular attention over the past decade, which has seen makeshift runways for private jets and mounds of litter. (During the 2023 heavy rainstorms that flooded Burning Man camps, leaving some to escape in viral ways, locals were left sifting through heaps of “mud-bound” trash after attendees had fled.) Social media has stripped away any facades or counter-culture narratives attached to Burning Man. And in thier place, an almost collective disdain has filled those voids.
Despite ticket sales slumping in recent years, Burning Man shows no signs of bowing into oblivion. Conversely, these year-over-year attendance declines might point toward Burning Man returning to its more humble roots; without any irony, Burning Man could, someday, regain its anti-establishment status — an ostensible 180 turn from Burning Man’s current iteration. Regardless of how Burning Man looks in five, ten, or twenty years from now … let there be less trash left behind.
