Burning Man Cools Off

It’s how I remember Labor Day weekend each year; fashions in my local Safeway checkout lines suddenly change from the de-rigueur mountain bike shorts and rash guards to guys in tweed vest and skirts and women in Cat in the Hat 4-foot high rainbow colored top hats and sunglasses with streamers flowing from the sides. And the parking lots all around town fill up with old school busses welded and chopped to look like dinosaurs or turtles or spinning, whirling … uh … things. And RVs. Lots and lots of RVs. Most of them at least as old as the school busses, all of them belching and spewing embarrassing amounts of greenhouse gasses into the desert air.

The beauty of Burning Man, however, has always been a sense of community and creativity and a culture that strives to take care of its own. Witness Cooling Man, an effort this year to bring the science and art communities together by helping Burners offset their greenhouse gas emissions and by encouraging climate-themed art exhibits.

Once again, the living, breathing organism that is Burning Man has found an elegant way to render beauty out of the desert’s hot, filthy, sexy, wacky, twisted and oh-so-magical chaos.

Burn on …