Green Theme Camp Community
Overview
In the 2030 Environmental Sustainability Roadmap, the Burning Man Project set three explicit goals: Handle Waste Ecologically, Be Regenerative, and Be Carbon Negative. The annual Burning Man event in Black Rock City provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate, experiment, and iterate on sustainable practices and technologies, with the potential for far-reaching impact throughout our regional networks, events, and other community partnerships in the “default world.”
Theme camp organizers and other ecologically-minded burners gathered at the first Green Theme Camp Summit in October of 2020, to brainstorm how theme camps might contribute to Burning Man’s sustainability efforts.
GTCC Supports Five Initiatives
Sustainability Leadership
Since the Green Theme Camp Summit in October 2020, our community has been actively organizing, testing ideas, and preparing solutions to get us closer to our goals. Areas of development include:
Six infrastructure focus teams including Food, Power, Shelter, Transportation, Waste, and Water
Building community and continually doing the work to bring green-hearted Burners together to align our values and "Green Our Burn"
Encouraging theme camps to assign a Sustainability Lead who will help to "Green Their Burn"
Burner Leadership in Achieving Sustainable Theme Camps
BLAST is a green camp rating system that offers a framework for energy and resource efficient, environmentally conscientious, and regenerative theme camps. If you’ve heard of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for green buildings, think of BLAST as the Burning Man equivalent. We provide an incentive to “Green Your Burn,” awarding camps and their members for successful sustainability efforts.
Green Corridor
The Green Corridor is a sector in Black Rock City that contains theme camps working towards the goals of the 2030 Environmental Sustainability Roadmap.
In addition Humans Uniting for Better Sustainability (HUBS) is a resource-sharing system to help camps plan and share resources and co-locate camps who have partnered to efficiently share resources such as water, power, tools, and transportation.
Thrival Guide
The Thrival Guide is a dynamic, interactive, open-source directory of solution-based ideas and green infrastructure projects. The Guide is meant to inspire and educate as we work towards a more sustainable event and a more conscientious global community.
Model Green Camp
A prototype model green camp where innovation meets sustainability. We aim to harness the brightest ideas from the community, focusing on: Water, Food, Waste, Shelter, & Power.
Burning Man 2024 Sustainability Report: Year Four Update
The Burning Man Project hosted a call on the fifth anniversary of publishing the 2030 Sustainability Roadmap. In it, we discuss progress towards our three goals to Handle Waste Ecologically, Be Regenerative, and Be Carbon Negative.
Green Theme Camp Summit
Burners Without Borders was proud to co-host the 2022 Green Theme Camp Summit in collaboration with IDEATE, Hotel California and all of the amazing participants who joined us over the 4-day event in January 2022.
Get Involved
Want to join the community and receive exciting updates once in a while?
Burning Man Project Sustainability
The nonprofit Burning Man Project and the global Burning Man community are working to make the Burning Man event in Black Rock City more ecologically sustainable. This web page summarizes sustainability efforts.
The International Wood Culture Society Presents
Tales of Dreamers: Burning Man 2022
Set in Black Rock City 2022, this latest project from the International Wood Culture Society delves into sustainability initiatives in BRC — from Burning Man Project and from a variety of theme camps, artists, and participant groups. Through a series of interviews, “Tales of Dreamers” tells the story of how sustainability projects are coming to life in diverse and innovative ways, and highlights some of the technology being used to make it all happen.
Partners
BWB promotes activities around the globe that support a community's inherent capacity to thrive by encouraging innovative approaches to disaster relief and grassroots initiatives that make a positive impact.
Fly Ranch is a 3,800 acre ranch in Northern Nevada home to Fly Geyser. Projects are organized by thousands of participants and tend to focus on reconnection, healing, and the land. Our goal is to produce public benefits as an agricultural site with sustainable systems for food, water, power, shelter, waste, and air.
Earth Guardians inspire, inform and encourage our fellow Black Rock City citizens to apply the Leave No Trace principles to life in our temporary desert home and to leave positive traces.
Leave No Trace
Burning Man Hive is a space for the Burning Man community and the Burner-curious to share their skills and knowledge, to learn from one another, and to support each other’s work in the world.
The RAT is an international all volunteer participatory community group and we educate and mentor artists and others to move away from having to use generators to power their installations. We help artists who have no or little knowledge about renewable energy systems that are suitable for use at Black Rock City.