On some occasions, you might be forgiven for thinking that Ears To The House has fallen for some parody story we’ve seen elsewhere. And we could entirely understand if you were under that impression reading what we’re about to tell you – but rest assured this is entirely genuine.
Burning Man is one of those festivals which is all about getting back to nature. The premise is simple – spend a week in the desert, forget about the world, forget about your phone and just enjoy yourself. In other words, pretend it’s the 90s for a few days. The event began in 1986 and has been at its current location since 1991 – but has become a victim of its own success.
Which means that the many environmentalists who attended were also responsible for creating traffic jams lasting, according to different accounts, anywhere between 8 and 14 hours. This photo from Melissa Dupuis is pretty stark…
Elsewhere, the event is being criticised for apparently breaking several of its own guiding principles, as espoused by co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004. Leaving no trace is one – yet the site is filled with glass bottles and rubbish. Not to mention the amount of pollution which will have inevitably been generated by getting all those DJs to head all the way to the remote Nevada desert and the roughly 80,000 people trying to get home in their vehicles.
And let’s not even get onto the number of people claiming on social media they’ve caught Covid-19 after attending. We wonder if there’ll be more monkeypox cases popping up too…
