[Scpg] [starhawk] Burning Man

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Hi friends­it’s been a while since I’ve 
written­but here’s what I’ve been up to.  Follow 
our adventures at http://www.myspace.com/earthactivisttraining.

Starhawk at Burning Man:  Part One

I didn’t really intend to get this involved in 
Burning Man.  I’ve never been­although of course 
for years now I’ve heard friends who go regularly 
rave about it.  I’ve been curious­as someone who 
has spent my life creating ritual and advocating 
that Western culture needs satunalias and 
carnivals and moments of public ecstasy and 
pageantry, I of course want to see this 
phenomenon which began as a group of friends 
burning a small effigy on the beach, and has now 
grown into a weeklong encampment of forty 
thousand or more artists and their posses out in 
the blazing, empty Nevada desert.  Hey, our 
Reclaiming community of Pagans has been burning 
an effigy on the beach for decades on the Summer 
Solstice, and it remains a joyful but 
comparatively sedate religious ceremony for a 
couple of hundred people. What are they doing 
that we’re not?  (Well, there’s drugs, for one
)



The scale, the madness, the accounts of 
incredible ecstatic moments and intense life 
transformation have intrigued me for years.  But 
I don’t do desert.  That is­I can be persuaded to 
go to some blazing hot climate for some 
overwhelming world-saving cause­protesting nukes 
at the Nevada Test Site for example, or chasing 
tanks in Jenin.  But for a good time, give me an 
ocean, or a cool trail in the mountains, or a 
pleasant, green, intermittently rainy day in 
Ireland.  Camping out in overwhelming heat, 
punishing cold, with blowing alkaline dust and 
the occasional eighty mile an hour windstorm is 
not the terrain I’d choose for either fun or 
spiritual transformation. Yeah, prophets have 
always gone to the desert for visions­but look at 
what they came up with:  angry gods, punishing 
deities, the concept of hell.  Case in point.



This year, however, the theme the Burning Man 
organizers put out was sustainability, and The 
Green Man.  The Green Man is an ancient Pagan 
figure­a face surrounded by leafy branches and 
vegetation mostly now found in old churches, 
remnants inserted by subversive stonecutters of 
an earlier, nature-based faith.  So a number of 
my Pagan and permaculture friends started 
murmuring that maybe this year we should go.



Since we were thinking of going, and since I 
spend a good portion of my life now teaching 
techniques of sustainability and ecological 
design, I though I should do
something. Maybe 
this was the moment to build the portable solar 
composting toilet trailer of my dreams?



Friends of friends put me in touch with the team 
that is organizing the Sustainability Pavilion, 
and I decided we should submit a proposal from 
Earth Activist Training, our organization which 
offers permaculture design courses with a 
grounding in earth-based spirituality and a focus on activism and organizing.



I seduced myself into the project with those 
dangerous phrases that have gotten me into so 
much trouble throughout my life:  “It won’t take 
long,” and “It’ll be easy.”  After all, you can 
always do a great-looking permaculture 
installation with a truckload of straw bales, a 
bunch of live plants, and some mulch. No 
problem.  Then I talked to my housemates, the 
veteran Burners. No live plants­they won’t stand 
up to searing, eighty mile an hour winds.  No 
straw bales­they shed and the Burning Man folks 
have become fanatics about picking up every stray 
bit of MOOP­Matter Out of Place­that might 
possibly contaminate the baking, lifeless old 
lake bed where the burn takes place.



How do you demonstrate sustainability in an 
inherently unsustainable environment?



Over the years, I’ve created a lot of graphics 
about permaculture, beginning with our project in 
Cancun in 2003, when we built a handwashing 
station and graywater system for the campesino 
encampment to protest the meeting of the WTO.  We 
needed something to identify and explain the 
thing­and my friend Delight and I printed up, 
cut, pasted and labeled a whole lot of pictures, 
which speak louder than words, especially when 
people speak different languages and when many of 
them don’t read.  I did something similar for the 
G8 encampment in Scotland in 2005.  They all 
looked a bit like someone’s 7th grade science project, but they did the trick.



Later that summer, I redid the collages on 
Photoshop and printed them up with graphics that 
brought them up into the 21st century.  We took 
them down to New Orleans after Katrina and used 
them to introduce concepts of permaculture and 
sustainability into the relief work we were doing there.



So, my second thought was just to set up the graphics on a nice piece of board.

My veteran Burner housemates were not encouraging.



“People don’t want to learn about permaculture at 
Burning Man,” they said.  “They want to see 
art.  They want to take drugs and have 
sex.”  And, forebodingly, “Whatever you do, don’t be lame!”



The thought of subjecting myself to the punishing 
desert winds only to achieve lameness was quite 
an awful one.  Over the next few weeks, I 
discussed the problem, we had a group in one of 
our courses do a design for Burning Man, and I 
thought long and hard about the 
problem.  Permaculture is not just about plants 
and straw­it’s about designing systems that can 
meet human needs while regenerating and healing 
the natural environment.  It works with a set of 
ethics and principles that can be applied to any 
situation­from designing a forest garden to 
planning a political campaign.  So­what could we 
create that would embody the principles without 
live plants or beds of attractive wood chip mulch?





One of the principles is “Use onsite resources.” 
Scratch that­there aren’t any, not even sand or 
clay, just alkaline dust.  Another is, “Use 
biological resources.”  Apart from people, and 
their various excretions, there aren’t any of those.



“Waste is a resource”, however, seemed to be a 
useful idea.  What waste did I have available 
that we might use?  I thought about the old PVC 
water line lying out in the hills on our land in 
western Sonoma County.  There was lots of 
that­and even more if I could cull the scrap of 
my neighbors.  Perhaps we could build something 
out of that, which would embody some of nature’s 
patterns­another core aspect of 
permaculture.  The meander pattern is a pattern 
of digestion and aborption, so if we wanted 
people to digest information, we could create a 
labyrinthine structure they could wander 
through.  It would have lots of edge­another 
principle.  The edge where two systems meet 
creates a third system, often more diverse and 
creative than either of the others.



So, I started drawing lines on paper, and putting 
words on paper, two things that are easy for me 
to do.  If the structure was going to be a 
labyrinth, it would have a sacred aspect, and 
could be a journey, perhaps from the fear and 
grief and despair we feel about the state of the 
earth, through connection with the elements, the 
primal patterns of nature, and into a gallery of visions and solutions.



I submitted the proposal, and much to my 
surprise, it was accepted.  At first I felt 
elated.  I felt like I’d passed some Ultimate 
Coolness Test, which was a relief because, while 
I was certainly cool back in the sixties, it had 
been a while.  Then I felt that terrible, sinking 
feeling in the pit of my stomach, realizing that 
now I actually had to do the thing.



So, I’ve been doing it­working on the graphics 
and the pictures, organizing our setup crew, and 
trying a mockup of the structure. I’ve been 
sucked deep into the trancelike underworld of 
computer graphics, where hours, days, a lifetime 
can go by while you tranfer images or parts of 
images back and forth in Photoshop with the magic 
wand.  I could sit and play with that for a long 
time­those little dancing electrons stimulating 
my brain into a zenlike state of calm.



It’s long been my experience with creative 
projects of all kinds that they mostly feel 
disastrous and out of control while you are 
immersed in them.  If you’re lucky, somewhere on 
the third or fifth or twentieth draft or the 
fourth day of fitting parts together, something 
settles into place and it all works.  If you’re 
not lucky, it just stays a disaster.



That’s just what happened with the structure.  I 
had in mind something modest, like the Hagia 
Sophia in sunburned PVC, a series of escalating 
domes.  Problem is­pvc doesn’t bend well, 
especially when its old and brittle. Jamie and I 
spent a morning lashing together half-domes of 
branches, which were flimsy and looked pretty 
silly.  Given an extra month or two, I could 
probably have woven them into baskets.  But 
luckily, during our lunch break we discovered a 
stash of old black irrigation pipe, which bends 
beautifully.  Suddenly we had all the domes and 
rings we needed­and it looks about as good as 
something made of old pipe can look.



The pictures, if I say so myself, look 
great.  Now I’ getting really excited to see what 
it looks like when it all comes together.



More later
now I’ve got a plane to catch to go teach in the woods for a week.

Part Two:  Friday August 24

It’s after midnight. This is about the fifth or 
sixth night in a row I’ll be getting to bed 
around 1 or 2AM and getting up early. We meant to 
leave for the playa this evening­decided instead 
to go early in the morning.  I’d thought I’d have 
a more relaxed evening at home to finish packing 
and write more of a blog­instead I spent it in a 
nightmare of frustration trying to get the last 
little bits printed up.  In the end, after 
closing down two copy shops, I still have to stop 
at a Kinkos in Reno tomorrow.



But all the rest is done.  All the big graphics 
are printed.  All the signs are made.  The whole 
structure has been labeled, bundled, and packed 
up in the truck and the bus.  Now, if we only all 
get there and can figure out how to put it all 
back up, we’ll have an installation.



I’ve instructed all my friends that the next time 
I get an idea, they are all to say in a firm tone 
of voice, “Down, Starhawk!   Remember Burning Man!”


Goodnight!



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Starhawk is a lifelong activist in peace and 
global justice movements, a leader in the 
feminist and earth-based spirituality movements, 
author or coauthor of ten books, including The 
Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of 
Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, and her latest, The Earth Path.

Starhawk's website is www.starhawk.org, and more 
of her writings and information on her schedule 
and activities can be found there.
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