photo: Mortesha, facebook
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/52028165
The burn starts at 6:45. That blue stuff looks gnarly – glue?
Interesting that they burned it in the day time. Looking at the stream now, it is whiteout conditions and also looks very windy, so perhaps another storm is expected.
MOOP collection, post-event
The Embrace creators were originally looking for a permanent home for their structure, but it seems the MOOP Monster may have forced it to burn.
160,000 lbs of wood was burned. The structure cost $266,000, of which $52,000 came from Kickstarter. Outraged gender-fluids took to BMIR to complain that Alpha looked too masculine, and Omega looked too feminine. They look like big artworks to me, not actual people. People have arms and legs, more like that big Man Person thing they keep showing.
Some comments from Burners on Facebook:
Bill: This is beautiful and touching… and i know im an ass for thinking/saying this- but I can’t help but think about all the pollution from all of this… Oh well… carry on!
Electra: It is beautiful but incredibly irresponsible.
Christi: I get the sentiment, but the CO2 emissions from actually burning things at Burning Man is just the icing on the tip of the iceberg. I’d love to see people commit to a lower-carbon burn in all the other ways– transportation, how much stuff gets brought out, how much excess stuff is bought and thrown away, etc. It would be interesting to do the math and see what kind of a reduction would be needed to “pay for” the burns. On a cumulative basis (x pounds CO2/70,000 people), I’d bet it wouldn’t take all that much to bring the math in line, as long as everyone (including all those Techexecs) did their share. C’mon PDiddy- ditch the jet and join the rest of the dirt hippies in their tents & shade structures!!
They did the math in 2007, for the Green Man. See here.
Haysteev: My opinion is that the huge expense (500K in this case, 150-300K for Man or Temple), gas and manpower to harvest wood around the globe, the volunteering, materials and fundraising to build, to then truck it out to the desert to burn for 6 days….is wasteful and I feel like Burners should be more highly considerate of the state of the planet and humanity. What could burners have done with that money and volunteering energy? OR…how about disassemble it and move it from city to city, to inspire other people off-playa? Isn’t that what BMORG wants to do? To spread BM culture off-playa? Lead by example.
Amber: they didnt know if they were going to allow this to burn because the wood wasn’t really the right wood to burn.They finally decided to burn it because it would be moopier taking it apart than burning it…it wasnt the wood burning it was that it had glue in it and it wasnt “approved”wood…i can’t remember what type of wood it was…one of the engineers at Ill Ville told me when we were on their art car…but I was drunk so i dont remember
We’ll let Anastasia have the last word: This is just reflection of our entire civilization, people, deal with it
What do you think, Burners? If, like 75% of us think, there is room in the world for more Burning Man-esque events, should we try to make them environmentally sustainable? Or should they always be temporary, wasteful, impermanent, symbolizing this ancient ritual ceremony of death-and-rebirth?
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