{"id":3109,"date":"2019-08-19T12:51:52","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T16:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=3109"},"modified":"2025-07-26T16:18:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T20:18:40","slug":"love-and-dust-a-partial-history-of-burning-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/love-and-dust-a-partial-history-of-burning-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Love and Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"
He wore a cowboy hat, a Stetson, distinctive even from a distance. The model was the Open Road, the color silverbelly, a pale off-white. The Open Road has what is known as a cattleman crown, a center crease with two sloping dents on either side. The brim turns up ever so slightly, with a bound edge. The hat has long been associated with former President Lyndon B. Johnson. But this Stetson sat on the head of Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man.<\/p>\n
It was 1996, and Marian Goodell \u201984<\/span><\/strong> was at the festival for the second time. The annual gathering had existed for only a decade\u2014the first one was just a \u201cbeach burn\u201d in San Francisco in 1986, where Harvey and his friends built a wooden man to set on fire as part of a summer solstice tradition. The burn was a success, and the people were awed, so Harvey kept the ritual going the next year. Eventually, it grew large enough\u2014about 80 people\u2014that in 1991 the group of friends moved it to Nevada\u2019s Black Rock Desert, and Black Rock City, the name of the temporary town that Burning Man swells into, was born.<\/p>\nMarian Goodell ’84<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Over the years, the festival would turn into a business, and then a nonprofit, adopting 10 principles and eventually hiring a CEO. The founders would strive to stay true to the ethos of the first burn even as the event became a global phenomenon, with 70,000 people attending in 2018. Today, Burning Man is a weeklong undertaking in service of art and community. In late summer, the “Burners” descend on the desert, spreading out and making camp in a great semi-circle, an organized chaos. Art cars, theme camps, and great towers of flames are central to the experience. Nothing is for sale; no one networks. It\u2019s a place to explore who you might be and discover what you can do when you are forced to manage your own waste, deal with the oppressive sun and punishing dust, and rely on your neighbors.<\/p>\n
Which is why some were surprised when, in the spring of 2019, the organizers announced changes they hoped, perhaps counterintuitively, would make people less<\/em> likely to come. Burning Man was in danger of becoming a victim of its own success\u2014and Goodell wasn\u2019t going to let that happen.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Back in 1995, when Goodell attended for the first time, the event brought out about 4,000 people. She had fun in the desert but went back to her life when it ended. The next year, though, a feeling tugged at her: She wanted to do more. \u201cI made it my business to figure out who the organizers were and introduce myself to Larry,\u201d she said.<\/p>\nPhoto by Neil Girling, 2013<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
And then that hat sailed into view. It had belonged to Harvey\u2019s father, and was one of the few possessions Harvey kept after his death. (Years later, at another Burning Man, the hat blew away in the wind, and Harvey bought replacements to wear up until the last two years of his life.)<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very, very, dapper,\u201d Goodell said. She was walking with friends and shooed them away so she could talk to Harvey. \u201cI immediately jumped into his path.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nothing came of the conversation. But that fall, Goodell was invited to a party back in San Francisco that she knew the organizers would attend. She didn\u2019t know many people, but went anyway, standing in a corner for a few hours with a six-pack of beer at her feet. A woman began to chat with her, and brought Goodell deeper into the party, to the wild part, where people were really letting loose.<\/p>\n
There, she met Harvey again. It stuck, finally. They stuck. Late that night, Harvey looked for her again, and she gave him a ride home, or he took her car; it\u2019s a little fuzzy. Sure, he was dating someone at the time (another organizer), and Goodell was, too. \u201cIt took me a while to figure that one out,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Harvey and Goodell fell in love. She first helped at Burning Man in the capacity of \u201cLarry\u2019s girlfriend.\u201d Goodell, an English major at Goucher who had earned an M.F.A. in photography from the Academy of Art in San Francisco in 1995, was working as a project manager building ford.com. She was the website\u2019s fifth employee.<\/p>\n
By 1997, the organizers, a total of six with Goodell and Harvey, formed an LLC. They called themselves the founders. They were, and are, a family\u2014two, in fact, are married. Goodell quit her job and lived on savings for the next year as they worked on Burning Man. In 1998, the festival made a profit for the first time.<\/p>\nPhoto by Neil Girling, 2013<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The networks of Burners\u2014as attendees are called\u2014were growing around the country. Goodell set up email addresses for contacts in different cities, and meetups proliferated. As more people got involved, the same philosophical questions kept coming up. Why do people have to take their trash out with them? Why don\u2019t you sell anything? Goodell\u2019s contacts were looking for practical answers to philosophical questions.<\/p>\n
Harvey was fed up with the constant interrogations, and all the founders wanted to decentralize the culture of Burning Man. At Goodell\u2019s urging, Harvey decided to write up a list of the festival’s values to share on the network\u2019s listserv. He went on vacation and came back with nine principles: radical inclusion, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, gifting, decommodification, participation, and leave no trace. The other founders immediately ribbed him for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were like, \u2018Nine!? Why not 10?\u2019\u201d said Goodell, laughing at the memory. \u201cHe looked at us, astounded that he\u2019d done all this hard work and we were giving him a hard time.\u201d The next day, he came back with the 10th, and ultimately his favorite, principle: immediacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cImmediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture,\u201d Harvey wrote of the principle. \u201cWe seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n“Step Forward,” by Miguel Angel and Martin Bordera. Photo by Scott London.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
In 2011, the founders announced they had agreed to turn the LLC into a nonprofit, removing the ownership structure, which was more in line with the event\u2019s philosophy. The process took several years, and Goodell was made CEO in 2013, as she was trusted by the others to handle the transition expertly. After all, she had worked hard on the festival for years, had management experience from ford.com, and she had been student body treasurer back at Goucher.<\/p>\n
By 2014, the transition to nonprofit status was completed. In the following years, Goodell and her fellow founders noticed American culture and society was changing, and so was Burning Man. More and more RVs showed up, as people wanted the convenience and luxuries of the modern world with them in Black Rock City: air conditioning, private bathrooms, full kitchens. Concierge groups were popping up, offering to take care of everything for their clients in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. But that went against the whole point of Burning Man: radical self-reliance, civic responsibility. And what about communal effort?<\/p>\nPhoto by Ray Strassburger<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The founders recognized they had played a part in it, taking fees from the RVs and issuing mostly warnings to rule-breakers. So in the fall of 2018, Goodell, in her role as CEO, began to draft a post about some cultural course corrections. The nonprofit changed the way some ticket sales are run, and Goodell urged attendees not to buy packaged deals. While theme camps, where groups of people camp and work together under a theme, are still welcome, the concierge camps are not, and those unwilling to change will be banned. Published quietly this spring on Burning Man\u2019s website<\/a>, Goodell\u2019s post was picked up as a major news story and feted widely in the Burner community.<\/p>\n
![\"Marian](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/mariang.jpg\")
![\"Coyote](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Neil-Girling-20132-s.jpg\")
![\"Burning](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Neil-Girling-2013-s.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Scott-London-Art-Step-Forward-by-Miguel-Angel-Martin-Bordera-s.jpg\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Ray-Strassburger-s.jpg\")
![\"Temple](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Neil-Girling-2012-s.jpg\")
![\"Temple](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2019\/08\/Zipporah-Lomax-Art-The-Temple-of-Grace-by-David-Best-and-crew-s.jpg\")