Number 6. Monday August 25th, 2025
ITS TIME TO BRING BURNING MAN BACK HOME - WE NEED IT HERE
And Let The Desert Heal
Black Rock 2020
Baker Beach 1990
35 years ago, a collective of San Francisco artists moved their yearly celebration of creative vision in a natural landscape from the City's Baker Beach to the Nevada desert to escape the GGNRA's prohibition on open fires, their culminating spirit, a Buring Man sculpture. Dozens of marvelous artworks have bloomed in the roadless Black Rock desert playa east of Reno in the decades since. And it's become one heck of a party too, with ubiquitous music and multi-media art embodying "Radical Self-Expression." Now each summer more than 75,000 "Burners" assemble there for two weeks in an eco-inspired "Black Rock City" organized by the Burning Man Project. The gathering's final celebratory moment, the symbolic burning of a monumental wooden figure has become world famous.
Black Rock City
But it’s time to face the truths of what Burning Man has really become despite the high ideals of its "Principles" including "Radical Inclusion": a Big Blast for the well-to-do and privileged who can get there.
When they’re not busy helping Trump.
The 2024 event's Black Rock City Census shows Burners are 2/3 white professionals who can afford its almost $1000 ticket. Most egregious are the "Tech Bros," the 20% with incomes above $300,000 per year who bring luxury RV's and helper cooks and servants with them.
And despite the massive cleanup of Burning Man's trash and debris each year, with as much recycled as possible, the Black Rock playa is never left truly unscathed from this intense two-week obliteration of its fragile ecosystem, repeated dozens of times by now. It will take decades for nature to restore that damage.
Meanwhile, back here in San Francisco and Oakland, both cities are thirsting for the renewed energy, fun, and vision of their once vigorous creative arts communities to revitalize their bland downtowns. Re-imagining Burning Man with its Radical Self Expression in the heart of these cities each year, with its inspiring sculptures, music, and celebrations lining San Francisco's Embarcadero, surrounding Oakland's Lake Merritt, gracing Yerba Buena Gardens and Treasure Island, and enlivening parks throughout the City will bring glorious new spirit to our cities' hearts. And what could be more truly Radical Inclusion than inviting all our 2 million city residents, rich and poor and in between, and all colors, to visit and be a part of that show - for no charge at all!
And just like every year's Fourth of July fireworks, the grand Burning Man effigy could be ceremonially immolated on a barge anchored in the middle of the Bay. Burning Man was a grand vision when it began, but now it's time for a vital change - for Radical Relevancy - and today's Times demand it.
- John Elberling, Editor
What Is The SF Reality Check ?
The Future of Our City and its People is very much in doubt today. And almost every day the City’s elite and powerful, with their minions, media, and front groups, bombard us with Hype upon Hype to push their agenda and schemes to control that Future. For 50 years TODCO has been on the Central City communities’ side pushing back against this onslaught, especially challenging their urban development ideologies, from bulldozer redevelopment to trickle-down up-zoning scams. This bi-weekly Reality Check ✔︎will call out the funky economics, the empty assurances, the pseudo visions, the sucker bait at the heart of all this Hype. So many years, so many bad ideas … what fun! – John Elberling, Editor
