BM Earth Guardian Goals

The Earth Guardians are committed to working year-round to ensure the conservation of the Black Rock Desert's unique resources - biological, cultural, and historical. Part of the beauty of the Playa is its emptiness. Except for tire tracks and footprints, our policy is to leave the playa as the profoundly barren and empty corner of the world that it is. As home to Burning Man, the Desert has a profound impact on the Burning Man community. In return, and to ensure that the Burning Man festival will continue for future years, we must reduce and remove impacts to the desert. To do this, the Earth Guardians were formed and have five major roles in preserving the Black Rock Desert:

Education

Action

Clean-up

Partner

Desert Steward

Education - Prevention, Prevention, Prevention

The Earth Guardians work to education, inform and encourage all

the citizens of Black Rock City how to apply the Leave No Trace

Principals to life in our temporary desert home. As the

community is preparing for their short stay in the desert, we

include messages via the Internet, printed survival guides and

newsletters to prepare the citizens of Black Rock City how to

minimize their impacts to the desert. During the event, we

continue to actively instruct the community from the moment

they enter Black Rock City by working through the Greeters,

Radio Free Burning Man, newsletters such as the Black Rock

Gazette, art and model camp installations to illustrate the good

and bad of desert living and lectures, games and demonstrations on

the environment and Leave No Trace principals.

Action - Running a city of over 20,000 people with minimal impacts. During Burning Man, the Earth Guardians work closely with the community to minimize waste and impacts with our recycling efforts, by dispatching teams to work with individual camps on no-impact desert living, by patrolling the community and sensitive areas like hot springs and using roaming Earth Guardian volunteers to initiate desert clean-up activities during Burning Man.

Clean-up - Leaving No Trace Each year, as the event begins to wind down, Earth Guardians will engage the larger Burning Man community to complete as much of the clean-up effort as possible before leaving the desert. We start with a community wide LNT Day to mobilize all Black Rock Citizens to survey the city and collect any artifacts left behind. After the event, Earth Guardians will provide volunteers to DPW to assist in the remaining full-scale clean-up efforts until all remnants of the city are eliminated.

Stewards - Taking the initiative to preserve the pristine desert environment. Over the past several years, the Burning Man Project has taken on the responsibility to monitor and evaluate the impacts of past events on the playa. Using the Earth Guardian- trained volunteers, we are completing long-term studies involving data collection, monitoring, and evaluation of previous year's Burning Man sites to evaluate the effectiveness of our clean-up efforts. Where impacts from previous events have been monitored, Earth Guardian volunteers are working to remove the impacts and return the desert to it's natural state.

Partner -Working with other Black Rock Desert users to conserve the environment. The Earth Guardians, as sanctioned agents of the Burning Man project, provide volunteers to come up to the desert year round to assist BLM and other desert users with clean-up efforts. We work closely with both BLM and other organized groups that use the Black Rock Desert on conservation projects as in conjunction with the BLM and these other groups. Through these projects, the Burning Man community has worked to improve the desert since 1990 by removing sizable quantities of car bodies, tires, sheet metal, bed frames, stoves and refrigerators.

Interesting in more information about what Leave No Trace means? Check out these additional Leave No Trace web pages

LNT - An 0utdoor ethic
LNT - National web page
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