From my experience, people are pretty good about cleaning up. The first year I went I camped solo, so I theoretically could have left a bunch of crap, but I didn't. The second year I camped with a camp, and they were really thorough with check out and break down. We had a formal clean up of certain areas that I participated in where I remember people finding the tiniest things, like little pieces of thread and what not. And then when I personally went to leave, we had someone come and inspect my area and whatnot. So in my opinion, I think people do a pretty good job. And even if people didn't do a good job... we are not talking about a beautiful national park here, it is a desolate wasteland where literally no life can survive. I saw maybe ONE bug while I was out there. Not even bugs can survive out there. It's like the surface of the moon.

the full map image for 2025: https://webassets.burningman.org/largeimages/MOOP_Map_2025_0...

Austria is a small country but festival-wise it does host a couple superlatives -- Donauinselfest as the largest festival in the world, Novarock being the largest rock festival depending on how you count. And then theres so many great other festivals in austria and the surrounding countries, big and small.

People keep raving about burning man so I kind of want to go but I wonder whether I'd just be slightly disappointed. Or whether it's an american media influencing europeans thing where expectations become overinflated compared to what we have here.

When I was a kid my stepdad was big into amateur rocketry, so we'd go to a lot of launches, including at Black Rock. One of them (could've swore it was LDRS, but given the timeline it would've had to have been XPRS or maybe BALLS) was at the same time that Burning Man's MOOP crew was doing their thing, and that was my exposure to how much work goes into preserving the playa for future users/visitors (including us). It's impressive to watch, even from long distance via binoculars. Of course the rocket launches have similar requirements, but they involve a lot fewer than 70,000 people (but on the other hand, a much larger area of potential litter, given that rockets fly far and sometimes don't come down in one piece).

I live in Reno nowadays, and the locals either love or absolutely despise Burning Man, in the latter case for good reason: while Burning Man as an organization clearly cares a lot about “leave no trace” (as I've gotten to see firsthand), the Burners themselves have a tendency to leave pretty giant traces throughout Reno. A big one is bikes getting left behind (by people who don't want to deal with a bike caked in excruciating-to-fully-clean playa dust), and there's a whole supply chain of companies here that'll find those dumped bikes (or encourage Burners to bring them directly), clean 'em up, fix 'em up, and resell them (often back to Burners the following year; rinse and repeat). A lot of other, less-lucrative-to-refurbish-and-resell stuff unfortunately ends up clogging up every dumpster in town.

> its release inevitably fuels a bit of public finger-pointing

Is this what's helping with that?

> the most striking trend is that the community has steadily improved at Leave No Trace

Probably not only? But shame and avoidance of shame can be good motivation

infamous: adjective

    1. Having an exceedingly bad reputation; notorious.
    "an infamous outlaw."
    2. Causing or deserving severe public condemnation; heinous.

If you think that’s dedication: I met Dominic (DA) who they interviewed in this article almost 20 years ago in the Spanish desert, where taught us Euroburners the art of MOOP cleanup. He’s been at it for a long time now.

I've never heard of this blog, but it's great.

Glad to hear of it. I wonder if one of the reasons for the improvement is the "corprotization" of the event. From what I hear, people are increasingly showing up with prefab shelters, or the VIP tents probably have entire cleanup crews.

Not like the old "a couple of stoners with a lean-to" kind of thing that probably featured heavily, in the old days.

70,000 people during a week. It would be interesting to compare this with some other kind of event with the same duration and similar amount of people or perhaps make a

grams of garbage per humanhour unit