Climate activists lined the road to this year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada to call out the “privileged mindset” of the Silicon Valley types who flock there – and the waste involved in creating a temporary city in the desert.
Only a couple of days later, disaster struck. Unprecedented rain – 20 mm in 24 hours – turned the desert into mud, trapping the 70,000 festival goers.
As you might expect, the internet went wild with schadenfreude. But there’s a deeper issue here. This is not the first – and won’t be the last – outdoor festival upended by unprecedented weather. It was only a month ago when the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea was crippled by intense heat and typhoons, forcing its abandonment. Last year’s Splendour in the Grass festival in northern New South Wales turned into a mudpit after unprecedented rains.
