‘Leave no trace’ isn’t just for Burning Man. Let’s all declare war on MOOP.
Why picking up trash is one of the most important things you can do today.
BY CHRIS TAYLOR
In Mashable’s series Wasted, we dig into the myriad ways we’re trashing our planet. Because it’s time to sober up.
First, let’s be clear: Burning Man did not invent the instruction to “Leave No Trace.” That phrase was likely coined somewhere in the U.S. National Parks system, Forest Service, or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the 1960s or 1970s. Clearer than “Walk lightly on the Earth,” more succinct than “Don’t drop any trash whatsoever, you freaking yahoos,” it was enshrined in a government pamphlet called “Leave No Trace Land Ethics” in 1987. That’s one year after Burning Man was born on a San Francisco beach, and four years before it moved to the Black Rock Desert, which is overseen by the BLM.
But what Burning Man did with Leave No Trace was take a simple meme and elevate it to the level of a religion. In the event’s cosmology, the devil is MOOP, a Burner-coined acronym for “Matter Out of Place.” You may read about LNT or MOOP on the Burning Man website before you go; you may think it one of those rules more honored in the breach than the observance.
It’s a big party in the desert and a lot of people get wasted, right? How responsible can they really be?
It isn’t until you see a veteran attendee chasing an errant piece of paper across the windy playa, or spy a cigarette butt that wasn’t theirs and automatically stoop to pick it up regardless, that you realize how deeply “Leave No Trace” is baked into Burner culture. You may marvel at how clean the streets of this pop-up city are, despite having no visible trash cans or dumpsters.
And that’s before you even see the volunteer army that spends a month picking up every tiny remaining scrap after the event, or the annual MOOP map used to name and shame camps with poor pickup skills. Those camps can then be disinvited the following year, as infamous wealthy person camp Humano was. And no wonder: Burning Man will itself be disinvited by the BLM if it isn’t certified 99.998 percent trash free every year in surprise inspections. (It passes every time.)
This hardcore anti-trash ethos is desperately needed in the wider world. Americans generate a whopping 250 million-plus tons of garbage every year, and an untold portion of it ends up on our streets and in our parks and waterways. This is a major factor in the alarming rise of microplastics in far corners of our planet; an estimated 80 percent of marine debris started as land-based trash.
If we are to stem a global tide of trash and save our wildlife, it needs to become socially acceptable — indeed, socially urgent — to pick up MOOP whenever and wherever you see it, no matter who dropped it.
The Pig Pen pickup
Lest you think this is solely an American problem, allow me to refer you to my home country, the United Kingdom. For as long as I’ve been alive, much of the UK’s highways and byways have featured crisp packets and pop cans, takeout boxes and condoms.
Our homegrown festivals aren’t like Burning Man; they’re like Glastonbury, which is infamous for its apocalyptic mounds of rubbish. This year, more than 5,000 Glastonbury goers abandoned their tents on the site, while more than 6,000 dumped their sleeping bags there — a horrifyingly privileged approach to trash.
I remember my school’s headmaster returning from a trip to Turkey to loudly admonish us kids for how messy our country was by comparison. Of course, we did nothing about it. Our cultural training wasn’t to pitch in, it was to berate everyone but ourselves for the state of it all, then walk on by the litter while grumbling.
You can feel smug about saving the environment and get fit at the same time
It took an American to shame us. Specifically, author and humorist David Sedaris, who moved to West Sussex, developed a Fitbit habit, and started walking for 9 hours a day. It was impossible not to notice how messy those bucolic country lanes were, so he took a mechanical trash grabber with him.
“You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins,” Sedaris wrote, comparing the chaos outside his walking zone to “Fukushima after the tsunami.” He became so well-known for his service that the local council named its garbage truck “Pig Pen Sedaris” in his honor, even though the locals knew little about his celebrity career.
When Sedaris appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers last December, the host pointed out that people who do what he does are normally wearing orange jumpsuits. We associate trash pickup with the lowest rungs of our society, and in so doing absolve ourselves of any need to participate in this essential civic duty.
Lucky for us, then, that one of the coolest corners of contemporary culture is basically a city full of David Sedarises. The only difference being that Burners usually don’t use mechanical grabbers, unless they’re part of the official post-event cleanup. (Which is handy, because hey, the squat is one of the most effective exercises there is. You can feel smug about saving the environment and get fit, all at the same time!)
MOOP Patrol
Black Rock City, with a street grid about the size of San Francisco, a Department of Public Works to build and maintain it, and a population north of 80,000, is the sixth largest city in Nevada for the week it exists. You know you’re in the desert, but it feels like an urban environment. So in terms of MOOP, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance for newbies.
We may be used to the social norm of picking up our own trash. We’re probably not averse to picking up a candy wrapper on a hiking trail, perhaps because the damage to nature is so stark. But transfer that same wrapper to the streets of a regular city, and we’re way more likely to walk on by. It’s probably got some kind of street filth on it! I’ll catch something! In the vast mechanical edifice of modern urban life, isn’t it someone else’s job? Aren’t street sweepers a thing? The city will take care of it, we think, then dismiss the thought and hurry on.
This is where Burning Man’s lack of trash cans comes into play, and it’s why a Trump administration proposal to mandate dumpsters at the event gets it so wrong. A few years back I attended the first Further Future, a “transformational” desert event run by Burners that attempted to replicate Burning Man for a more elite clientele. It had trash cans. They overflowed, creating eyesores all around. The organizers did not emphasize responsibility for your own trash, and it began to crop up everywhere. It was, in effect, a fascinating control experiment.
The fact that Black Rock City is without trash cans means it is forever at risk of losing the war to public enemy #1, MOOP. Therefore everyone has to do their part, and everyone has to reinforce everyone else’s commitment to do their part. If you don’t leave your tent or RV without a pocket or backpack to stick trash in, you cannot count yourself a true Burner.
This reinforcement can reach the level of vigilantism. When a camp called Big Imagination brought a Boeing 747 to Black Rock City as an art project, then failed to get the permits it needed to move the plane off the playa within 2 weeks after the event, guerilla artists returned to the desert to spray a vast MOOP tag on its undercarriage — the Burning Man equivalent of a scarlet letter.
Is it a perfect system? Of course not. As the event has grown to more than 80,000 attendees, many adhere to the Leave No Trace concept only so long as they’re at Black Rock City — then pack out and dump their trash bags all at once in the nearest permanent city, Reno. But that’s all the more reason to spread the ethos of Leave No Trace as far and wide as possible. A puppy isn’t just for Christmas, and LNT isn’t just for Burning Man.
MOOP is all around us, and it’s an artful term that covers more than just the trash we see before us. Microplastics in our oceans are Matter Out Of Place. So too are excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere — and by extension, fossil fuel power plants are pretty damn MOOPy too. Arsenic and lead in our drinking water, fracking chemicals deep below our feet, nuclear waste in our mountains: MOOP, MOOP, and more MOOP.
It’s not an exaggeration, therefore, to say that MOOP could destroy humankind. And that despite the outsize influence a handful of companies bear in terms of carbon emissions, it is still on all of us -corporate citizens and regular citizens alike — to clean up the world. We must leave it a tidier place than we found it, or future generations will suffer. Every tiny piece of trash you pick up helps, as it encourages your neighbors, friends and family to do the same. We all need to get MOOP-minded, at every level of society, as quickly as possible.
Because hey, if the oft-naked, orgiastic, wasted partygoers of Burning Man can do it as effectively as they do, then you have absolutely no excuse.
This story originally published on mashable.com.
