Playa Experiments to Global Solutions: Black Rock City’s Living Legacy

For one week each year, we all know that a portion of the Black Rock Desert transforms into a city. But that city is more than “just” a city; it’s also an open air mad science laboratory for grand experiments, a sandbox for big ideas, and a potent proving ground for hunches about offerings that might make meaningful contributions to the wider world. 

Reporting live from How Burning Man Makes the World Better, here are two remarkable stories of how time spent in our one-week-only fair city of dust has led to positive change that lasts.

Powering Hope: How Burning Man’s DIY Spirit Created a Disaster Response Revolution

When Will Heegaard first brought a modest solar trailer to Black Rock City in 2016, he wasn’t planning to revolutionize disaster response. Mainly, he wanted to satisfy his own curiosity: could mobile solar microgrids power critical infrastructure in a harsh environment?

Heegaard’s experimental array worked so well that it eventually ended up powering Rampart, Black Rock City’s emergency medical field hospital. Heegaard and a team of tinkerers returned to Black Rock City again and again, using the harsh playa environment to continue iterating on solar solutions.

“Burning Man was kind of a testing ground,” Heegaard explains. “If you can test or deploy these types of technologies in non-disaster events for critical needs, you can get a lot of data and learning that can be directly applicable to a disaster.”

Those early experiments evolved into Footprint Project, a nonprofit that brings sustainable power solutions to communities hit by natural disasters. Today, their fleet of mobile solar microgrids and battery systems provides essential power to emergency response facilities, medical equipment, and community centers in crisis zones across the US. They have gone on over 20 disaster and recovery missions to date and provided emergency clean power access to more than 50,000 people. 

In the wake of 2023’s Hurricane Idalia, Footprint Project deployed over 50 solar-powered systems across the Carolinas, powering everything from fire stations to home health devices. When roads were impassable, they even partnered with helicopter teams to airdrop solar kits alongside Starlink units, establishing critical communications in isolated mountain communities. Currently, Footprint Project is deeply immersed in Hurricane Helene relief efforts.

“The reality is that I can’t even keep track at this point of how many individual home health needs we’re supporting,” Heegaard says. “We were getting calls two to three to four times a day in the first couple weeks of people saying ‘My neighbor, friend, grandfather, family member is on oxygen, and if our generator goes down, we don’t know what we’re going to do.”

As they say, the playa provides… a potent convergence of necessity and wide-open space for innovations that evolve to meet urgent real-world challenges. The same improvisational spirit and technical ingenuity that power Black Rock City are now bringing light to communities in their darkest hours, literally and figuratively. 

Footprint Project demonstrates Radical Self-reliance doesn’t mean going it alone — it means building resilient systems that help communities power themselves through crisis, one solar panel at a time.

If you want to know how the rich legacy of Burners supporting disaster relief efforts began, take a listen to the new Burning Man LIVE podcast episode “Tom Price: From the Playa to the Planet” with Tom Price, co-founder of Burners Without Borders, Black Rock Solar, the XRT (External Relations Team), and a company that gifts clean-burning kitchens to people in Kenya.

Hot topics include: the importance of a gift economy and innovative solutions for climate change, and exploring how the values of Burning Man can extend beyond the event itself into everyday life.

JAGUARA: When Playa Art Becomes a Movement for Environmental Empathy

On a moonlit night in 2017, Leo Vilar and Catalina Pulido found themselves standing on the open playa, exhausted but elated after completing work on an Honorarium art project they had volunteered to build. As if on cue, in that moment of completion, Mayan Warrior drove out of the dust, massive light array sparkling and legendary sound system filling every inch of desert air with sound. In the midst of this awesome serendipitous spectacle, Vilar, ever the technician, found himself mentally cataloging the art car’s lasers, noting the placement of every speaker, and checking to see how the light array was hung. As his mind whirred, a bigger dream began taking shape. Like so many citizens of Black Rock City before him, Vilar found himself thinking, “I want to make something like that.” 

But his dream wouldn’t be another mutant vehicle only for art’s sake — it would be a messenger from the Amazon rainforest to the world. 

The concept for JAGUARA, Vilar and Pulido’s mutant vehicle with a mission, was born during a traditional ceremony in their home country of Colombia. It was then that the duo realized they could combine the languages of art, music, and technology to facilitate environmental empathy. The result is a stunning fusion of ancestral wisdom and modern expression: a massive jaguar-shaped art car that serves as both stage and sculpture, carrying the urgent message of rainforest conservation.

After its 2018 debut in Black Rock City, JAGUARA caught the attention of the Biennial of the Americas festival in Denver, where it became the cultural centerpiece of a ten-day gathering focused on sustainability. The project has since evolved into a movement, inspiring conservation efforts and educational initiatives throughout Colombia and beyond.

And just this fall, Vilar and Pulido brought JAGUARA to COP16 (short for Sixteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity) in Cali, Colombia. There, the duo orchestrated the creation of a grandly immersive outdoor theater space called the Circuito Terra Experience presided over by JAGUARA. The Circuito Terra Experience became a vibrant hub for environmental and cultural programming alongside the formal conference. 

However, rather than producing a pre-programmed experience, they followed a principle familiar to any Black Rock City citizen: build the container and let the community fill it with meaning. Participants from around the world screened films, led discussions, and shared their work on topics ranging from the Amazon Rainforest to worldwide ocean conservation to the Sierra Nevadas. 

Even the logistics of the two-week event echoed Black Rock City’s spirit of Communal Effort and Radical Self-reliance. “This is the closest we have been to Burning Man,” Vilar reflects. “Because it was so expensive for hotels, we ended up renting empty houses that were close to the conference and putting mattresses on the floor. There were always people cooking. And I was happy because my kids, for example – they’re 11 and 9 – they were involved too, baking cookies and contributing, just very much like Burning Man. Everybody was there together, really happy.”

The Burning Man Effect

Footprint Project and JAGUARA are living proof that the arid playa is actually fertile ground. Seeds of innovation planted there flourish long after the dust settles. 

More than watching lasers dance across the desert night, it’s about the inspirations that result, and the wild realities those inspirations become. It’s beyond the technical knowledge gained from stress testing equipment in extreme conditions; it’s really about the unique alchemy that occurs when creative minds encounter the freedom to experiment backed by a community eager to support bold ideas. All that is what makes change happen. 

These two projects are beacons for Burning Man’s Ten Principles in the wider world – Participation, Civic Responsibility, Gifting, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, and Immediacy are the obvious ones, but when any project makes its way from playa to the planet, all Ten Principles are inevitably in the groundwater. Whether powering communities through crisis or inspiring environmental awareness through art, projects like these show how the playa’s transformative spirit takes root and flourishes, far beyond the dust. 

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Cover image of the JAGUARA mutant vehicle at the Biennial of the Americas Festival in Denver, Colorado, 2019 (Photo courtesy of Sonic Design)