Leave No Trace is one of the core principles of Burning Nest, Nowhere, Burning Man, and every Burn event. Essentially, Burners take responsibility for their environmental impact.
Leave a Better Trace is a step beyond, and started life at London Decompression 2019. We believe that the burner community has the power to make a positive impact not only on the individuals who are part of it, but also on society at large. We want to honour the basic burner principle of leaving the environment as we found it, but why stop there when our community has such potential to leave a positive trace? Examples of LBT include planting trees in a place that has been desertified; creating art or facilities that can be used by the local inhabitants after you leave; awakening people to take further actions to protect and improve the environment or become activists.
This means our mission has expanded to include:
- Reducing our environmental impact.
- Educating the community on environment related issues.
- Empowering the community to adopt more environmentally-friendly behaviour, both at burns and in daily life.
Rather than leaving a sea of beer cans, cigarette butts, half-eaten food, discarded packaging, grubby clothes, wellies, sleeping bags and abandoned tents, Burners leave only footprints. It is up to each of us to ensure the long-term survival of our event and its immediate (and larger) environment. We do this by carefully considering what to bring, how to get there, and how we behave on site.