2025 BWB Spring Summit Report Back

June 18, 2025

In May 2025, 99 participants gathered once again on the ancestral lands of the Northern Paiute at Fly Ranch for the 9th BWB Summit. As Burners Without Borders celebrates its 20th anniversary, we returned not only to place—but to practice. This year’s theme, “What Future Now?”, invited us to step into the unknown.

Our theme asked: What does the future hold—for our communities, our environment, our civic institutions, and our relationships with the natural and technological worlds?

Our answer: It’s not about predicting the future, but practicing how to notice it as it unfolds. We can learn to “track emergence”.

Like wildlife trackers in a living landscape, we practiced noticing: the subtle signals of new organizing models, ancestral knowledge reactivated, newly forming technologies, and stories ready to take root. Instead of a tightly scripted agenda, we designed for responsiveness. We stepped back into a model that honored curiosity, co-creation, and exploring the unique constellation of people and possibilities each moment invites.

As part of our 20th anniversary reflection, we’ve been looking closely at the story our network is telling—through the projects we build and the communities we support. At this year’s Summit, that story came into clearer focus. Across our programming, we saw our narrative taking shape: one that weaves together Response, Resilience, and Regeneration. These aren’t steps in a sequence, but overlapping expressions of how communities are coming together. 

True to the spirit of BWB, the weekend called on us to be present, flexible, and collaborative. With shifting skies and dynamic weather, we adapted—improvising our site map and infrastructure, and finding warmth in shared conversations until the rainbows emerged.

Our **Serve** pillar continued to anchor us in tangible contributions to the land, the bioregion, and the wider web of mutual aid. Projects included:

• Walipini Greenhouse & Garden Build: Participants helped construct a sunken greenhouse—rooted in Traditional Ecological Knowledge—and planted seedlings in a newly prepared garden bed. Compost sourced from Black Rock City waste streams brought full-circle energy back to Fly Ranch. The dream: food grown here, served on playa, and returned to the soil in regenerative loops.

• Compost Tumbler Construction: A new system was built in order to utilize the food scraps from the Summit kitchen and infused with biochar from our effigy.

• Biochar Burn Ritual: In its second year, this effigy burn experiment—led by Michelle Wong in 2025—transformed urban trees salvaged from the Altadena fire into biochar. The output will be utilized in gardens at Fly Ranch, return to Altadena soils, and even travel across the ocean to a permaculture program in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.

• Global Coffee, Local Connection: Mornings began with beans and conversation, courtesy of BWB Sacramento’s “Connected by Our Humanity” project. Sourced from farmer partners in Uganda, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, each cup came steeped in story and reciprocity

• Disaster Shelter & Tools Demonstration: In collaboration with ShelterBox, an NGO that provides emergency shelter and essential tools after disasters, participants engaged in a hands-on demo of their disaster kit. We unpacked a family-sized tent, solar lights, and water filtration tools, exploring how these support immediate needs. This offering connected BWB’s mutual aid ethos with real-world tools for disaster response, reinforcing the importance of working with local partners and communities for deeper impact.
  
  

The **Learn** element focuses on conversations and skill sharing that are peer-to-peer, land-to-person, idea-to-action. Highlights included:

• Storytelling Circles with David Alder invited participants to build bridges of meaning through personal narrative and vulnerability.

• Hide Tanning with Cass Boraiko transformed a local ranch sheep hide— served at the 2024 BWB Civic Dinner—into a community learning ritual. The workshop helped close the circle of nourishment, care, and craft, embodying a culture of full-cycle thinking. Rather than seeing the meal as an endpoint, we honored the animal’s full contribution by continuing its story through traditional practice. It was a hands-on reminder that regenerative culture begins with how we choose to engage: with presence, respect, and intention across time and place.

• Amiga the Farm Robot (by Farm-ng) sparked conversations about open-source robotics, AI, food justice, and what it means to work with machines in service of land stewardship —offering a tangible glimpse into the future of appropriate technologies.

• Sustainability Man! Jeremy Crandell (Man Base Team) and Starchild (BRC Solar) hosted a conversation on Burning Man’s efforts to make the construction of “The Man” more sustainable, alongside renewable energy initiatives for BRC and Northern Nevada.

• Medicinal Plant Walk with Matthew Raphael of The Ripple Project (LAGI) and biologist Ciara Parenzin deepened our relationship with the landscape through plant identification while harvesting sage for the medicinal Balm workshop.

• Medicinal Balm Making and a Regenerative Kitchen workshop with Charles Michel, blended ingredients sourced from Fly Ranch beehives and desert plants.

• Fly Ranch Honeybees where Big Chris helped participants learn about pollinator health, hive dynamics, and bee stewardship.

• A Disaster Response Roundtable connecting grassroots innovation with ShelterBox, Footprint Project, Field Ready, Meshtastic, and Burner Disaster Response. This conversation focused on scalable tools, distributed response, and the future of mutual aid.

The **Celebrate** element focuses on meaningful ritual and ceremony. Celebration isn’t an afterthought—it’s a vital expression of our values. We celebrate because it’s how we metabolize grief, deepen joy, and remember why we do this work.

• The Nostres Effigy, led by Brendan Darby and Simón Malvaez, stood as a story-structure and provided the artists an opportunity to burn their sculpture which was cancelled because of the rain at BRC 2023.

• Solar-powered Soundscapes & Sauna Sessions offered nights of playful reverence and public bathing with the Black Rock Sauna Society.

• Communal Meals as Learning Labs, where nourishment, cross-cultural sharing, and fermentation met at the same table.

• Dance as Embodied Celebration. Movement was a surprise favorite through a series of workshops: Tango with Patric, Persian Dance with Shireen, and an extra Cumbia session sparked by participant enthusiasm. We were reminded that embodiment is a vital part of our culture: dancing together helps us metabolize emotion and build trust.

• Sunday Art Sessions with Rock Gilding with Tania Seabock and Potato Prints with Justin Katz transforming natural elements into artful talismans.

• Closing Labyrinth Walk with Crimson Rose invited participants to reflect on the path behind, and the trail ahead.
  

What Future Now?

We believe the answers we seek are already within our networks—emergent, relational, iterative. These Summits remind us that futures are not predicted; they are practiced.

If you feel called to help shape that future, we invite you to express interest in upcoming gatherings by emailing bwbsummit@burningman.org. Stay connected by subscribing to the BWB Newsletter and checking out our Community Activation Calendar.

Deep Gratitude:

Behind every workshop, shared meal, and late-night fire circle is a vibrant network of people who show up with their time, talents, and tenacity. It’s thanks to these efforts that the BWB Summit has become more than just a gathering, it’s a living network of people building a better world.

Annie Coleman, Molly Rose, Neha Sharma, Charles Michel, Wesley Chen, Justin Katz (producers); the Fly Ranch team (Matt, Zac, Big Chris); Nevada Operations; and Burning Man Project staff. Special appreciations to: Michelle Wong, Brendan Darby, Simon Malvaez, David Alder, Cass Boraiko, David Waterman, Matthew Raphael, Tania Seabock, the disaster response roundtable participants, our medics and rangers, kitchen and coffee crews, ShadeShifters, SquareOne and all who brought offerings, presence, and wild ideas.