The Man Behind Burning Man

He is not one of them. They are naked bongo-playing blue Smurfs proffering gang massages and, in the hindsight of photographic evidence, looking like a bunch of dorks. He is sitting alone on a couch in the middle of the desert, face hidden under a cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses, teeth like a colonial graveyard, chain-smoking unfiltered Camel 100s in the 98[degrees] heat and talking about the ancient Greeks' concept of public space. When the Internet took his bonfire and turned it into a horde-gathering weeklong event that generated headlines all over the globe, Larry Harvey could have become many things: cult leader, millionaire, party promoter. What he chose was urban planner. We all dream differently.

Harvey, a San Francisco bohemian, started the tradition 14 years ago as a punk-pagan celebration on a San Francisco beach and moved it to a lifeless desert northeast of Reno in 1990 when the S.F. beach patrol kicked him off. Since then, he has nurtured his festival into a lengthy ritual that this Labor Day attracted 30,000 campers to its mix of art, raves, nudity and spirituality. In the process, much has changed. Harvey has driven out some of his original anarchy-loving partners, instituted streets and rules (no guns), and now controls much of the art through $250,000 in grants. He is the director of a limited-liability corporation that oversees the festival's $4 million annual budget. He is the mayor of the wildest city the West has ever seen.

Larry Harvey may be the first truly pragmatic utopian. "The problem with utopias is that they are based on some theory of human nature," he says, as he is joined on his couch by a topless woman, a punk called Chicken John and a transvestite glam rock star named Adrian Roberts. "Static utopias based on a priori notions are doomed to failure." Surprisingly, utopias where you have to bring your own toilet paper work just fine.

Because he wipes away Black Rock City each year, Harvey is able to plan civilizations based on how people actually interact--at least when they've got a week's vacation and a lot of money. His goal is to free people from passively consuming mass-marketed culture; the Internet, as he sees it, offers a medium through which to re-create communities. "People are culture-bearing beings, but culture is not going to break out where people are anonymous and thrown together in a mass," he says. "Cultural activities could disappear because they have been siphoned off to mass culture." Harvey, a self-educated college dropout, talks a lot about William James, agora, public squares and preaching civitas. Only he makes it interesting.

Harvey was raised in Portland, Ore., in a house built by a carpenter father who moved West during the Depression, running from the same swirling dust storms that are bearing down on Harvey's city as he speaks. He wears the same style of Stetson his dad wore, and his eyes tear up when he talks about him. "He was the most honest man I ever knew. So upright he never managed to make money," he says.