So parties are an essential part of influencer culture. Lots of influencers have gotten into controversies from throwing major parties (especially at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic) and we hear news of influencers getting evicted due to their elaborate and boisterous parties. The issue with this is that influencers see these parties as not a way to hang out with friends, but rather as important business networking opportunities. This leads to a culture of needing to outdo one another, resulting in bigger and more elaborate parties that eventually… inevitably have negative impacts on the environment.
One of the biggest and baddest example of these problematic parties was the infamous gender reveal party in California back in 2020. The party was held in the El Dorado Ranch Park which is a popular destination for fall photos as the wild grasses make a beautiful backdrop. The problem is, with the ongoing drought around that time, these grasses dry out and become incredibly flammable and the gender reveal party, unfortunately, involved the use of pyrotechnic devices (Silverman et al., 2020). I know… WHAT?! You would think that people know better than to use pyrotechnic devices in the middle of an extremely dry park, but apparently not. The resultant fire spread like… well… wildfire. It resulted in the destruction of San Bernardino National Forest and other nearby forests and the fire continued to burn over the next 23 days. According to the San Bernardino National Forest authority, the fire burned a total of 22,680 acres in the Oak Glen / Yucaipa Ridge area and within the San Gorgonio Wilderness Area of the San Bernardino National Forest (Incident Information System, 2021). How exactly do wildfires affect the environment? Well to start off, it involves a huge loss of forests which are important carbon sinks. The fires also result in poor air quality from the smoke and particles being thrown into the atmosphere (Cowan, 2020). Long forest fires also affect visibility and can change the colour of the sky.
While this is indeed a shocking example of a gender reveal party resulting in a forest fire, it is surprisingly not the only case. In 2017, a gender reveal party in Arizona sparked a wildfire that burned nearly 47,000 acres and caused more than $8 million in damage (Silverman et al. 2020). Furthermore, there are many other ways gender reveal parties can cause environmental damage besides forest fires.
One example of this was a gender reveal party in Miami that resulted in beach pollution(Cardona, 2020). As part of the reveal, a helicopter was flown over a beach and large amounts of blue powder was dumped into the water. Furthermore, the wind blew powder and confetti across the beach and into the sand dunes and sea grape trees. A volunteer (Cardona, 2020) at the beach remarked
I assume all that trash will get stuck there. Who’s going to clean that up, and whose responsibility is that? That’s not right. Have a celebration, but you shouldn’t come to a beach, make a huge mess, and then just leave.
It seems like in a bid to outdo one another, influencers are finding creative ways to pollute and destroy the environment. Of course, it is important to celebrate life milestones but surely there are ways to do so without literally burning down a forest.
Cardona, A. C. (2020). Environmental Group Blasts Gender Reveal Company for “Illegal Dumping”. Miami New Times. Retrieved from https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-gender-reveal-party-criticized-for-polluting-beach-11765148.
Cowan, J. (2020). Where the Wildfires Are Burning, and Other Answers You Need. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/article/wildfires-california-oregon-washington.html.
Incident Information System. El Dorado Fire. Incident Information System. Retrieved from https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7148/.
Silverman, H., Vera, A. & Mossburg, C. (2020). A pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party sparked one of the California wildfires, burning over 8,600 acres. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/07/us/california-fire-el-dorado-gender-reveal-trnd/index.html.