Burning Man Survives | LA Weekly | February 4, 1999
Festival makes peace with feds
BY Rico Eagliaho
Radical subcultures and government bureaucracies don’t have a long tradition of getting along, but to judge by a recent tilt between the Burning Man Festival and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, sometimes those worlds can peacefully intersect Poised to battle over a proposal that might have led to the demise of the festival, the two groups have apparently reached an understanding that spells good news for freaks everywhere.
The proposal in question is the draft Environmental Impact Statement prepared by the federal land bureaus Winnemucca district. Released to the public last September after one year in the works, it seeks to address increased recreational use of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Explains district project manager Gerald Moritz, When the land bureau did its last land-use plan in 1982, we didn’t really examine the Black Rock desert from a recreational standpoint. No one was using it for that purpose. That changed in the 90s, when several groups chose Black Rock as the site for large annual events.
Most conspicuous of these was the privately operated Burning Man Festival, which came to Black Rock in 1990 as a small gathering of San Francisco artists-cum-outdoorsmen and quickly evolved into a tribal celebration for the worlds subcultures, some of which would be odd bedfellows in other settings. Thousands of ravers, nudists, pagans, gearheads, pranksters, hippies and cy bergeeks flock to the festival each September, bringing with them immense interactive artworks, bizarre theme camps, noise, music and lots of pyrotechnics. What it all means is left to the individual, but it is by any definition extreme.
The draft environmental statement proposes controlling recreational use of the desert in two ways: by limiting attendance at large events to a maximum of 10,000 people and by creating a yearly user pool of 40,000 man-days that would put a cap on the total amount of time the desert could be used by all large recreational groups combined.
Under the new rules, Burning Man would be restricted to a four- or five-day gathering of no more than 10,000 people. The 1998 fest drew 15,000 people and lasted a week.
“If the environmental plan were approved as is, we’d have to leave Black Rock, and that would be the end of the festival”, says Marian Goodell, manager of communications for the Burning Man Project. The event needs to be within a days drive of San Francisco, where our organizers and offices are. We can’t just move to Wyoming. We don’t have touring trucks. Were not Lollapalooza.
Moving Burning Man to a location near Black Rock but out of federal jurisdiction is also not an option: The festival did exactly that in 1997, and met with what organizers term irrational, paranoid fears from their hosts in Washoe County, who took 100 percent of Burning Man’s gate receipts to shore up fire and police security that wasn’t needed and ultimately wasn’t used.
With the environmental plan threatening the festival’s existence, Burning Man mobilized its staff and the far-flung Burning Man community to lobby for a change in the proposed maximum-attendance and user pool figures. In each case, those numbers are completely arbitrary, says Burning Man founder Larry Harvey in an Internet-distributed interview. In 1997, we conducted an event drawing 10,000 people with no adverse environmental impacts. This year our population neared 15,000 people with the same result . . . This maximum attendance number was pulled from a hat.
At the same time, It was critical to emphasize our environmental connection to Black Rock, says Goodell. It’s not just about Burning Man changed my life and you have to let it keep growing. It’s that the Black Rock desert has special significance for us, and that we’ve been willing to take on a stewardship of that land.
In letter-writing campaigns, and patient negotiations with federal officials, Burning Man advocates emphasized the festival’s stewardship. They pointed to Burning Man’s educational efforts federal safety pamphlets and a short history of the Black Rock area were posted on the Burning Man Website, and were distributed along with survival guides to all ticket holders as well as the projects surprisingly clean environmental record. So thoroughly do Burners pick up after themselves that only once in the festivals nine-year history have federal inspectors recorded traces of a former Burning Man site.
The effort has apparently paid off. Admitting that the numbers in the environmental plan were merely a starting point for analysis purposes, the land bureau’s Moritz now acknowledges Burning Man’s unique place in the Black Rock ecology. “What it amounts to, they come in, they bring their own equipment, erect these massive things. It’s amazing that you can have that amount of people for that amount of time and pretty much leave the site clean. There’s nothing there to start with, and there’s nothing there at the end.”
Moritz predicts that the environmental plan will be significantly revised before the land bureau ratifies a final version sometime this summer. Whatever the outcome, this year’s festival looks like a go: Tickets to Burning Man 1999 went on sale this month. The festival’s Goodell, for her part, sees the whole episode as indicative of a larger movement. It’s really, really cool if you think about it. It’s a form of the citizenry taking back our land. If were radical in our play, unusual in our play, we can still rally our forces together and work with the government to create an environment that works for us.