Has Popularity Killed Northern Nevada's Biggest Art Festival? | D. Brian Burghart | Burning Man 1997
By D. Brian Burghart
MIKE BILBO TELLS A STORY ABOUT A CERTAIN SPRING—a watery oasis near Roswell, N.M.—that became popular with travelers who needed a stopping off place while driving across the desert. An outdoor recreation planner for the Bureau of Land Management, Bilbo says old photos show the spring to be a flourishing resource. But as time advanced, the spring was abused and overused. It shrank.
“Now there's nothing,” he says. “You can't even tell where it was, they basically loved it to death.”
Bilbo's spring may be a perfect analogy for the Burning Man.
Lack of controls, poor planning, sheer popularity and philosophical differences may have killed the event. Whether something called “Burning Man” will happen outside Reno this year on Labor Day weekend remains to be seen. But one thing is certain喫t won't be the free expression of freedom and anarchy that it has been in years gone by.
“We want to keep the door open, but for the first time, there is going to be a door. People need to understand that this is a place with boundaries. In this case boundaries that are hard to breach. We’re are trying to socialize it more intensively, and the way to do that is to have them live next to one another.”
“We're going to try and keep it inviting and inclusive,” says Larry Harvey, Burning Man creative director and founder of the anti-commercial, pagan arts festival that brings thousands of people from around the world to Nevada's Black Rock Desert “We want to keep the door open, but for the first time, there is going to be a door. People need to understand that this is a place with boundaries. In this case boundaries that are hard to breach. We're are trying to socialize it more intensively, and the way to do that is to have them [participants] live next to one another.
“You can have large gatherings of people, and they don't turn into ravening animals. So, to the people who say you can't have a lot of people, or they turn into robots, I say, 'Bullshit,' that's simply not true.”
The fact is, it is the number of people that may have caused the festival to collapse under its own weight. There were 11,788 participants at Burning Man 1996, according to figures arrived at cooperatively between BLM and BM staff. Black Rock City, for those several days is undoubtedly the largest city in Pershing County. While it may be a tent city, it experiences all the problems that a city the same size experiences—infrastructure issues such as sewage, taxes environmental impacts, police, fire, ambulance, insurance, leadership—without the incremental growth that allows other cities to address problems one at a time. For Burning Man in 1997, these issues will be dealt with before the city begins building, or the city will simply not be built.
The 1996 special recreation permit had 16 stipulations that had to be met to go into 1997 with a clean record: 10 of them were violated, according to the BLM.. It is these violations that put Burning Man on a probationary status with the feds.
“If you get enough formidable organizers out there, it will happen again,” says John Law, former technical director for the project. Law retired after the 1996 event, citing philosophical differences as much as anything. “For me personally, it's just gotten too big,” he says.
Law is not the only integral participant to bow out. Reportedly up to half of the old staff of volunteers and enthusiasts, including members of the Danger Rangers and gate organizers, have found the event has gotten too far from its founding principles and won't be returning.
“But, don't count Larry Harvey out,” says Law. “If anyone can get it going, it's him. He's an impresario in the literal sense of the word.”
Flaming Hurdles
What the Burning Man Project needs is money. Financial burdens have the most potential to nix the event.
“We got killed this year, financially devastated,” says Law. “The event doubled in size, doubled in people coming in and tripled in costs. One third of the people didn't pay, they simply rolled around the gate.”
Costs are only going to rise.
Insurance required by the BLM are projected to rise from $10,000 property damage for any one occurrence to $50,000 in 1997; personal injury, bodily injury liability will go from $300,000 for any one person to $2,000,000 based on the Lara Sherbin claim of $1,000,000-plus (Sherbin was injured at last year's event); and $300,000 for any one occurrence is predicted to rise to $5,000,000 in 1997. While these numbers are yet to be chiseled in stone, they are included in the model plan. No estimates for how much these insurance hikes will cost are yet available.
The project still has to pay the lion's share of fees from last year. They were assessed fees of $23,576 (based on $2 per person). Of this $3,000, a permit performance bond, was taken, and an $8,000 payment was made on the balance. Two more payments of $6,288 are to be made, one on April 19, the next May 17. If either are missed, the permit will he revoked, and the project killed, at least on public lands, for one to three years.
Another financial obligation to be met will be a paid security force. Everyone contacted expressed concern about general safety, although solutions to the problem vary.
The BLM sanctions getting a paid security staff on the order of a Lollapalooza event. “Permittee will hire and coordinate closely with regional certified law enforcement of officers at the federal, state and county levels. An avocational security backup is appropriate when it only augments certified personnel,” says an issues and potential solutions document compiled by the BLM.
“Lollapalooza has around 100 security guards,” says Law, and emphasizes that the area covered by Burning Man participants is much larger than any comparable rock show. He suggests that organizers may be between a rock and a hard place, since paying 100 guards 24 hours a day for three to five days will be expensive and “you couldn't do it with volunteers.”
Another cost that will be required this year is for an expanded environmental assessment. Since the event annually has doubled in size since its first appearance on the Black Rock Desert in 1990 (it started on a California beach in 1986), there is larger impact on the environment than before. According to Bilbo, past assessments did not take into account all potential impacts on the playa and surrounding areas. Contrary to popular opinion, there are environmental concerns on the playa. The event is held near the Applegate Lassen Emigrant Trail, a settler shortcut that crossed the desert last century.
Hot springs, both on public and private land, had negative impacts last year. In particular, water and mud was illegally removed from Trego Hot Springs and emigrant-period artifacts (two bottles and possibly a rifle barrel) were reportedly taken.
Trash is another concern. While the BLM praises the trash removal efforts made by the project, (“A highly commendable effort—the place becomes spotless”) it wasn't the perfection exhibited in past years. “Eye-witness reports and photos indicate considerable trash blown from event to Black Rock Desert eastern edge areas. Also, debris left at springs from campers and the water 'vendor,' ” the agency said.
Law's evaluation agrees. “From the very beginning, we were concerned with not trashing the desert,” he says. “Even though people carried 95 percent of it away, we still took out eight 30-yard Dumpsters [in the weeks after the event],” he says.
While the cost of an environmental assessment is less than that of an environmental impact study, a detailed assessment of the “real and perceived impacts” could be pricey. The BLM has assisted the project by compiling a list of companies that do these sort of studies. Bilbo could not estimate within $10,000 its cost.
“Who knows,” he says. “They could get someone to do it for free.”
The cost overruns for toilets and cleanup were mentioned in the BLM's closeout as reasons for the lateness in paying fees, saying they totaled $45,000.
Expect that cost to jump even higher. Planners had anticipated around 6,000 participants last year (as mentioned, nearly 12,000 showed) and supplied 80 toilets: half the number needed. The assumption is that if the event again doubles to 24,000 people, 320 toilets will be needed, and the toilets will have to be pumped two or three times a day—potentially quadrupling last year's cost.
The final hurdle is time. Even though Labor Day weekend is six months away, the clock is ticking. According to Bilbo, the sooner the environmental assessment is begun, the sooner it can be analyzed. The payment schedule deadlines will not be adjusted, and a missed one will spell disaster for the project. Specific emergency services plans must be developed, coordinated and implemented by Harvey with BLM, state and county emergency response personnel (medical and law enforcement ). The plans must be delivered to the BLM no later than 75 days before the event in order to give the public time to respond before the BLM will issue a new permit.
“We need to hear from them, like, now,” says Bib.
Burnt Out?
One possibility that Harvey is exploring is to partially move the event off public lands, although he is keeping the potential site secret
“I'm interested in publicizing the fact when its an absolute go,” he says. “What we are essentially talking about is private land—a place where people can form community instead of just a big parking lot. What happened to us was we were in an uncontrolled environment. All these people came and they drowned us.”
Still, whether the event happens even partially on public lands, state and county governments and the BLM are going to have a say in the proceedings.
“It's our job to ensure that resource degradation does not occur, and public's safety is handled,” says Bilbo. With these two goals in mind, the BLM has created more hoops for Burning Man to jump through to pass the federal permit application process. While it is true that moral questions have been raised and letters have been received both for and against the event, “It's not necessarily the BLM's position to rule on moral issues.”
Still, the moral objections are, in effect, covered by the BLM, because one of the stipulations covered by the permit is that state and local laws will be obeyed by participants. While the BLM is more concerned with health, safety and environmental violations like public defecation, food and water vending and water rights than flagrant drug use and public sex, it is obvious that those are considerations that will affect renewal hopes for the permit.
A group called The High Rock, Black Rock, Immigrant Trail Coalition made up of mining, ranching environmental and land use groups have also expressed concerns about the event. Contrary to other reports, they are not specifically against Burning Man, but against most large-scale recreational uses of the Black Rock Desert until a management policy for the area is put into force. Burning Man is the largest event on the desert.
“There really aren't any problems with Burning Man, per se,” says Desna Young, former planner for the BLM and project and research coordinator for Public Resource Associates, a group that belongs to the Coalition. “It's just how large it has gotten out there. For every event there comes a point when the life cycle changes and the dynamics change.”
She says the Coalition is most concerned with maintaining the desert's “integrity of setting.”
Pershing County has also raised objections to the event.
“Pershing County got slammed,” said Law. “Sheriff Skinner and the deputies did a great job, but it was just too much.”
Sheriff Skinner is at the FBI academy in Washington, D.C., and was unavailable for comment. Acting Sheriff Lt. Bill Barks would not comment for the record
“We're not against Burning Mall, per se,” said William Denier, Pershing County commissioner. “We are against anything illegal that took place on the desert last year. We don't want to violate anybody's rights, free speech and the right to assemble and such. Everybody has the right to use public land. What we are against is the alcohol and drug use that was beyond anybody's ability to control.”
“It was probably fine when it was just a gathering of artists when it started in California and for the first two years or so there in the Black Rock, nobody got hurt,” he said.
Last year, there was one death and two severe injuries associated with the event.
“I was on 14 accident sites, and I didn't get to all of them,” says Law. “It's a miracle that there weren't more accidents than there were.”
Invariably, organizers of the event see automobiles as the major threat to public safety on the playa.
“If you could leave the fucking cars out of the equation, you could mitigate problems,” said Harvey.
Harvey says that his plans for the new event will take people out of their cars, thus increasing safety and minimizing impacts on the desert. He plans to lessen financial impact by raising ticket prices (preliminary planning suggests that tickets will go from $25 to $45 in advance and from $40 to $75 at the gate) and making it impossible for people to sneak in.
“If they come out and expect what they're used to, they are in for a shock,” Harvey says.
“I don't believe we're going to be on the Black Rock playa [in '97]. If today they said, 'No problem, you've got the big playa,' I think I'd just say 'No.'
“We are well into the planning process,” he said. “I think we've got what we need. I think we've got exactly what we need.”