Another 40-foot stick-figure totem will be set ablaze
by 12,000 revelers in the desert in Nevada if a federal agency says
yes to the San Francisco-based organizers.
Last
year the Burning Man arts get-together was moved to private land,
where county fees, including $308,000 for fire insurance alone,
drove the festival into debt. That made them look again at BLM
land.
Festival organizer Marian Goodell says, “We
had to move back to public land. But the Bureau of Land Management
turned our application away.” BLM District Manager Ron Wenker
responds, “We were caught off guard. We were too understaffed.”
Festival organizers charged censorship and protested Wenker’s
decision until he recruited state BLM employees to help review the
application. A decision is expected June
1.
Goodell says the Labor Day gathering is more
than an arts festival. “It’s a temporary, self-contained,
low-impact pedestrian city built in the desert where people can be
safely creative and expressive.” She adds that attendees will be
instructed how to “come prepared and depart without leaving a
trace.”
Festival critics hope the teaching
takes. In Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, some revelers cemented a hot
tub near two historic watering holes. The Sierra Club and some
Western historians say the celebration threatens to obliterate
wagon tracks worn in the ground by 19th century immigrants.
*JT Thomas
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline To burn or not to burn.
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