Burning Man vs. the BLM.

It would be fascinating to know of the substance of meetings between Burning Man and the Bureau of Land Management. Unfortunately little is revealed, although hints of acrimonious discussions have turned up.
Last year the BLM attempted to charge the Burning Man organization for the excessive law enforcement presence they seem determined to impose on the event. The amount of violent crime at Black Rock City is notably lower than other communities of similar size, yet it is treated as a law enforcement priority by BLM rangers who behave like aggressive vice cop wanna-bes. They also wanted the Organization to agree that they could evict anyone from the event for any reason.
Burning Man then initiated a letter writing campaign, which I participated in, resulting in 298 letters to the BLM and many more e-mails. A couple months later Burning man was issued a new 5 year permit for the event, although the BLM still trying to charge the L.L.C. extra for law enforcement. This is an unethical practice known as 'double dipping', since the user fees are by law supposed to fund such expenditures, and is indeed much of the reason for the permit fees. They want the event to subsidize a wasteful and unnecessary multiplication of law enforcement well beyond that called for in their own guidelines for public land use. Thankfully the legal resources of Burning Man, as the largest single public customer on Federal land with growing political connections, are addressing this.
Wht is seems to come down to is the BLM has historically tried to strong-arm Burning Man out of existence but the event has grown powerful enough to legally fight back. The BLM has responded by bringing in rangers from across the West to patrol the event, who have no cultural familiarity with it. Previously regional BLM volunteers, who liked attending the event and worked closely with the Black Rock Rangers, plentifully met such needs. The new forces gathered from afar, answerable only to distant supervisors, were given free reign well beyond the bounds of professional conduct tolerated even by big city police. They have been essentially accountable to no one for their behavior. They were organized into patrols apparently ordered to bust participants on drug possession charges using any possible pretext to search people and their surroundings. If they couldn't ban the event outright they go out of their way to harass the participants.
This year many people entering the events passed a gauntlet of BLM officers looking for any possible vehicle infraction as an excuse to initiate a usually physically probing encounter. People were warned by Rangers that open backpacks were being considered 'probable cause' for searches on the open playa. Two large BLM rangers, according to a report I consider probably truthful, pounced on a small woman who had been seen going through her bag, holding a gun to the head of this unresisting but terrified woman while shoving her face into the dirt and forcing her arm behind her back. People caught peeing on the playa were often searched, looking for infractions beyond what was initially being cited. People were confronted and asked 'what they were on'. Participants near the fence who felt intruded upon when approached were ordered to produce their ticket stub, loudly threatening instant ejection from the event.
The Opulent Temple Dome at the 2:00 Esplanade was the site of repeated massive sting operations, many crossing the lines of defensible legality. After being pointed out by camouflage wearing BLM rangers using night goggles people were accosted and searched by teams of up to half a dozen armed rangers. Random camps were invaded by teams of four BLM rangers demanding people turn over drugs and consent to searches, threatening to bring in dogs if they refuse.
In 2006 there were 155 BLM citations, mostly for smoking or having pot. During the 2007 event 331 such tickets were written! The police, apparently on the lookout for more substantial crime, made only 8 arrests in that week. Mark Pirtle, 'special agent' for the BLM seems to be the person who shapes the interactions with Burning Man. He announced the suicide at the event, and spread the false story that poor Jerm had hung in full view for two hours , and that 'His friends thought he was doing an art piece', which was picked up and echoed worldwide.
His main concern about his agency's performance at Burning Man was that a lot of potential busts were missed because each citation temporarily removed two agents from patrol and required 10 hours of paperwork. Rather than seeing such misuse of resources to produce petty citations as wasteful, he wants to saturate the event with more officers since the limiting factor in issuing citations seemed to be the rate at which they could be issued and processed. This ludicrous escalation of harassment of the event may be partially prompted by a desire to justify more funding for his rangers' activities, which could easily cost more than what the existing standards for land permit allocation fees per numbers of people provides. The problem is not a terrible crime wave in Black Rock City, it is the mass disrespect shown for people and for the personal rights we were told were part of what made America special.
On mid October the legal arm of the vast Burning Man related population at last saw the BLM harassment as a problem demanding attention. Lawyersforburners.com emerged from this need to see justice applied to the situation in court. They have finally publicly declared on their site what has been known for years, that the BLM crackdowns are 'part of a coordinated effort to intimidate the community and collect additional revenue.' On October 18 five lawyers, three from California and the rest from Nevada, arrived at the US District Courthouse in Reno to meet several participants due in court that day. The presiding judge confronted them in the court hallways and stated they were not allowed to communicate with participants in the hallway outside his courtroom. Permission to use one of the attorney conference rooms was then refused. Meanwhile BLM officers, including one who worked undercover at the event, swarmed to the court and were stopping people getting off the elevator trying to convince people arriving at court of the virtues of a 'guilty' plea.
Seeing their hands tied within the building, the volunteer lawyers then tried to meet with clients outside, carrying small signs with 'got ticket?' and their URL. Several minutes later a group of officers from the 'Department of Homeland Security' appeared and told them they couldn't hold signs without a permit. They had written responses from people who had planned to meet them there but the only way to get together with them under such circumstances was to find them like one would a friend arriving at an airport.
Returning to the courthouse they were told they couldn't solicit clients, although the BLM agents were allowed access at will to arrivals to try to influence the case in their agencys interests. In the end 5 lawyers with briefcases sat in court under the gaze of 5 BLM rangers, 5 court house marshals and 2 'Homeland Security' police. The next court date, on November 15 promises a better prepared defense effort applying real world legal measures against the tactics a renegade agency has sadly chosen to inflict on their largest public customers.

A disturbing trend by the BLM has caused at least one regional Burn event to drop any mention of 'Burning Man' from its open communications. The BLM told organizers of the 'Dark Skies/Singularity' event on the dry Roach Lake bed near Las Vegas During a meeting that they 'didn't want to see thousands of people on Roach Lake'. During the previous 'Dark Skies/Singularity' event they stopped numerous incoming cars and conducted illegal searches, finding Cannabis in several. For each citation they made, legal or not, they jacked up the permit price next year by over a thousand dollars. The official ratio of law enforcement to event participants on public lands are one officer per 1000 people. For some reason the BLM wanted future such events packed with 1 officer per 90 people, a force marshaled against an inoffensive group who merely want to have a private desert experience faw away. The law enforcement fees demanded to fill such irregular ratios added up to more than the roughly 27 thousand dollars the event cost to produce. The BLM 'After Action Report' on the previous such event, which was required to be filed, would presumably contain accounts that could justify such an exaggerated police presence. Such a report never appeared. Every excuse was apparently made to impose logistics required for a much larger event than planned, driving up fee costs dramatically. This was likely done to price the land use permit beyond precedent to discourage the organizers. Happily the event organizers prevailed and people had a good time under the stars. By ignoring their own guidelines, regulations and established precedent combined with selective enforcement of minor infractions the BLM is attempting to prevent anything like a 'Burning Man Movement' from taking hold on lands under their heel. They tried to kill it in the late 90's and failed, settling for playing cat and mouse with the participants and treating them like dangerous criminals. Somewhere in the command chain of the BLM are right wing zealots determined to persecute anything that smacks of a counter culture. If the nail stands out it must be hammered down at the point of a gun. They soil their uniforms by behaving like arrogant swine, and I am ashamed that they give the Department of the Interior, for which I once proudly worked, a bad name.
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Conclusions.

The results of the controversies surrounding the events of Burning Man 2007 seem likely to be continuing reappraisals of what the event should be and widening isolation of increasingly discordant and indifferent populations from the Organization decision making process. Another likely side effect will be an ever greater separation of the public from the Man. I treasure the memory of my early years at the Event being able to stand between the legs of the Man itself, atop the painted hay bale base instead seeing it at a distance over a corner of all the elaborate structures keeping people ever farther removed from the Man.
With hope and apprehension for the future, I close this years accounts of my experiences, feelings and thoughts of this incarnation of Black Rock City. As I finish an agonizingly drawn out process mostly done with stolen time, I wonder how many years the event has left, and what forces will end up shaping its destiny. While my intended plans for the event were noticeably curtailed by circumstances, my relative poverty in variety of intended experiences to write about was offset by a proliferation of stories and issues surrounding the event worthy of note but thankfully beyond my personal experience, and hopefully of some general interest.

My special thanks to Steven Fritz for his kind permission to use some of his photos, including the unique image of the arson in progress. Michael Bonham contributed an image of the 'Crude Awakening' tower which I never photographed!

Don Davis

November, 2007