Besides transportation, other highlights from the Bureau of Land Management’s Environmental Assessment Report:

Participants to the event are not allowed to run after the water trucks which are clearly marked non-potable. Participants are given notice that the water in the trucks is non-potable and could result in an illness (BRC 2011b). Participants do frequently run after vehicles and are sprayed by the water trucks. Contaminants found in the Fly Ranch water source above the maximum contaminant level for drinking water include E. coli, fluoride, antimony, and arsenic all of which can result in potential health effects from long-term exposure. – s3.2.1

The [Summit Lake Paiute Tribe] believes the land needs to ‘heal’ after the Burning Man festival. The tribe suggested that the event should alternate between the playa and a more distant location, such as just north of Empire or Cedarville, or closer to the Burning Man Ranch near Hualapai. – s4.8

Additionally, as the event continues, there is a likelihood that at some time during the life of the event a natural or man-made emergency would require evacuation of the event. Weather related emergencies are the most likely event. While the average rainfall in August and September, 0.25 inches, is unlikely to result in standing water, it would impede event participants from leaving the playa. Higher precipitation amounts could occur on a limited basis and could result in standing rainfall leaving the event goers stranded for longer periods of time. – s4.16.1

For those who support Burning Man as an opportunity to create a temporary community outside of conventional society, an increase in participation would largely be viewed as giving others the opportunity to participate in this experience (Aspen 2011). Non-participants opposed to Burning Man and its associated activities for moral and ethical reasons would likely become more resolved in their opposition to the event. Participants and former participants critical of Burning Man would be likely to see growth of the event as increasingly reflecting mainstream society and dilution of its countercultural aspects. Other participants or former participants could view this in a positive light, seeing the growth as the popularization of Burning Man’s principles among the public: instead of Burning Man increasingly reflecting conventional society, conventional society’s increasing reflection of Burning Man’s principles. – s4.18.1

It is anticipated that just as Burning Man participation has grown since its inception, demand for Burning Man, or Burning Man-like events would continue to grow, regardless of capping the population at 50,000 people. Consequently, it is expected that participation in regional events would increase. Over 40 regional Burning Man-related or Burning Man-like events are held by other groups and organizations worldwide (BRC 2011). While the effects in the assessment area would remain the same, all of the effects described above would increase at the location of regional events. – s4.18.2

Burning Man is held on US federal land, so Black Rock City Corp (BMORG) must have a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to hold the festival. The existing permit capped attendees at 50,000. The permit is under renewal so BMORG has asked the cap to be raised to 70,000. The Bureau has just published their Preliminary Environmental Assessment considering three options:

• A variable cap of 58,000 to 70,000 attendees, adjusted yearly by the Bureau
• Maintaining the cap at 50,000
• Telling BMORG to do it somewhere else

One of the main issues with expanding the event is transportation on and off the playa along the 2-lane roads from Wadsworth:

The Bureau has calculated that if the event goes over 65,400 people, the highway will drop to a level of service of E during Exodus, which is the level immediately above gridlock. Disturbingly, the Bureau has noted that carpooling has decreased over time, from 0.95 automobile trips/guest in 2009 to 1.2 trips/guest in 2011.

BMORG didn’t propose a solution to the traffic problem in their submission. The Bureau proposed a few but the Assessment doesn’t recommend any of them:

• Extending the Exodus period
• Implementing a system that requires participants to sign up for an exit time
• Incentivizing carpooling so there are more participants per vehicle

Exodus “pulsing” was implemented last year, where cars are allowed out in staggered groups. More complicated solutions have been proposed in the past, from waiting lots (this is how entry to Shambhala works) to an exit lottery. I think the best solution is mass transit: parking individual cars in Wadsworth and using buses to transport people and trucks to transport gear. The logistics of that are obviously immense but, hell, in World War I they built temporary railways.

It’s estimated (Black Rock City Corp is secretive) that the lottery had 70,000 credit cards requesting 1.7 tickets (total of 120,000 requests for 40,000 tickets = 1 in 3 odds). The highest ever recorded yearly jump in ticket demand was 15%, so at most there is a real demand for 62,000 total tickets. 3,000 tickets were sold in the presale and 10,000 remain to be sold, leaving a real demand for 49,000 tickets. Not all those 49,000 potential attendees had the financial ability to purchase a ticket at this time, so it’s assumed that many people entered the lottery with multiple cards and are now holding surplus tickets.

Surplus tickets will be redistributed in one of three ways:

• The official Secure Ticket Exchange Program
• Craigslist, eBay and StubHub
• Local community transactions

Since physical tickets aren’t distributed until July, there is a significant risk to buying tickets unofficially online. The official exchange program will only redistribute tickets at face value, but many Burners believe that is the only ethical price. I suspect most Burners will redistribute their tickets in their local community.

Unfortunately, applications for theme camps, art installations, mutant vehicles, fire conclave troops, regional effigies and other projects are due before many of the tickets will be redistributed. Most people who submit proposals for projects are connected to their local Burner communities, so they will have no problem getting tickets in the long run. The question is: will uncertainly about tickets cause these projects to lose momentum? Certainly I’ll have trouble continuing my personal planning and local contributions with full enthusiasm. (I hadn’t really thought about this when I first endorsed the lottery.)

Although I still think a lottery is the best general solution to excess demand for an economically-diverse event, the participation aspect of Burning Man suggests a different approach: have leaders of projects and regional contacts hand out tickets. It distributes and scales the selection on merit currently done for low income and art grant tickets. This is not necessarily more biased against virgins than any other way of distributing tickets and would skew attendees in a mostly good way.

Burning Man: the most diverse group of white people you will ever meet. – Blu

The official Burning Man blog (which is written by a volunteer) ran an interesting post about the lack of ethnic diversity among Burners. In the post and comments a number of reasons to explain the lack of ethnic minorities were put forward:

• Going to Burning Man requires a cultural sense of physical and economic security that ethnic minorities have only gained in the last generation. Economic security comes not just from personal income, but from multi-generational wealth, networking and a social safety net.
• Minority culture tends to be more sexually conservative.
• Minorities are more family and community focused, while Burning Man is heavily individualistic. Alternately, only white people need to go to Burning Man to find community.
• Minority culture grew from the civil rights movement while white counter culture grew from an individualistic movement.
• Minorities don’t like camping: “the last time [my Japanese family] went camping, it was an internment camp“
• All the cultural appropriation makes them uncomfortable.
• “Being colorful for a week in the desert might not have the same appeal for those who feel like they are outside of the mainstream all the time.“

Although one comment argued that if you control for income and education, there is no ethnic disparity. Given that none of the census reports after 2008 have been made public, it’s difficult to have an informed discussion about this.

I think it requires a level of immersion within the capitalist system that enables one to afford the luxury of attending as well as a degree of personal consumer excess high enough that one looks forward to an escape from that excess. Maybe it also requires a bit of blindness to the waste involved in a celebration that rejects attachment to worldly possessions by burning them to the ground. That said, I already have my tickets, airline reservations and RV reserved. I suspect that people of color attend in proportion to the percentage of them that have achieved this level of hypocrisy. – Paul Williams

The Bureau of Land Management restricts Burning Man to a maximum of 50,000 participants averaged across the days (last year the peak population was 53,963). To maintain that, Black Rock City Corporation caps the tickets at 50,000. Last year, for the first time they sold out.

Although you can apply for ticket bursaries, Burning Man is already skewed toward the wealthy, because it costs far more than just the ticket price to get to the black rock desert and survive there for a week. If demand was controlled by increasing the price of tickets, it would skew even further.* So Black Rock City Corporation has decided to sell tickets in a lottery. Interestingly, the tickets are still being priced in four tiers, as they were when ticket prices increased over time – from $240 to $420. This will actually increase economic diversity over previous years because some of the low price tickets will go to people who can only afford to go at that price, not simply the most organized Burners. I think that’s worth it in exchanged for added complexity. Although just like previous years, people need to have budgeted the money early in the year to buy tickets.

Most of the tickets are being lotteried in maximum batches of two, probably to prevent scalpers. For the first time, Black Rock City Corporation will create an online market place for reselling tickets, presumably providing seller verification to prevent fakes. It’ll be interesting to see how the market responds to the scarcity, especially with a central marketplace rather than eBay, Craigslist, etc.

* If poor people don’t go to Burning Man for cultural as well as economic reasons, then keeping ticket price down works as a subsidy – just like university tuition.

Hexayurts are structures made out of rigid insulation panels. They’re quite popular at Burning Man because they’re easy to transport and keep out the heat & dust better than anything else. I plan on making an H12 size hexayurt for my first Burn next year. I made a model using gingerbread.

1. I made dough according to this gingerbread recipe and bought fresh royal icing from the bakery at Thrifty Foods.
2. I rolled 2/3rds of the dough between wax paper to pretty damn thin and baked it on parchment paper until the bread didn’t take imprints, which was much longer than 10 minutes and ended up being brittle around the edges. The bread ended up being 1/8″ after baking.
3. I cut the bread into twelve 2 × 4″ panels with a serrated knife.
4. I cut six of the panels in half from corner to corner – next time I’ll cut half of them the opposite way so I have the same side facing out on all pieces.
5. I iced each pair of half panels into an isosceles triangle, as per the hexayurt design, and left them to set on a piece of wax paper.
6. I iced the walls into a standing hexagon by icing them onto a piece of parchment paper and to each other. Note that a regular hexagon has 120° angles and with 2 × 4″ panels, parallel walls are 6.75″ apart – I sketched the footprint on the parchment paper before erecting.
7. Based on my friend Clamb’s suggestion, I made a cardboard frame for the roof and left it to try overnight. Note that it’s important to put icing on the full panel edge and press them together rather than trying to push icing into the gap after they’ve been assembled.
8. I put icing on top of all the walls and dropped the roof into place.
9. I was too cheap to buy silver leaf, so I mixed white and grey sprinkles to simulate reflective insulation panels. The advice I got from a cake store was to stick them to the walls using warm corn syrup, but the sprinkles dissolved into it. Also, it was very difficult to get good coverage on the sides since I was hesitant to tip the hexayurt – there must be a better way to decorate, but I’m not sure what it is.