Burning Man: Bureau of Land Management's Regulatory Challenges

Burning Man's survival hinges on strict environmental compliance, showcasing the Bureau of Land Management's complex land management challenges.

### The Bureau of Land Management: Balancing Conservation and Use in the American West
* 🏜 Each year, Burning Man, a massive festival held on public land in the Black Rock Desert, requires a permit from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to operate, emphasizing the **need for environmental preservation**.
* 🗑 The BLM mandates that the festival must **leave no more than one square foot of trash per acre**, and in 2023, Burning Man narrowly passed inspection, with **11 out of 120 points failing**.
* 🌍 The BLM oversees **8.2 million acres of land**, more than the size of Qatar, but operates from a limited number of offices, highlighting the **challenge of managing such vast areas with few resources**.
* 📜 The agency's responsibilities stem from historical land allocations, where land deemed **less valuable** was entrusted to the BLM, making it the overseer of what is often referred to as "**America's worst land**."
* ⚖ The BLM faces criticism from various stakeholders, including ranchers and environmentalists, as it attempts to **balance multiple land uses**, which often leads to **dissatisfaction from all parties involved**.
* 🚔 To enforce regulations, the BLM collaborates with local law enforcement and relies on a **small number of rangers**, which has raised concerns about their **ability to manage large events** like Burning Man effectively.
* 🐴 The agency also manages wild horse populations and is tasked with **maintaining safe conditions around old mines**, showcasing the **diverse and often conflicting responsibilities** it holds.
* 💧 As water scarcity issues arise in the Intermountain West, the BLM's role becomes even more critical, as it navigates the **complexities of land use, conservation, and resource management** in a **rapidly changing environment**.

[Music] each year, Burning Man, the famed and occasionally notorious weeklong festival, cannot operate unless it gets a signature on this short document. After all, the festival occurs here on the playa of the Black Rock Desert, on land not owned by Burning Man itself, but the United States. It's public land managed by an agency called the Bureau of Land Management. So, in order for the massive 880,000-person festival to occur, this permit needs the signature of the manager of the BLM's Black Rock field office. Getting that signature can be a tenuous process. The Black Rock Desert is encompassed in a National Conservation Area, so the BLM requires that the festival disappear without a trace. 880,000 people must come and especially go without leaving an impact, or at least the BLM's definition of an impact. Each year, Burning Man must clean the playa to the point that on any given acre of land, there's no more than one square foot of remaining trash. To assure this, the agency randomly selects 120 out of the event.

3,883 acres then actually goes out to them, picks up any remaining trash, takes it back to their field office, lays it out on a green background, takes a photo, then uses Photoshop to layer out the green background and measure the square footage of the trash in this photo. For example, it added up to 0.264, meaning the acre of land that this trash was pulled from passed the test. But in 2023, after an irregularly rainy year that led to a muddy mess of a festival, Burning Man barely passed their inspection. 11 of the 120 points failed. They're allowed to fail 12. Had they passed that threshold, their permit for 2024 very well might not have been granted. But far more notable than the festival's near miss is the scale of the agency tasked with regulating this temporary world-famous 80,000-person city. The Black Rock Desert is part of the BLM's Wiuka district, headquartered here in this single-story office building in Winnemucca, Nevada. The district then has this and facility in Gerlach.

Nevada, far closer to the Black Rock Desert, but that's it. That's the entire physical presence of the District of the agency tasked not only with overseeing Burning Man but 8.2 million acres of land, more than the entirety of Qatar, and a collection that adds up to 75% of the entire land mass within the Winam Mona District. How such a small and obscure government agency ended up with this colossal task is remarkably straightforward to explain. When the United States conquered and settled the West, all the land was originally owned by the federal government, at least according to the federal government. This land was then allocated out to different owners and users. For example, this trun of Nevada near the Black Rock Desert was earmarked as the best route for the first Transcontinental Railroad due to its comparatively tame geography. So, the federal government incentivized the Central Pacific Railroad Company to actually build the rails by giving it every other square mile of land in a band around the track. The thought was that they'd eventually be able to

sell much of that land, which would become more valuable with the construction of the railroad. So today, more than a century on, these tracks are held by various private landowners. Private land ownership was also established here in the town of Fallon. This area started as a ranch owned by Mike and Alisa Fallon. They likely claimed the land through the rights established by the Homestead Acts, which effectively allowed settlers to get up to 160 acres of land in these Western States for a nominal fee, as long as they cultivated and lived on it for 6 months. Eventually, Mike and Alisa Fallon heard rumors of an upcoming project by the newly formed Bureau of Reclamation to build the irrigation infrastructure to allow for farming in this dry desert region, and they therefore sold their ranch to a land developer who leveraged the speculation to split it into smaller chunks and sell to new arrivals, thereby forming the town of Fallon. That Bureau of Reclamation project did eventually happen, and as part of it, the agency was given ownership of this land around the

Farmland rivers and relevant pieces of infrastructure, although simultaneously, the very waterways that the Bureau of Reclamation were manipulating, were identified as crucial habitats for migratory birds. So, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was given these two portions of land to turn into the Fallon and Stillwater National Wildlife Refuges, assuring that they'd remain undisturbed for the wildlife. With World War II, the Fallon Naval Air Station was built, so this land was handed over to the Department of Defense, and it also got these tracks to turn into the Fallon Range Training Complex, essentially empty areas of the desert where pilots can train using actual live weapons. Then, finally, this area near town was transferred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be held in trust on behalf of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Reservation. And that was the extent of land allocation, but all this was still left. So, that's to say, if land wasn't valuable enough for settlers to want it, if it wasn't important enough as habitat for the Fish and Wildlife Service to want it.

If it wasn't notable enough for the National Park Service to want it, if the DOD nor the Bureau of WCK nor the Forest Service nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted it, that's when the Bureau of Land Management got land. The BLM manages what's left. This land has therefore been judged through the process of land allocation as America's worst land, that of least utility to both humans and animals. But even if it is America's most useless land, that doesn't mean it's useless. As the American West has developed and grown in population, humans and animals have found plenty of use for the land the BLM manages. But simultaneously, BLM land is the least regulated public land in America. If you want to camp on it, you can for free effectively anywhere for up to 14 days. If you want to collect rocks and fossils and take them home, you can for free as long as you're not selling them. If you want to let your cattle out to graze or build an electric transmission line or a

coal mine or an oil rig on BLM land. You probably can after some permitting, and if you want to set up a temporary city of 880,000 on a conserved ancient lake bed in the middle of nowhere, well, you can do that too. But because Burning Man takes two diametrically opposed land use concepts—conserved nature and bustling city—and merges them year in year out, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. Not long after the trash samples are taken, the process of organizing the next year's Burning Man begins anew with the post-event Cooperators meeting. The title's APT while it's the BLM's land and therefore the BLM's rules. Building a city then disappearing it is a monumental lift that's overseen by the federal bureau with the assistance of county officials but undertaken almost exclusively by the Burning Man project, the festival's official operator, and its army of volunteers and staff. Out of this Cooperators meeting between land managers and land users comes a document.

like this, the additional stipulations list a list of new rules that are layered on top of what's established in this, the 29302 special Recreation permit. And of course, this permit in turn is informed by the findings of this environmental impact statement, initiated in 2017 and completed in 2019 by the BLM. That runs hundreds of pages and multiple volumes. Taken together, just getting the paperwork in order for this is a bear. Then there's upholding the rules outlined in the paperwork. And for this, the BLM calls for backup. As a Federal Land Management agency, the BLM does have a policing arm, the BLM law enforcement Rangers. But there's only 200 of them Nationwide and only two in this particular region of remote Nevada. So to staff Burning Man, where in more recent years they've called for more than a third of the force to be present, they go National, bringing in Rangers from Wyoming, California, and Colorado, many of whom become annual fixtures at the event. Still, that's not quite enough. So the BLM

also partners with Nevada Highway Patrol and the Pershing County Sheriff's Office to toll out citations, tickets, and make the occasional arrest. But the multifaceted Bureau does more than just police each year. For instance, among the thousands of extravagant setups, there's this humble tent called the interp camp, where employed specialists can monitor air quality and public-facing recreation and visitor service staff set up tables and posters to inform the public on the geological and cultural history of the landscape upon which they're standing. At the end of the festival, the BLM again appears in another capacity, as now it's BLM officials training and overseeing volunteers on how to properly take trash samples. While heavily cooperative from paperwork to litter picking and law enforcement, the BLM is there every step of the way. While intuitive as it is, the land they maintain, it's a monumental undertaking for a regional office that as recently as 2022 only had five specialist employees. But the BLM doesn't have much of a choice in the matter to

begin with the nearly $3 million in annual fees for the event. Covers the cost the BLM allows this use for a more fundamental reason because it has to see all of this Black Rock Desert land became conservation land in 2000 with this legislation. But the rules on access and use well they're a little light on detail essentially it can be used if it's not damaged too much for future use and it can host large permanent events as long as it doesn't offend the management plan or the management Act of 1976. But this management act which has come to guide how the BLM operates today is also largely up to interpretation as it declares that public land is to be managed on for the basis of multiple use and sustained yield. The land is to be protected for future Generations while it is also to be used for the Public's benefit in the present. It's rather vague it's rather contradictory and it's made room for cities on conservation land and a whole host of other odd outgrowths and

when you combine that vague mandate with a Congress and executive branch that needs someone to follow through on their acts and orders, the BLM ends up with a dizzying array of often contradictory tasks. For example, in 1971, Congress addressed long-running concerns by a subset of Animal Welfare Advocates and passed the Wild and Free-Roaming Horse and Burros Act. The name is a bit of a misnomer, as horses and burros are both domesticated animals, meaning they can't truly be wild. But through the years, plenty of horses and burros had escaped or been freed and now roamed across the West, multiplying in population at a pest-like rate. Ranchers hated this, as the horses were ferocious grazers that quickly depleted the land that would otherwise sustain their cattle. But the Act declared them living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West, and therefore the BLM was tasked with protecting them, often from ranchers. To do so, they established 270 herd management areas where a bunch of

federal land is managed specifically for the benefit of these horses and Burrows. In addition, they determined that the sustainable Nationwide population of wild horses and Burrows was 26,6190. So, the BLM is tasked with keeping the population as close to this as possible, which is near impossible with the tools at the bureau's disposal, evidenced by the fact that the current population is over 880,000. They're not allowed to kill the horses, so when a given herd is overpopulated, they use a helicopter to Coral them into a trap. From there, some horses receive birth control to limit population growth, while others are taken to off-range pastures. Many of these off-range pastures are near prisons that have programs where inmates train the horses so that they can eventually be adopted and live the rest of their lives as a non-wild horse. But that's just the start of a near-endless list of BLM tasks. For example, they're also responsible for protecting 20,000 rocks in California. The federal

government formed the California Coastal National Monument, which primarily protects not the land on the coast but the islets, reefs, and rock outcroppings just off the coast. And it's the BLM's job to run that National Monument. The BLM is also supposed to make about 50,000 old mines safe. Mines were poorly documented and quickly abandoned during the Gold Rush era, leaving them dotted across the West without nearly the standards of the mines that close today. The risks are myriad: one can fall in a mine shaft, get crushed in a cave-in, accidentally detonate an old explosive, breathe in deadly gases, suffocate from a lack of oxygen, get lost while exploring, or just walk across unstable land above that caves in. And these aren't theoretical threats, as dozens of people die due to them each year. So the BLM is tasked with preventing that as much as possible by fixing up these old mines. Congress also told the BLM to figure out a bunch of good routes for electric lines and pipelines. They did this was

the answer. The BLM's also not super sure exactly where all its own land is, especially in Alaska. So, Congress told them to figure it out. So, they go around and survey land pretty regularly. BLM land also catches on fire a lot, so the agency runs its own 3,000-person fire department, including an aviation division, owning and operating almost 100 aircraft. But beyond the endless array of tiny yet crucial programs, the core task of the BLM really is managing whatever people want to do with their land. If people want to recreate on BLM land, the BLM needs to figure out how to do it in a generally sustainable way. For example, a lot of people believe that this spot is where the Fed Roswell UFO crash happened, and it happens to be on BLM land. So, the BLM had to construct a parking area and trail to mitigate potential damage by an influx of visitors. This process occurs constantly. Users find a way to have fun on BLM land, and the BLM rolls out regulations and develops sites with the infrastructure.

needed to make that Recreation sustainable. If others want to use BLM land to mine coal, for example, the BLM also has to manage and regulate that. In fact, the BLM manages almost the entirety of the federal government's mineral rights, which are enormous. You see, not only is the BLM responsible for oil and gas leasing on all federal land, meaning they even handle leasing on Forest Service land, for example, but the agency also handles so-called split Estates. When the federal government allocated land in the west, much of it was under the stipulation that the federal government would still own the subsurface mineral rights. So, that means almost 30% of the US's land mass is administered by the BLM for the purposes of subsurface minerals. Of course, this puts the BLM in the center of a near-endless controversy over oil, gas, and mine leasing on Federal Land. But the BLM is used to controversy, as from the very beginning, it's been tasked with solving the tragedy of the commons, quite literally. Many of the first Americans to

settle the West were ranchers raising cattle, sheep, and other livestock through open grazing, as in animals being let loose on unused federal land and allowed to eat whatever wild plants they want. This was entirely allowed, but eventually, as more and more ranchers moved into the West, land got overgrazed, and cattle populations collapsed as there was not enough forage to sustain them. So, in the 1930s, Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act that started to regulate ranching on federal land through the establishment of the Grazing Service, which eventually merged with the General Land Office to become the Bureau of Land Management. These days, the BLM administers 18,000 permits for livestock raising. These are granted to ranchers with a valid so-called base property near BLM land, and as a condition of their permit, ranchers must pay a fee of $1.35 per animal unit month, which basically means they pay $1.35 per month for the amount of forage it takes to sustain one horse. This is lower than the grazing fee

was all the way back in 1981. Even ignoring inflation back then, it was $231. It's also well below the free market price for grazing, estimated at around $23 on private land. That means the permits for BLM grazing are incredibly valuable. Much like water rights, property in the West will sell at hugely inflated prices if it includes grazing rights, and any threat to the ability to graze on federal land is therefore treated as existential. This assumed existential threat reached fever pitch in 2016 when a group of radical right-wing ranchers stormed and occupied the headquarters of the US Fish and Wildlife's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 40 days. A standoff which resulted in a death and ultimately 27 federal indictments. And it was all at the heart of a dispute some century in the making. All this. The Malheur Refuge has been a federally protected bird sanctuary since 1908, when this slice of land between the Refuge and BLM land has been the Hammond Homestead Ranch since

the 1870s. For a while, these parties coexisted relatively peacefully, in part because no one really made a fuss if hammonded cattle made their way onto Refuge land to Graves. But that changed in 1994 when fish and wildlife managers wanted to build a fence to better protect the Paran ecosystem that for so long had been overgrazed. Suddenly, what one party saw as a privilege and the other saw as a right was being taken away from the Hammonds, seen as a direct affront to his way of life and trampling of his rights. The ranch's patriarch, Dwight Hammond, escalated the dispute by issuing death threats towards the federal employees. Then he and his son physically held up fence construction by parking heavy machinery in the fence's path and refusing to back down. The two were arrested, but Dwight and his son had sparked a large movement. Now their neighbors and allies in Burns, Oregon, posted signs in businesses that they wouldn't serve federal agents while their District representative protested the arrest of the Department of the

interior and President Clinton to this group. Their use of the overlooked, off-forgotten, ever-so-lightly-policed grazing land of the West was functionally theirs, and now feds were trying to take it away. After their release, the Hammons didn't back down. In '99, they set a fire to burn off Refuge that then spilled onto BLM land, incurring fees and federal IR. They did it again in 2001, allegedly to conceal proof of illegal deer hunting, then to protect their own property during a larger wildfire in 2006. They started their own back burns to limit the oncoming fire's fuel, which nearly trapped BLM firefighters between two blazes. These moves led to charges of arson, and after a lengthy legal battle, the story began to spread across the rest of the ranching West, where it reached one Ammon Bundy in Arizona, who set in motion the takeover of the Refuge. 20 BLM official, the name was notable, as the Bundy family too has a long history of high-profile disagreements with federal.

Managers Cliven ammon's father had refused to sell his grazing permits back to the federal government in 1993 as part of a larger land swap deal to protect a newly designated endangered species, the desert tortoise, in southern Nevada. In a further act of defiance, he decided to no longer renew his grazing fees, eventually racking up more than a million dollars' worth of unpaid fees. When the BLM finally moved to capture and impound all the trespassing cattle, a standoff commenced with armed militia members squaring off against over 100 federal officials, including 24 BLM enforcement officers, before the BLM ultimately relented and returned the cattle in an act of de-escalation. Of course, such standoffs are exceedingly rare, but heated, intense disagreements over exactly what should be happening on BLM land is anything but fringe. Anti-federal militarized ranchers are only one party that feels grieved by federal land managers. Entire states take issue when the federal government alters policy and designation, as Utah did when

the Clinton Administration designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which stymied the state's development of lands and roads in the region. A coalition of ranchers, recreators, and environmentalists boisterously lobbied against oil and gas development along Western Colorado's Thompson Divide until the BLM and Forest Service finally relented in 2020. When the Trump Administration moved BLM headquarters from DC to practically the opposite of DC in Grand Junction, Colorado, certain land users, primarily weary ranchers and opportunistic oil and gas developers, celebrated, while environmentalists and recreators complained at every turn. The BLM, tasked with pleasing so many, inevitably disappoints, turning one of the sleepiest and most obscure federal agencies into one of the nation's most controversial. The issue seems to be that the BLM doesn't have a thing. DOD land, for example, is very clearly for the use of the military. This is undoubtedly controversial, especially in places like Hawaii where it takes up such a huge

chunk of the landmass, but it's not like the public has any realistic shot of getting in the way of whatever the US military wants to do. National Park Service land, on the other hand, is very clearly for the dual purposes of conservation and recreation. Many of it serves as national parks themselves. It's no surprise that the agency that manages globally known destinations like Yellowstone and Yosemite is popular and well supported by the public. In fact, in a Pew research poll about public sentiment regarding 16 of the best-known federal agencies, the NPS was the most popular, with 76% having a favorable view of it and only 7% a negative one. The lesser-known Fish and Wildlife Service seems to steer clear of controversy because its mandate is very clearly one of conservation for the sake of animals, not humans. It's not completely loved; in fact, right now, it's made headlines due to its dispute with Elon Musk's SpaceX, whose Starbase is adjacent to their conservation land. But wildlife conservation is broadly popular.

and therefore so is the agency. The Forest Service mandate is perhaps closest to the BLM as its task with simultaneous management of resource exploitation, recreation management, and conservation. But forestry, which is the core of Forest Service resource use, can be much more compatible with conservation goals. It also helps that its land is conspicuously used for America's most popular ski resorts, and it's the agency behind Smoky Bear. The Forest Service has entered public consciousness as something to be revered and supported. The BLM, meanwhile, is unloved. Ranchers complain it's not protecting their rights enough. Recreators complain it's favoring ranching and resource use. Oil and gas complain it's straying from its original intention and morphing into a conservation and recreation-focused agency. The problem really is that the BLM is supposed to please everyone, and the only way to do that with land where uses are mutually exclusive is to disappoint everyone. The BLM has no real coalition behind it; it's them versus

everyone, so they're under-resourced and under-appreciated. America's worst land is great for what it's not. The American West is defined by its emptiness, yet the agency tasked with managing that emptiness is perpetually pulled apart at its rather weak seams. I'm really glad you made it to the end of this video because this topic is one that matters a lot to me, and I think it goes under-discussed. I, after all, live in Colorado in an area with a ton of BLM land, and rarely a day goes by that I don't end up on some of it. The Intermountain West is a pretty unique region; there really are not a lot of equivalents to it in the English-speaking world, so it does have a fairly distinct set of challenges. As the least populated area of America, I think a lot of these challenges go under-reported in national media, so I find it particularly interesting and important to make videos about these issues. And one issue in particular was so significant that I

thought it merited more than a video. 40 million people in this region rely almost exclusively on the water that one River, the Colorado River, provides. Las Vegas, Phoenix, many of the fastest-growing areas in America, simply could not exist without it. Yet people have been legally guaranteed more water through water rights than the river actually carries downstream in an average year. So, over much of the past 20 years, the massive reservoirs sitting behind the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams have been getting lower and lower and lower. It's a pretty existential situation for this entire region. So, I thought I merited a whole documentary about it, which myself and my team made with funding provided by Nebula. And this doc, The Colorado Problem, is just a tiny bit of the top-notch original content on Nebula. In fact, earlier this year, we filmed in the same region again for The Getaway, a competition show that we told the contestants was a simple elimination-style thing where they had to root out the saboteur among them, but in actuality, we

told all of them they were the savior, which, as you can imagine, led to chaos. There's also modern conflicts by real-life Flor covering the most consequential conflicts of recent times in intricate detail. WTF USA by TLDR News covering the current US election week by week and more coming out all the time. Nebula was founded by creators, and unsurprisingly, we designed it to be the best ecosystem to support our work. We also post all our normal videos there ad-free, and the revenue helps provide stable, predictable income that we can use to build our businesses. Nebula's churn rate is lower than almost every major streamer, meaning the people who subscribe find it worthwhile and stay subscribed. So if you want to see what all the hype is about and watch the Colorado problem, head to

The Gov Agency That Manages America's Worst Land

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The Bureau of Land Management's Role in Burning Man

Burning Man, a weeklong festival in the Black Rock Desert, requires a permit from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to operate on public land.

The BLM's strict regulations demand that the festival leaves no trace, with random inspections to ensure compliance.

The agency's small presence oversees a vast area of 8.

2 million acres, a legacy of the federal government's land allocation during the settlement of the West.

The Unique Role of BLM Land and Burning Man

BLM land is considered America's least valuable and most useless land, yet it has become crucial for both humans and animals as the population in the American West has grown.

The land is least regulated, allowing for various activities like camping, grazing, and resource extraction with minimal permitting.

The Burning Man festival uniquely merges conserved nature and a bustling city on BLM land, requiring a complex process of permits and coordination with federal and county officials for its annual setup.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) partners with law enforcement to manage events and protect the Black Rock Desert.

They offer public education on the area's geological and cultural history while also training volunteers for conservation efforts.

The BLM's vague mandate and contradictory tasks, such as protecting wild horses and burros, highlight the complex challenges they face in managing public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is tasked with managing federal land for the benefit of wild horses and burros, aiming to maintain their population near the sustainable target of 26,619.

With the current population exceeding 880,000, the BLM uses helicopters to corral overpopulated herds, providing birth control and off-range pastures for some horses.

In addition to managing wild horses, the BLM is responsible for protecting California's coastal rocks, making old mines safe, surveying land, running a fire department, and regulating recreational activities on BLM land.

The Bureau of Land Management's Role in Resource Management

The BLM manages a significant portion of the federal government's mineral rights and is responsible for oil and gas leasing on federal land.

The agency also regulates ranching through permits, offering them at a lower fee than the free market, making them highly valuable.

The BLM's role in resource management has led to controversy and conflict, exemplified by the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by radical ranchers.

The Escalating Conflict Over Federal Land Use

The conflict between the Hammonds and federal land managers intensified in 1994 when a fence was proposed to protect the overgrazed Paran ecosystem.

The Hammonds' defiant actions, including issuing threats and obstructing construction, sparked a larger movement against federal authority.

This tension eventually led to a standoff between armed militia members and federal officials over grazing permits, highlighting the ongoing disputes over land management in the West.

The Clinton Administration's designation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument hindered development in the region, while the Trump Administration's move of the BLM headquarters to Grand Junction led to mixed reactions from land users.

The BLM's struggle to balance the needs of ranchers, oil and gas developers, and environmentalists has made it one of the nation's most controversial federal agencies.

Unlike other agencies with clear mandates, the BLM's goal of pleasing everyone has resulted in widespread dissatisfaction and a lack of public support.

The Importance of the American West and the Colorado River

The American West, defined by its emptiness, faces unique challenges due to its low population and under-resourced agencies.

The Colorado River is crucial for 40 million people in the region, yet water rights exceed the river's average flow, leading to declining reservoirs.

The creator's documentary, "The Colorado Problem," highlights this existential water crisis, while Nebula offers original content and support for creators.