Burning Man event spars with US government for permit

Washington: Burning Man event organisers are sparring with the US government over a 10-year permit after being presented with new rules that they say "would spell the end of the event as we know it", the media reported

On Monday, the Bureau of Land Management issued the draft environmental impact statement to "analyse the potential impacts" of conducting Burning Man, an arts and community event, from 2019 to 2028 in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, reports CNN.

An environmental impact statement is a process the federal government uses to analyse how construction, events or other activities could affect the landscape. 

Burning Man event organisers took issue with proposed requirements that came in a more-than-150-page report and fired back in a post on their website, writing: "The proposed level of government surveillance of and involvement in our everyday operations is unprecedented and unwarranted, and is unsupported by the ... analysis."

Burning Man said the statement requires "astronomical cost increases" and "beyond-excessive government oversight", and proposes to "increase federal government agency operations exponentially in order to take over or 'monitor' our operations".

The organisers said security operations, how many cars are allowed into the event, how people are tracked while there and how lighting is used would all be affected by the proposed rules which could hurt tickets sales.

Burning Man, which was first held in 1986 in San Francisco's Baker Beach, is an annual event in the Black Rock City - a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert. 

The event is influenced by 10 Principles: radical inclusion, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, gifting, decommodification, participation, immediacy and leave no trace. 

The name comes from the symbolic ritual burning of a large wooden effigy ("The Man").