On Wednesday, Burners new and old gathered round their computers to purchase tickets to this August’s Burning Man, the annual libertarian hootenanny staged about 100 miles outside of Reno, Nevada. This year, ticketing did not go well—there were technical difficulties that left many would-be attendees of the art festival-cum-Mad Max-ian bacchanal, but with more thoughtful governance, frustrated. Ticketing, however, seems to be the least of their problems this year. Government oversight encroach-eth, posing what organizers believe is an existential threat to Burning Man itself. It appears the feds are trying to build a wall.

The Nevada division of the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M.) manages and protects the Black Rock Desert Wilderness, public land on which Burning Man is held every year—specifically on the dried-up lake bed referred to as “the playa.” After the organizers filed their request for a 10-year permit, the B.L.M. responded in March with the requisite Draft Environmental Impact Statement: nearly 400 pages split into two volumes that attempt to assess the environmental impact of the growing festival—from air quality, to light pollution, to weeds, to the safety of migratory birds, to trash build-up—and propose a number of potential solutions.

It has not gone over well. “Some of B.L.M.’s proposals are in direct conflict with our community’s core principles and would forever negatively change the fabric of the Burning Man event, if not outright kill it,” reads Burning Man’s statement on its official Web site. The site published a nearly 7,000-word “fact-check” of the proposal, a roughly 1,300-word call to action, and an almost 1,000-word guide on “how to submit a great comment,” in response to B.L.M.’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which Burners have until April 29h to do. The Reddit threads are teeming with discussions about the proposal (when not troubleshooting ticket issues), and, on Monday, when the B.L.M. hosted a town hall in Reno at the Nugget Casino Resort, about 200 people reportedly showed up.

One suggestion—and a major focal point of contention for reasons that will be immediately clear—is a 9.5-mile concrete wall around the perimeter. The B.L.M. stated in the proposal it will prevent vehicles from going through it, and have said that it will block trash from escaping. The Burners argue that it’s “logistically onerous, environmentally irresponsible, unnecessarily redundant, [and] prohibitively expensive.” The proposed trash wall would replace a trash fence that currently exists, a fence that Burners contend already gets the job done. Austin Collins, a Reno local who has attended the festival for about five years and has been building on his copper bathtub art car, called the Lub Tub, for nearly as long, was at the casino meeting. He said that Burners confronted B.L.M. officials “multiple times” about how, if the wall was implemented, “sand dunes would build, and it would take more equipment to fix the effects, and how they didn't even know if it would do a good job of catching trash.” Much like another hypothetical wall out there, the debate around the wall hinges on unanswered questions, like, is it a solution for a nonexistent issue, and can it even fix what it proposes to fix? And also, if so, at what cost?

Jessica Schneider owns Junkee Clothing Exchange, a costume store in Reno that services Burners every year. “I think B.L.M. is being so ridiculous right now. Ridiculous,” Schneider said. “Like, they want a concrete wall. And what is the environmental impact on shipping in a concrete wall? The gas, the trucks . . . I think they’re asking for the world, and then I guess you politic down. I’m not sure.”

Other B.L.M. proposals include an increase in car searches, adding dumpsters and trash cans around the camps and along the one road into the event, and requiring the Burning Man organization to hire more security. The event’s organizers have estimated that, all told, the measures would put a nearly $20 million burden on the festival, which they say will force them to raise ticket prices $286 over the current price—awkward for an event that relies on the currency of gifting while on the playa.

Hadley Beedle, a burner of four years and a ski technician, said that the B.L.M. requirement to add dumpsters and trash cans along the road to the playa flies in the face of Burning Man attendees’ commitment to picking up after themselves. The suggestion “goes against the Leaving No Trace principle that’s the core of Burning Man,” Beedle said, pointing out that the event “has a dedicated trash crew [organized by its internal Department of Public Works] that picks up trash that has been left on the highway, even if the trash was not left from Burners.” Plus, big dumpsters and overflowing rubbish bins would be an eyesore.

It’s not all doom and gloom and the end of Burning Man as we know it, though. A spokesman for the B.L.M. told Vanity Fair in an e-mail that it is and will continue to be open to hearing the community’s criticisms. “The [Environmental Impact Statement] analyzes a range of recommended mitigations and alternatives. Not all recommended mitigations apply to all alternatives. These should be seen as proposals to begin a discussion with [Black Rock City] on how we effectively mitigate the significant impacts of the festival on the landscape.”

Though Burners swear by their Leaving No Trace coda, and the event has passed the B.L.M.’s inspections in the past, there has been pushback against the number of vehicles and amount of travel it takes to get there, especially as the event has grown to around 70,000 participants and continues to expand. The lack of trash cans or centralized trash pickup makes it nearly impossible to estimate how much garbage is really generated every year.

Still, Schneider worries about the economic impact that the new measures could have on the event, and by extension, on her business, on Reno, and on Gerlach and Empire, the closest towns to the festivities. She recalled that one Italian crew comes into Junkee every year. “These cool cats from my Italy crew—they don’t really speak any English, and they kind of look like metalheads,” she said. “They come to Reno, and they eat at our restaurants, and they tip our waitresses. Just the exposure—any city would dig that kind of exposure, because it costs so much to get there.”

Mostly, though, the community feels that many of the government’s environmental proposals fundamentally misunderstand what the festival is all about, and don’t give credit where credit is due. “We no longer will have control in many ways,” Collins said. “We are proud of what we do. We call the place home. Over the years, Burning Man and its inhabitants have found solutions to everything that can happen when building a temporary city in the middle of a dried-up lake.”

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