Can Nevada’s Black Rock playa survive Burning Man?

The Black Rock Playa is an exceptional place. Stretching across about 200 square miles, the sandy stretch of Black Rock Desert is as flat as a tabletop. Often flooded in winter, it's dusty dry come summer. Silent, empty and harsh, few places like it exist on the planet. "It's a really special place," said Ken Adams, a geologist with the Desert Research Institute in Reno. "What makes the Black Rock Desert playa unique is its size, its smoothness and its flatness." But if the ancient lake bed is unique in its nature, there's more to it. Much more. For the past 20 years, the playa has been home to the Burning Man annual counterculture art festival. Desert silence is replaced with costumed desert craziness, culminating with the burning of the towering effigy of "The Man." Last year's event, climaxing over Labor Day weekend, attracted more than 51,000 people to the remote playa about 120 miles northeast of Reno. The festival's organizer, Black Rock City LLC, is asking the federal Bureau of Land Management to issue a five-year permit to continue Burning Man on about 4,400 acres of public land from 2011 to 2015. It would increase the number of people potentially attending the event to 60,000...more

Will BLM do a "Rapid Ecoregional Assessment" or just a plain old EIS?

Everybody should be watching to see how the "landscape" approach handles this.

Better have the BLM Critical Infrastructure Crisis Response Team there too. After consulting with the vast supply of intelligence sources available to The Westerner, I can almost guarantee there...will...be...pot at this function. No dams in sight, but you never know.