If you've been to Burning Man—the annual gathering dedicated to interactive art, intentional community, and wild revelry, whose gates open Sunday—you've noticed that the Black Rock playa on which you are camping is utterly dry and featureless, except for endless stretching miles of flaking cracked clay. It is devoid of any visible animal or plant life that didn't come in on a Burners' truck. You can do Burning Man for decades, as I have, and if you are lucky you might have one weird, miraculous sighting of a confused bird.

It's curious, then, how much attention the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) gives to birds in its latest Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Burning Man. The BLM controls the federally owned land—a tiny portion of the vast Black Rock Desert playa, about 100 miles northeast of Reno—where 80,000 gather for the event.

In the public comment process between draft and final EIS, some commenters asked for some documented proof of bird impact, or even bird presence. The agency gave this dryly salty reply: "At the request of [Burning Man], biological resources surveys were not conducted as part of this EIS. This is typical of other proponents not wanting to bear the cost of wildlife surveys; therefore, the BLM assumes that wildlife are present." That's what you get for not wanting to pay for something a bureaucracy wants!

Having discussed the event with media and with many curious strangers in the 15 years since writing the book This Is Burning Man, the first detailed history of the event, I've often been asked why the federal government permits the event at all, given its reputation for unusually sexy and unusually druggy partying. The surface answer is: A legal process exists for seeking permits for gatherings on such federal lands, and the Burning Man Project (the nonprofit that now runs the event) goes through that tortuous process.

Dave Cooper—now an enthusiastic Burner, formerly the manager of the BLM's Black Rock National Conservation Area—says that despite the "pushback to Burning Man" that he frequently encountered when he was responsible for processing its permits, the event "always met the stipulations in their permit, and I saw no reason not to allow it to continue on the playa." Things have seemed a little different this year, with the BLM issuing the first full-on environmental report on the event since 2012. The nearly 1,000 pages that fill its two volumes hint at many curious and colorful, and onerous and expensive, demands that the government might want to impose on the event.

When the draft version of the EIS came out in March, baffling and infuriating many in the Burning Man community, the agency received more than 2,000 public comments; contentious crowds showed up at a series of public meetings in Nevada, though only 5 percent of the event's attendees live in that state. Some of the more eyebrow-raising demands, such as a nine-mile concrete barrier around the event, were then walked back, or at least held in abeyance for some potential future year.

Despite an April Vanity Fair headline declaring "Burning Man Readies for War with the Federal Government," the event got its official permit in July without too much in the way of new bureaucracy that an attendee would notice—for now. The BLM is applying what it calls "adaptive management" to the event this year. That means it will be keeping an eye on nearly everything—while making Burning Man pay for the cost of its monitoring—and retaining the right to impose new restrictions moving forward.