re:
http://www.cieux.com/bm/bmtoc.html
FWIW, I think some of the dates are off, and the list does little to explain the true evolution of various rules or taboos, but there's always going to be confusion among people who do Burning Man for only a week on differentiating safety, environmental, Darwinian, & plain-old BLM permit compliance concerns. Hierarchically, I think the basic common rules that might affect ticketholders are:
- Human mortality due to natural causes
- Ditto, due to unnatural causes
- Anything that really pisses off the Black Rock Rangers
- The Law
- Permit compliance issues
- Whatever else might be in the Survival Guide.
Take fires, for instance. For those setting up the event, it's largely a simple matter of complying in a reasonable way with the permitting agencies in providing efficient vehicle access to places where fires & pyro displays, either intentional or accidental, might occur. And keeping debris from known fire locations as contained as possible to localize possible playa damage and aid cleanup. Nothing will stop individuals running straight into a fire, of course. And if to the casual ticketholder it all looks like seemingly petty ad hoc rules against tiki torches, that's fine with me, because it preserves the sense of irony that has always been central to the event.
I used to "inspect" theme camp structures on behalf of the theme camp crew. Mostly it was just to suggest a few extra stakes and guy lines here or there, because people would try to pin three-tier scaffold with six-inch stakes and suchlike. Only a couple times did we ever "red-tag" anything, and only because a) any reasonable person could see a real hazard and b) the campers beligerantly refused to do anything about it. You couldn't boil it down to a set of rules, though, because you can't possibly predict what kind of fresh hell people are going to bring to the playa.
