News broke this month that the Nature Conservancy has been invited into the negotiations over ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore, and that the nonprofit may even supply buy-out money to help get things settled.
Local news reports did not reveal who had violated the confidentiality of the ongoing settlement talks between the National Park Service, ranchers and environmental groups by divulging the Nature Conservancy’s involvement, but the mediator leading the talks confirmed the news.
The Nature Conservancy’s role is still unclear. Rep. Jared Huffman, a longtime cattle fan, told the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, “I don’t think it’s responsible for people to speculate that all ranchers are leaving the seashore, because I don’t think that is under consideration.”
Behind the news reports was Albert Straus, whose group Save Marin Food Community Coalition sent a letter to seashore superintendent Craig Kenkel in December, stating its preferences for outcomes of the ongoing negotiations. The letter, which was printed as an ad in the Light, mischaracterized numerous aspects of the situation, encouraged the park service to flout the law and proposed “more tax dollars” to cure what ails us.
The coalition’s letter implied that ranch leases in the park are inappropriately expensive, when it is well established that they are far below market rates. Earlier this year, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility issued a press release pointing out that if the park service charged Point Reyes ranchers market rates, those rates would quadruple for pastureland and skyrocket even more for housing.
The ranching coalition argued that the park service should allow historic silage to continue and that it should compensate ranches for off-farm feed expenses. Silage mowing occurs in the spring and is detrimental to nesting birds and other wildlife. Since it is legally obligated to protect park resources, the park service has significantly limited silage production in the park.
Straus’s coalition recommended that the park improve “farm core housing, buildings and other infrastructure…within context of grant availability.” This would disavow a longstanding but unenforced lease condition that the operations bear the cost of maintenance. The coalition is effectively stating that ranchers are not meeting their lease conditions.
The letter asked the park to create “a water quality regime that meets environmental goals and targets… [and] to financially and administratively” support methane digesters and similar projects. But due to massive public outcry, it is now clear that achieving acceptable water quality in Point Reyes, if it ever happens, will be a fantastically expensive affair far beyond the appetite of those currently rendering the water dangerous.
The group asked the park service to “manage” native tule elk in the ranch areas to minimize impacts to their businesses. “Manage” means exclude with illegal fencing, hazing and culling. Tule elk went through a very narrow genetic bottleneck in the late 19th century, when they were thought to be extinct. Managing the elk in the way ranchers desire would prioritize their financial interests over those of a native species that is at 1 percent of its historic population.
The park is considering removing the fence that confines a portion of the elk on Tomales Point, where they have suffered repeated die-offs driven by malnutrition. Wilderness Watch contends that keeping the fence is a violation of the Wilderness Act, one of several major environmental laws the park is accused of breaking.
Finally, Straus and his coalition want the park to implement both family and non-family succession plans indefinitely “in order to support a systemically functional farming ecosystem in the Ranchland zone.” Leaving aside the false implication that the ranches are ecologically or financially sustainable, this amounts to an insistence that these lands are never restored. Rendering ranching permanent in the park would contradict law that requires the park service to periodically update its general management plan for the seashore.
The same article that spilled the Nature Conservancy beans quoted rancher Kevin Lunny as saying, “I hope the outcome will be consistent with what the public agreed to in this process because it would seem to me to be wrong if that public process gets all undone.” This is staggering. Anyone paying attention knows that the public has been exceptionally vocal and distinctly one-sided in favor of ending ranching in the park. The reason there are settlement talks at all is because the sham process exasperated the vast majority of the thousands of people who expressed an opinion.
Meat and dairy are shrinking under pressure from alternatives and reputation struggles. Milk is overproduced. As with “clean coal,” the industry is incentivized toward greenwashing. But the American public should not be asked to pay more for the privilege of having a third of its park permanently polluted, fenced off and covered in manure. The real impact of the Nature Conservancy on the fate of Point Reyes will become clear soon. Let’s hope it’s not just more money and more or different cows. A pretty smart man once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Ken Bouley is a software professional and an amateur wildlife photographer who splits his time between Inverness and Mill Valley.