I CAME BACK TO Point Reyes in the first week of May 2012, to start work as a reporter for the Light. All of the fields were still overgrown and flecked with wildflowers, a few weeks away from being cut. Some seemed to be nothing but wildflowers, or at the very least, the grasses and the wildflowers were thoroughly tangled up. By June they’d mostly be mown down for silage or in preparation for the drier and more incendiary months. For now though there were Red-winged Blackbirds perched in the tall weeds of the roadsides, and on tree branches and power lines, their plaintive cries like the creak of rusty swing sets, saying oooPREEEEEEoom, oooPREEEEEEoom. From the edges of little woods you could hear the Hermit Thrushes singing from somewhere in the deep green, like something played on a pan flute. Zheeeee freediila fridla-fridla, they trilled. I’d forgotten that they sounded like the month of May to me, it had been so long since I heard them.
I say I was starting work as a reporter for the Light but really I was to be the reporter; the only one, save an intern who would also write stories, though not every week—not while I was there. And I say Point Reyes, but I really mean West Marin, the constellation of rural villages tucked into the hills and along the water, where I grew up. The Point Reyes Light was not actually in Point Reyes anymore, but rather in the even tinier village of Inverness just across skinny Tomales Bay, a ten- or fifteen-minute drive away. The residential population is actually larger there, but there are fewer amenities; just a country store and, across the way from that, a post office, café and restaurant, which used to be the store where Doc Ottinger’s poached white stag was once strung up. Vladimir’s Czechoslovakian pub is on this block, too. (And yes, the place where Vlad came from isn’t called Czechoslovakia anymore, but it was when he left it.) Tucked behind these was the one-room newspaper office. The rent was cheaper, and, well, you know how it is with newspapers now.
The bay was just across the road, and I’d often go stand at the edge of it while talking to sources on my cell phone, near where the wreck of an old fishing boat called the Point Reyes has spent the last several decades of its afterlife picturesquely stuck in the mud. Between Vladimir’s and the post office there is an enormous overgrown bush of tiny, pale pink climbing roses. If I wasn’t getting cell reception by the water, I’d sometimes stand by this rosebush and pick off a little bud absentmindedly, slowly peeling back the petals to reveal the powdery yellow-green stamen cluster while I listened or talked.
The town of Point Reyes is really called Point Reyes Station, named during the railroad days, but people don’t usually say the Station part. There’s a proper main street there with a grocery store, a bakery, a post office, a bank, a lumberyard, a hardware store, a barber, a bookstore, a bar, a tack and feed that also sells clothing and some toys, and a few restaurants. There are also several gift shops, a few art galleries, a doctor’s office, and a vet. On a perpendicular street you’ll find the gas station, the pharmacy, two kayak companies, the diner, and Tomales Bay Foods, where you can buy gourmet picnic supplies and watch artisanal cheese being made behind a glass divider. This is famous cheese, from Cowgirl Creamery, which incidentally you can get at nearly any gourmet grocer in Brooklyn worth its salt. In 2012 there was still a stationery store that also sold goofy knickknacks, which had been there since I was little. It’s gone now, but I remember going in and being allowed to buy tiny plastic farm animals or little rubber monster finger puppets with googly eyes and jiggly arms. Tucked into other crannies of the town you’ll find a yoga studio, an herbalist, the radio station, a thrift shop, the small library (where my stepfather is one of the librarians), an elementary school, the fire station, Fred’s little office of the Environmental Action Committee, and a few other things—you get the idea. It’s pretty idyllic, and in recent years that fact has not gone unnoticed. Real estate and rental prices have skyrocketed, and on weekends the streets are busy with tourists. There is a farmers’ market on Saturdays with a booth where you can buy a grilled cheese sandwich for $8. Great big groups of cyclists clad in spandex will all ride out together from the city or more suburban towns, and congregate at the bakery to buy coffee and bear claws or sticky morning buns, their special bike shoes clacking on the tiled floor. My sister calls them “locusts.”
When I arrived at the paper I was feeling pretty optimistic. I’d read up a little on the Drakes Bay Oyster Company controversy, but felt that in the Light’s coverage at least, the story seemed to be fairly onesided. To get acquainted with the history of the thing, I’d been told to listen to what Corey Goodman had to say about it, and to read the hundreds of pages of analysis and PowerPoint presentations that he sent to me. He told me that he was sending them to the White House, too, and could tell when they’d been opened because they did so by accessing an online file-sharing platform. In terms of articles I’d only read coverage from the past few months, and there didn’t seem to be very much coming from the pro-wilderness camp. I was surprised by this, and thought that I would remedy it, a plan I communicated to the newspaper editor. She said that was just fine, and gave me the contact information for the people I’d want to talk to. Right away I rang one of them up.
“Go back to New York!” this person yelled at me over the phone. “We don’t want you here. That goddamn paper! Why don’t you get a real job?” And they hung up.
“I’m sorry that your career has taken such a downward turn,” another told me nastily when I explained who I was, also over the phone.
“I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences with other reporters,” I tried to soothe, completely taken aback. “But I’m really just trying to do a good job. If you have concerns, I’m happy to listen.”
“Your boss is the devil,” this person said to me. And that was that.
I hadn’t realized it, but I was walking into the Oyster War at the height of its ugliness. I also did not realize that Corey Goodman was arguably the de facto publisher of the paper where I worked. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell. The paper as I knew it growing up had been sold to a youngish Columbia journalism grad named Robert Plotkin some years prior. He was brash and liked to ruffle feathers, and the San Francisco Chronicle described him as being like “Jerry Seinfeld with a Granta subscription.” I kind of see what they mean, although I like Robert. The first time I met him we were debating Middle East gender politics less than three minutes after introducing ourselves. The second time I met him he made a joke about how I should enter into a polygamous marriage with him and his wife. The third time I met him he made the same joke. His tenure in the community was somewhat fraught, and after a few years he decided to sell the paper at a substantial loss. By then he’d ruffled so many feathers that a whole other newspaper had sprung up to challenge his journalistic hegemony, called the West Marin Citizen. In 2010, members of the West Marin community pooled their money and formed the Marin Media Institute (MMI) with the intention of buying the historic Point Reyes Light, its Pulitzer legacy and the famous lighthouse masthead, thus combining the two papers to heal the rift.
By far the largest donor was Corey. The idea was to make the newspaper itself a 501(c)3 nonprofit, or at least what’s known as a “low-profit liability company”—an L3C. However the Light’s application for nonprofit or low-profit status was never approved, and so it remained the property of the MMI and failed to merge with the Citizen. It has been argued that the paper was really legally owned by the eighty-six individuals who donated the money to buy it, with a majority share belonging to Corey—but I don’t know the definitive answer on that. He was then chair of the MMI’s board. I fielded calls from other reporters around the country while I worked at the Light, asking if Corey was the owner. Did he technically own it? I don’t think so, but the relationship was certainly enmeshed. He had already set himself up as the oyster farm’s most powerful local ally, that much I knew. But I was surprised to find that so many people were so angry at the paper. I thought I was coming home, to a place that would recognize that I belonged there, and where I could get something of a break, but right away I was regarded as an outsider and one worthy of suspicion at that. When I was hired I was told that it probably wouldn’t even be a full-time gig, and I’d surely have time to pitch other freelance projects to supplement my income, which was not enough to live on. After taxes I was getting paid about $1,500 per month. Monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in town was about $1,500. Based on how much I actually ended up working, my salary amounted to around $5 an hour. Minimum wage in California at the time was $8. I also spent around $100–$150 per week on gas while driving around for stories, and was never reimbursed. Luckily I was able to find a cheap room to rent, and my sister gave me a car she wasn’t using—a tan 1991 Pontiac minivan with a weird pointy front like the starship Enterprise and a mysterious blue blinking light on the driver’s side windshield that I couldn’t turn off. It was pretty much the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. The gas mileage was good though.
To get better acquainted with the oyster farm story, I was also introduced to Dave Weiman, the lobbyist hired by the Lunnys. I wasn’t really supposed to refer to him as a “lobbyist,” though, and if I did I was corrected. Or not corrected—adjusted. Yes, he was a lobbyist, but it would “be more accurate” to describe him as “an attorney who has been advising the Lunnys.” Being a lobbyist made it sound bad. We were connected by email, and spoke frequently on the phone, although we only met in person once because he was based in Washington, D.C., most of the time. He was personable, and funny, and often spoke in riddles and folksy analogies that sometimes made sense and sometimes did not.
“Imagine you and I are at the malt shop,” one of his analogies might begin. Or, “Just imagine that you’re gonna sell me a prize hog.” He sent me emails that had more questions in them than statements.
“Who is Brigid Lunny and why does she figure in the story of Corey being a LIAR?” he wrote to me. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”
He meant that Corey was not a liar, of course, and we all knew who Brigid Lunny was. She was Kevin and Nancy’s daughter. I guess Dave was trying to foster a sense of drama, or maybe that was just how he talked, but I was quickly becoming extremely busy with my duties at the paper, and the mystery routine could get a little old. Between Corey’s written sagas and Dave’s analogies and questions, it was a lot. Every week it was not uncommon for me to spend at least two hours or more on the phone with one if not both of them. They were very interested in telling me what the “story-of-the-story” was. During these conversations I was rarely able to ask questions or say anything at all.
From what I gathered, the “story-of-the-story” according to the Light was that the National Park Service had swindled the Lunnys, and that the Lunnys were shocked when they found out their permit would not be renewed. More than that, I was given the distinct impression that the Lunnys were told their permit would be renewed, and that they had purchased the farm and paid to have it cleaned up based on this information. Then, they’d been framed for environmental crimes they did not commit, spied on and harassed. I was told the park had once planned to rebuild the ramshackle oyster farm into a shiny new visitor’s center to showcase the mariculture operation, and had even hired the same architectural firm that designed the park’s headquarters. I was shown drawings. It looked pretty convincing. Dave implied that the reason the park had changed its mind and decided to make the estuary a wilderness area was that being a “National Seashore” wasn’t impressive enough. “It isn’t even really a park,” Dave said to me, with flourish. “I mean come on, what’s a seashore anyway? But a park, now a park. That’s something.” The idea was that the wilderness designation would bring them more power and clout. The Light was determined to uncover this upsetting case of government fraud, and in doing so, might even win the paper another impressive national award. This was suggested to me by newspaper staff, as well as individuals associated with the DBOC story. Never mind that the scandal the Point Reyes Light had uncovered in 1979 had to do with a local cult stockpiling firearms—and that it happened less than a year after the Jonestown massacre, giving the discovery even more national significance. Nevertheless, when I arrived the newspaper’s Wi-Fi password was “Pulitzer.”
But the thing was, it took a while for me to start digging into the oyster farm story in earnest. With in-depth community obituaries that required me to spend hours interviewing the very recently bereaved, and school board meetings, and fishing competitions, and local elections, and people who wanted me to investigate “chemtrails,” and a small but dramatic shipwreck I had to hike two miles along the shore to reach, I didn’t have very much extra time for research. Most of the time I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but during my stint as a West Marin reporter I was not able to take even a single day off. The files on DBOC as I found them were an unorganized mess anyway. Besides, the local oyster farms had other things to worry about besides the feud with the park.
IN JULY OF 2010, Kevin Lunny walked out to his concrete cultivation tanks on the edge of Drakes Estero to check on his latest batch of oyster larvae, and was met with a nasty surprise. The baby oysters were dead, all six million of them—a loss of about $10,000. Unfortunately, this kind of complete crop failure was getting more and more common, and Kevin was pretty sure he knew the culprit all too well: ocean acidification. It is a part of climate change that you don’t hear as much about but is readily measurable and observable. Excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is settling into the world’s oceans and lowering the pH. Ocean waters are also made more acidic when excess nitrogen from sewage and agricultural runoff causes algae blooms that overwhelm native ecosystems and result in carbon-emitting decay. The oysters and other shellfish take calcium carbonate from seawater to form their shells, but that process can only take place within a specific pH range. When the pH drops a little more than normal, some of them die. If it drops too much, they all do. This is a very big deal.
“I wondered, did we just fill our tanks with corrosive seawater and kill our larvae?” Kevin mused to the Light. He told the paper that this was just another reason why he wanted to try farming “native” oysters, i.e. the Olympias, because he speculated that they might be more resilient to acidic water. Unfortunately, that hypothesis isn’t true, and all of the oysters are vulnerable.
This kind of thing was already happening up and down the West Coast. In Willapa Bay, where the Olympia oysters once came from courtesy of John Stillwell Morgan, fuel emissions had turned the seawater there so lethal that the little oysters would sometimes no longer grow at all. When oyster larvae grow ill, they turn pink and stop feeding as they struggle to build the exoskeletons that will become their shells. Then they die. Most oyster farms in California, Oregon and Washington grow the Japanese Pacific oysters. But the water is too cold for them to spawn, so baby oysters are produced in hatcheries that use the local seawater but are able to force the reproduction with cultivation techniques, and then sell the results. Some farms, like Drakes Bay Oyster, hatch their own.
Ocean acidification is not uniform, but collects in different regions and then spreads in currents and upswells. The corrosive seawater from Willapa managed to make its way down the coast to Oregon, killing off entire oyster hatcheries there, too. It can come from anywhere, and oyster farmers have had to get creative. In 2009, Dave Nisbet of the Goose Point Oyster Company in Willapa Bay was forced to move his entire hatchery all the way to Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii—three thousand miles away. The Nisbets employed seventy people in Washington and felt responsible for their seventy families. If they went out of business, it wasn’t just they who would suffer. The little oysters grown in Hawaii were then shipped back to the Pacific Northwest—where the water was not too polluted to sustain them, just too acidic for the little ones to get started. Other hatcheries have managed to coax their oysters to maturity by adjusting the pH in controlled tanks, like you would an aquarium. But this doesn’t solve the problem for the wild shellfish living in Pacific waters, and besides, by 2014 Willapa Bay oyster farms were starting to encounter problems with the grown-up oysters, too. Many oyster farms countrywide are losing up to 40 percent of their crop every year. In Tomales Bay, the owners of Hog Island Oyster Co. have teamed up with biologists at the Bodega Marine Laboratory of the University of California, Davis, to track rising temperatures and acidity. Drakes Bay Oyster Company wanted to do their part to support ocean research too, but for them things were a little more complicated.
Not too long after I started investigating the feud between DBOC and the National Park Service, a New York Times reporter would remark that the conflict had grown increasingly convoluted. Other journalists complained of the “dizzying” procession of reports that had sprung up around the issue. I will tell you that there are in fact nine scientific and investigative reports that are key to this story, and the next two chapters of this book deal with four of them—what insiders called “Becker,” “MMC,” “Frost” and “the DEIS.” All of those four were released between the time that Dianne Feinstein managed to put the possibility of a lease extension for DBOC on the rider of a spending bill, and the time that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar arrived in Point Reyes to make that call.
A person could go crazy sifting through the mountainous minutiae of scientific data and analysis produced between 2004 and 2014 with regard to the oyster farm, and to be honest with you, I think I very nearly did. This was before realizing that most of it didn’t ultimately matter. There are hundreds of thousands of photographs that mostly show an expanse of blue water; hundreds of pages of dense debate about whether or not a group of seals had stopped hanging out in a particular part of the estuary for a few years because of an elephant seal, or maybe it was because of the oyster workers, or maybe it was something else. The bottom line is that it is impossible to know for sure. Again and again the conclusion of the reports—most of which extrapolated data found elsewhere in an attempt to apply it to Drakes Estero—was that “more research was needed.” More research needed. Data was insufficient. More data was needed. Better data was needed. Was the oyster farm causing harm? Maybe. Was it very severe? Probably not but we didn’t know yet. Could it be mitigated through an adaptive management approach? Most likely.
A top government scientist in Washington, D.C., spent several hours on several occasions speaking with me off the record about the case, his voice calm and measured. I won’t name him here due to his request for anonymity, but I think what he had to say was important. The gist of it was this: if the park wanted the oyster farm to stay—assuming there was no wilderness designation to get in the way of that—then it seemed perfectly reasonable that the park and the oyster farm could find a way to coexist more or less peacefully. This would only happen if the park service was reasonable about setting up rules, and the oyster farm impeccable about following them. But the question of whether or not the farm was harming the flora and/or fauna of the estuary was not the central issue—even if nearly everything written about the controversy made it seem that way. The scientific and investigative reports can also get confusing because they are nestive to a degree, seeking to evaluate, expand upon, prove or disprove one another. The IG report of 2008 was made in part to investigate the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report of 2006 and 2007. The report of the Marine Mammal Commission, the MMC, released in 2011, evaluated the science found in that report as well as in what’s called “the Becker report,” which itself was created to expand on, investigate and examine assertions made in the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” document, which was also dissected in the “Frost report,” an investigation by a government solicitor to see if park scientists had committed scientific misconduct. For those not intimately familiar with the whole thing, it can get quite confusing.
As soon as the bill with Feinstein’s rider was passed, the National Park Service was tasked with producing an Environmental Impact Statement with which to help Ken Salazar make his verdict. While that report would assert, rightly, that the Secretary’s decision was one of policy and not science, it acknowledged that science could however potentially influence that policy decision. If the oyster farm was not causing any harm, Salazar was still entitled to say no to the proposed issuance of a ten-year Special Use Permit. If it was causing harm, it would probably make the issuance of such a permit, to continue operating in a potential wilderness area, a lot less likely.
That statement, first released as the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, or DEIS, set out to examine four potential outcomes. In “Alternative A,” no action would be taken, the permit would expire in November 2012, and the oyster farm would be removed. In “Alternative B,” a ten-year extension would be issued that would expire on November 30, 2022, with onshore and offshore facilities as they existed in the fall of 2010. “Alternative C” would allow the same extension, but with scaled-back operations as they existed in spring 2008 when Kevin Lunny signed the current lease, plus the option to renew again when those ten years were up. “Alternative D” would also allow for a ten-year extension, plus the ability to expand and improve the farm’s infrastructure—i.e., build a new onshore facility. These options reminded me of the debates between the Israelis and Palestinians that I heard at the United Nations, about whether East Jerusalem could be made Palestine’s capital or not, and which settlements if any would be dismantled, and if the borders would be based on those drawn before the Six-Day War of 1967, or thereafter.
The Becker report was really titled “Modeling the effects of El Niño, density-dependence, and disturbance on harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) counts in Drakes Estero, California: 1997–2007,” by Ben Becker, Sarah Allen and Dave Press, for the National Park Service. It was previewed in 2008, published in 2009, and then republished in 2011, with corrections. Whereas Sarah’s initial claims of harm on the part of the oyster farm were based largely on individual disturbances observed by park scientists and volunteers, the Becker report shifted the focus to compare overall seal numbers with annual oyster harvest yields, the latter serving as a proxy for mariculture operation levels. Those stats came from the Department of Fish and Game. Ultimately, the report concluded that both El Niño weather events and oyster farm activity “best explained” the seals’ haul-out patterns, i.e., where in the estuary the seals chose to spend time. The seals’ numbers were highest in 2004, a year with very little oyster yield, since Tom Johnson was floundering and his family’s farm was winding down. Based on this report, it would seem that more oyster farm activity meant fewer seals.
When I spoke to Kevin Lunny about it, he found the whole thing extremely frustrating. According to him, the use of annual production—shucked oysters, at that—was “fundamentally flawed” and didn’t reflect the true activity of his family and employees.
“We set out hundreds of millions of oyster larvae per year,” he told me when I was working for the Light. Per that line of thinking, he explained, even a 1 percent change in the survival rate of that seed could indicate an “increase in production,” even though it would not change the number of boat trips that the workers took. It was the boat trips that allegedly disturbed the seals, although just three or four of some forty oyster bedding areas were located near seal haul-outs. A drop in larvae survival could be chalked up to a number of factors, most of them environmental, and would just mean that the oyster bags or bars, once hauled up, would have fewer oysters in or on them. Kevin said of the farm activity:
The park service didn’t make any effort to ask us. We would have been very happy to share how the farm works, but none of the authors of the Becker Report have even been with us in a boat, or even talked with us about how we do what we do. It’s all speculation. . . .We’re getting lost in the weeds of statistics when there is something really easy to understand here. The high-low harvest does not have a linear relationship with our efforts in the bay that could translate into additional concerns for seals. There is nothing true in that high-low means more boat trips, or more disturbances or more anything. It’s something they guessed might be true, and they guessed wrong.
IF YOU’LL RECALL, the National Park Service first approached the Marine Mammal Commission about Drakes Estero in spring 2007, just before the Marin County Board of Supervisors meeting when supervisor Steve Kinsey proposed getting Dianne Feinstein involved. In 2009, the MMC agreed to review the available science on marine mammals in the estero; their findings were published in November 2011. The goal was also to help Salazar make his decision, and noted that the ultimate judgment would be one of policy, not science. Still, like the DEIS, the report said that science could inform policy. The MMC said there were two separate issues on the table. One, was DBOC harming seals? And two, should the permit be renewed? The commission would not concern itself with the latter, but offered guidance and expertise with regard to whatever was decided.
If the central question of the MMC report was whether or not Drakes Bay Oyster Company was in some way “disturbing” harbor seals, it more or less takes seventy pages to say “maybe.” The panel members did not agree on everything. There was debate about what constituted a “disturbance,” and how that disturbance could be measured. The commission set out to evaluate the statistical data of the Becker report by three different parties. One was selected by the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA) and Save Our Seashore (SOS), one was selected by DBOC and Corey (and was, in fact, Corey himself), and a third was selected by the commission. Then the MMC would report and comment on the findings of all three. The scientist chosen by the NPCA and the SOS, a man named Dominique Richard, found the Becker report of 2011 to have used “appropriate statistical methods” that supported the conclusion that oyster harvest and seal haul-out use were related. The statistician hired by the MMC found the Becker methods to be “generally appropriate” but also made recommendations for improving them. Corey, on the other hand, with the help of a few others, completed a set of analyses that he believed countered the Becker results.
This was based on the following: Apparently, there was an especially aggressive elephant seal that showed up in the Point Reyes National Seashore in 2004, at a place called Double Point, some miles south of the estuary. Corey hypothesized that the reason the Drakes Estero harbor seal population was so high in 2004 was not that the oyster farm was winding down, but that other harbor seals from elsewhere in the seashore were driven into the estuary to escape what he called the “marauding elephant seal.” Therefore, he posited dismissing that year’s number as an outlier, thus producing a completely different analysis of oyster yields versus seal numbers that countered the Becker report’s findings. However, the MMC made a note that it found Corey’s analysis to be “difficult to evaluate because his statistical models are confounded by built-in dependencies that are inconsistent with the statistical procedures he used.” Corey was not at all happy with this public dismissal of his work. He’d completed it with the help of other scientists, including someone from Stanford. He wrote to the executive director of the Marine Mammal Commission, Tim Ragen, to appeal.
Whenever I spoke to Tim he seemed laid-back, with the demeanor of a man resigned to finding himself embroiled in a big controversy less than a year before retirement. He would eventually respond to Corey’s lengthy protestations through a twenty-page letter of his own, in which he wrote that there were “fundamental errors” in some of Corey’s interpretations of the data, which he said rendered them “incorrect,” “invalid” and “unreliable.” He also argued that Corey did not apply the same level of scrutiny to the oyster company’s records as he did to those of the National Park Service.
“My view of this case has not changed,” Tim concluded in the letter. “I continue to believe the Commission’s report summarized the situation accurately. The park service has provided ‘some support for the conclusion that harbor seal habitat-use patterns and mariculture activities in Drakes Estero are at least correlated.’ The evidence is not overwhelming, but also cannot be dismissed.”
On the phone to me Tim intimated that while Corey may have been an expert in other scientific fields, when it came to this he was out of his depth. There were other unanswered questions with regard to the marine mammals in the estuary as well, such as the mystery of the dead baby seals.
In 2008, a volunteer reported seeing a number of fresh seal pup carcasses located near the mouth of Drakes Estero. During that year’s breeding season, the park staff counted thirty-five dead pups in a span of just thirteen days. Sixteen of the dead pups were taken in to a lab to be examined, but no obvious cause of death could be found. Most of the babies all had a normal, healthy amount of blubber on their little bodies, and one even still had milk in its stomach. No one could figure it out. Denise Greig of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito prepared a poster on the mysterious event for a scientific conference held in San Francisco. There are photographs of the infant carcasses as they were found on the sand, looking like once-loved children’s stuffed animals left out in the rain. There are also photos of the dissections, which are fascinating but grisly, the ribcage cut away to reveal gleaming organs and flesh in various rosy hues. She concluded that there were no signs of bodily trauma to the babies, and while the two thinner ones may have perished due to malnutrition, most if not all likely died simply because they were separated from their mothers. This usually happens due to environmental disturbances, for example, when a large group of seals is startled into the water and a baby gets lost in the shuffle. Greig wrote, “These data suggest behavioral disruption rather than disease predisposed these neonatal seals to trauma. Sources of disturbance for seals previously reported for Drakes Estero include primarily humans and occasionally birds, planes, kayaks, and motorboats.”
(Note to humans in Point Reyes National Seashore: Do not go near the seals!)
One thing that is important to remember with regard to Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s operations is that this wasn’t a murder trial. It wasn’t necessary to prove guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt. The MMC was choosing to adopt the “precautionary principle,” which means that in the event of uncertainty, one should err on the side of resource protection. After all, it was still unknown what made seals choose or abandon particular areas, and how deeply or not they could be affected by a “disturbance.” It could be benign, a mere inconvenience, but it could be quite severe, as shown in Greig’s report. This was a sensitive natural area under federal protection after all, whether there was an official wilderness designation or not.
Lots of people didn’t like or didn’t agree with the Marine Mammal Commission’s report. For one, it also found that oyster boats were not even the most disruptive presence to seals in the estuary, in terms of what made the seals flush into the water. By far the biggest source of observed disturbances to harbor seals were “other humans,” i.e., park visitors. Frankly, these are people like me who walked blissfully down the beach and then either stumbled upon a group of seals on the other side of a dune, or else intentionally approached them in order to snap a photo or have some kind of “authentic wilderness experience” only to spook the seals in question. I am certainly guilty of all of these. After “other humans” (seventy-nine observed instances in nine years), the next most disturbing thing was “unknown” (fifty-three instances), birds (thirty-eight), aircraft (twenty-six), clammers (thirteen) and then oyster boats—just ten instances in nine years. After that came coyotes and researchers, a tie, then non-motorized boats, then fishermen.
Critics of the MMC report also noted that the individual responses of the panel members, which informed the final conclusions, were included in unedited form in the report’s Appendix F. I heard some in the pro-oyster camp allege that the responses were “hidden” there, and a joke circulated that one should not let the other side marginalize you, i.e. “Don’t let them Appendix F you.” There certainly is some confusing and conflicting information in there. One panel member didn’t seem to think that there “should” be any problem with harbor seals and oyster boats coexisting in the same bay. After all, seals and oyster farms could be found together elsewhere in the country. Furthermore, a panel member provided a link to a YouTube video of seals on a San Diego beach, barely moving as visitors walked within a few inches of them. The message seemed to be that harbor seals were not disturbed by humans whom they no longer feared. As Kevin would point out to journalists, “They’re called harbor seals.” However, as Tim pointed out to me, it didn’t ultimately matter what populations of seals in other parts of the country did or did not find disturbing; what mattered was whether these particular activities disturbed the seals that lived here. And what the MMC had found was that the data on disturbances to harbor seals in Drakes Estero was “scant” and already stretched to the limit.