WHEN YOU GROW up next to a national park, as I did, it is easy to feel like you own it, and in a very real sense you do. National parks are the property of the American people as a whole. However that doesn’t mean you can do as you like with them, as I have personally been reminded on a few occasions.
I am an inveterate flower picker. I can manage to find flowers to pick in even the most unlikely of places, not unlike the way our family’s daffy but determined golden retriever Ropher could find water to jump into pretty much anywhere that we let him out of the car. I have picked flowers on five continents, in wild places and in cities; legally, unknowingly illegally, and on occasion with a willful disregard for the law (I’m looking at you, flowering Brooklyn magnolia trees with low-hanging branches: sorry). When I’m in New York I live in one of Brooklyn’s more industrial neighborhoods, but still I have picked flowers there, too. I have picked flowering weeds poking out through the chain-link fences of vacant lots, and on one very late and slightly tipsy spring night, I plucked a sprig of lilac from a sidewalk garden near the Gowanus Canal. Again, my sincere apologies. When I was younger and living in bucolic Northern California, it was a rare hike that I went on that did not result in some wild bouquet—yellow acacia or plum blossoms in February, daffodils and narcissus in March, forget-me-nots and roses and foxgloves and honeysuckle and nearly everything else from April through June. There was flowering coyote bush in July, Pink Lady lilies in August, colorful leaves in the fall, and evergreen and red berry branches in winter. I didn’t know it at the time, but even in the county-protected open spaces near my childhood home, this is actually illegal. In Point Reyes National Seashore just a short drive away, it definitely is, too.
I was once walking back to my car from a trail hike through the wilderness area near Limantour Beach. I had begun by heading down through a wet little wood of young trees with a small musical brook running alongside. I then came out into a wide open field of tall dry grass with a view of the ocean. I could have continued on that path to avoid the sand, but instead I scampered down a dune to the beach and pulled off my shoes, opting to walk in the surf for about a mile. I then turned back towards the hills and away from the sea, trying my best to brush the sand from my salty-wet feet with my socks before putting my shoes back on, and rejoined the trail where it climbed upward again. The way was overhanging with fragrant purple ceanothus, a native shrub in the buckthorn family that’s also called California lilac, its fuzzy flower-clusters busy with fat and wriggling bees. There is a meadow at the top of the ridge, next to a pine forest, which has grown back now with incredible fecundity and denseness following the Mount Vision fire of 1995, but at the time was still a little charred. Then the trail slopes down again to meet the place where I started, near a daffodil field. Naturally, by the time that I was walking back to my car I had collected a modest but diverse little illicit bouquet. A park ranger drove up alongside me.
“You can’t take that,” he said, rather guiltily, gesturing towards my flowers as his engine idled. I was around nineteen years old then, my long hair wild and curly from the coastal breeze. I was wearing hiking boots but also a dress, and with my flowers in hand was generally doing my best impression of Marianne from Sense and Sensibility. It was apparent that the ranger did not want to be telling me this thing about the flowers. Similarly, I did not really want to hear it. There was so much abundant nature around my family’s house that appeared to be free for the taking, and this just felt like more of the same. Even though of course I knew it was a park, I wasn’t consciously poaching federal property. I just didn’t think about it. I was told I had to leave the flowers there by the side of the road. Yes, even though they would just wilt in the sun. Yes, even though I had already picked them.
Another time, a few years before, it was a fellow park visitor who verbally slapped my hand away from picking flowers. It was March of 1996 or 1997, I can’t remember which. There is a kind of native iris that grows all over Point Reyes in the springtime—Douglas iris—which is mostly purple but occasionally also white or pale pink. There were already lots of them before the fire, but in the years afterwards there have been even more. Anyway, on this spring afternoon I was driving back from the beach with my boyfriend when I demanded that he pull over so I could collect some wild irises—they were just so beautiful. But as I was leaning down to pick some from among the tender green grasses by the side of the road, another car drove by and an older woman leaned her head out of the passenger-side window.
“No! No! No!” she screamed angrily as they whooshed past, as if she’d just witnessed me savagely beating a child or abusing a baby animal. Or maybe not quite that severe, since whoever was driving the car did not find it necessary to slow down.
In my defense, I was in high school and there are worse transgressions I could have been committing, and I have since reformed my ways. Nevertheless, when it comes to protecting the nature of Point Reyes, people can get very passionate indeed.
In 2009 Sim Van der Ryn, a local architect famous for pioneering environmentally friendly construction models, completed a concept design for a possible new farm-meets-store-meets-hatchery-meets-visitor-center at Drakes Bay Oyster Company. The introduction began:
Drakes Bay Family Farms asked the EcoDesign Collaborative to re:invision [sic] their existing oyster processing facility so that it may better meet the needs of their operations and mission in the 21st century. Our scope of work for this stage was to formalize the building program, understand the best uses for the site and to derive a conceptual design and master plan that reflected the values, priorities and future aspirations of Drakes Bay Family Farms. This project has many variables to contend with; our hope is that this initial vision can add inspiration to the overall goal of creating a world-class processing building and visitor’s center that enhances the natural ecosystems and cultural resources of our Point Reyes National Seashore.
I’m going to be honest with you: looking at Sim’s design made me sad that it will never exist. Thinking of the creativity and care that went into it is a little heartbreaking. It made me want very badly to go there, although admittedly I’m a sucker for pretty much anywhere with an aquarium. Add oysters into the mix, and I’m sold. If this were an alternate universe without the controversy, with no issues of wilderness or mud-slinging or seals, and this facility had actually been built, it likely would have become one of my favorite places in the seashore. What they came up with is not only lovely but rather ingenious. It is beautiful. As the proposal states, even the design is a teaching tool. It has a living green roof and is raised off of the ground to accommodate tides and also a possible sea-level rise due to climate change. The proposal calls it “future-proof.” The roof extends outward from the neighboring cliff, so that when seen from above it looks like a natural formation with vegetation growing on top, that just happens to have a jetty coming out of it. Instead of the cluttered sheds and vats on the shore, everything would be streamlined, orderly and logical.
Based around the life cycle of an oyster, visitors could observe the oyster farm employees working in the lab and the hatchery, sorting the oysters harvested from the bay, shucking and packing. There is space for an exhibit, a kitchen, a shop, and an oyster bar. Everything is visible through glass that shows all the way through to the estuary on the other side, so that the pristine view is not obstructed. In place of the village of rundown homes, there would be a visitor parking lot. Where the oyster farm currently had picnic tables and piles of shells, there would be a visitor observation deck. Surely there would also be nerdy little science exhibits, and in the retail store the computer rendering depicted large tanks of tropical fish and coral that take up two whole walls. Other than the worker housing, the only thing missing is the mountains of oyster shells, for which no clear space has been designated (although an area marked “storage yard—6' fence” might be a likely candidate). Perhaps the assumption would be that the shells would all go back into the estero to create reefs for the “native” oysters to use as cultch, which Kevin was so keen on importing. If done right and well-maintained, Sim’s design could have been amazing. It was submitted by DBOC to the National Park Service to be included in the DEIS. This was meant to inspire Secretary Salazar to go with “Alternative D”: that the farm not only be allowed to stay, but to overhaul its entire system.
This wasn’t the first professional redesign of the oyster farm I had seen. When I started working at the Light, the editor showed me a Xerox copy of some architectural plans for a new visitor’s center at the oyster farm. I was told the plans had been commissioned by the park. There wasn’t a name on them, but I’m pretty sure the editor told me that the designs had been made by the same architect who did the Bear Valley Visitor Center at park headquarters. Or maybe Dave Weiman told me this. I’m not exactly sure. The information came from somewhere. Later, when Ginny Lunny showed me around the oyster farm, she also invited me into their office, located inside a single-wide trailer onsite. There was an obviously Photoshopped picture tacked to the wall of Kevin riding a Jet Ski through the waters of Drakes Estero.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it. Ginny laughed and said it was a long story. Then she showed me the architectural plans. They did look very much like the park headquarters in their aesthetic. Like the ones I’d seen in the Light office, these too were copies and the edges were cut off, so that no identifying information could be found. I don’t remember Ginny telling me either way if the park had commissioned or approved the designs, just that she was rather mysterious and twinkly about it, as if to say Can you believe this? The implication was that this was strong evidence that the National Park Service once intended to allow the oyster farm to stay. I have heard this cited by other oyster farm supporters as well. The only problem with this is that it isn’t true. I eventually saw the original designs in the park archives, which had both the name and contact information of the architect who made them. His name is Charles Dresler. I called him up.
“No, the park did not commission or approve those,” he told me. He explained that Tom Johnson paid for the designs when he was in the middle of his legal problems with the county, when sewage from the worker housing was leaking into the estuary. Even at the time, Charles said he knew the design was unlikely to be implemented, but Tom wanted to use it to illustrate how the Johnson Oyster Company might clean up its act. Otherwise, they were going to be shut down more than a decade before the end of their lease. In applying for a loan from the Bank of Oakland to cover the cost of bringing the oyster farm up to code, Don Neubacher wrote a letter of support on Tom’s behalf, but pointed out that the lease was set to end, and when.
“The NPS purchased the land and facilities from the Johnson Oyster Company in 1972,” Neubacher wrote to the bank on November 22, 1996. “A condition of the sale was that the Johnson family would have a forty-year reservation of possession (ROP) of the site that will expire in 2012.” He goes on to say that NPS couldn’t terminate the lease before 2012 without offering financial compensation, and added that the park was “genuinely excited” about the planned changes. As Kevin Lunny later pointed out, the oyster farm and its environmental problems were Don’s “biggest headache.”
Two years later in 1998, NPS completed an Environmental Assessment (EA), as required by law, to ascertain if the renovations to Johnson’s Oyster Company could be made without harming the flora and fauna of the protected area. Making reference to the Johnsons’ legal troubles with the county board of health, the stated reason for the EA was put thusly:
The purpose and need for this proposed project is to bring the JOC into compliance with federal, state and Marin County regulations. Existing facilities do not currently meet federal, state, and county health and safety codes. Failure to perform the necessary improvement would result in Marin County and the NPS issuing cease and desist orders for operation of the facility [italics added].
The proposed renovations were not part of a grand, park-generated plan to build a gleaming new oyster-based visitor center. Rather, they were an attempt to keep the Johnson Oyster Company in business. The talk of shutting the farm down due to health hazards began a good twenty years before the lease was set to expire. The architectural drawings were just an example, a “what if” of Tom’s. What if they had the money. What if the park wanted them to stay. (What if, what if.)
ON JUNE 6, 2008, Sarah Allen received an email from a graduate student about what would come to be called the “hidden cameras.” In the documents I was able to examine via a Freedom of Information Act request, the student’s name was redacted in nearly every instance save one, by mistake. Nevertheless I will not be including it.
“Hi Sarah,” REDACTED wrote. “Here are the images from the stationary cameras that might be of interest.”
She included the following information, connecting time-stamp ID tags for the images with observational notes.
2008-4-03, 2:08 Boat leaves [oyster bar] channel and there is possibly one seal that flushes into the water
2008-5-15, 2:07 Boat leaves [oyster bar] and seals flush into water
2008-3-23, 5:23 Boat leaving Home Bay
2008-3-25, 5:01 Boat leaving Home Bay (might be a boat, its blurry) [sic]
2008-4-14, 6:21 and 6:25 Boat going into Home Bay and then leaving (possibly a boat, hard to tell)
2008-4-15, 5:05 Boat leaving Home Bay
[etc.]
These were instances of oyster boat movement during pupping season, some of them near harbor seals, which lasts from March 1 to June 30. REDACTED was working with biologist Ellen Hines at UC San Francisco to study the harbor seals at Drakes Estero. In her project proposal she states that the research sought to examine seal behavior in relation to the presence of oyster mariculture. She liked the work, but her ability to tend to the camera and monitor the photos was intermittent, and all in all the whole enterprise seemed disaster-prone.
“I have attached a word document which contains the activity at Drakes Estero captured by the camera,” REDACTED wrote in an email to Sarah Allen on November 5, 2009. “I apologize that I am sending it to you two months after I took the camera down, I’m hope [sic] [harbor seal monitoring coordinator] told you that I lost the original word document when my computer crashed and thus had to look through the photos a second time. Not bad photos to look at though!”
It took her another two months to mail the CD containing the photos, and she had other problems besides an unreliable computer. She didn’t have a car of her own, and often had a hard time getting out to the site where a Reconyx stationary wildlife camera was trained on Drakes Estero, allegedly taking one photo per minute, all day every day, although plenty of things went wrong. Sometimes the camera got knocked over and took pictures of the ground. Sometimes it sat there not taking pictures at all because the memory card was full or the battery was dead. Some of the pictures were blurred because the lens had fogged up and needed to be cleaned manually in order for the pictures to be discernible again. To visit the camera, she relied on rides from her boyfriend, or her roommate, or the harbor seal monitoring coordinator, or Sarah Allen, or some other member of the park staff who was headed that way. First, however, for some of the rides she’d need to get all the way out to Point Reyes from where she lived in San Francisco. Sometimes she was able to borrow a car from someone, but not frequently. When she got a ride, she would often have to wait out in the seashore for hours after she completed her tasks, exposed to the elements, before someone could pick her up again. The camera was left on its own for weeks or even months at a time. It was hard to tell if it was aimed at the right spot, and sometimes she got the framing a little off. The sandbar and the seals and any boats going near them were pretty far away, and it was difficult to see what actually turned up in the photos. Was that a boat? A glare on the lens? A trick of the light? Something else?
“I don’t see anything in the pictures,” the harbor seal monitoring coordinator wrote to REDACTED on February 17, 2010, when REDACTED’s observation notes and the images did not match up, “which makes me wonder if maybe the camera is not pointed at the right sandbar and it might need to move over to the right a little.” The coordinator said she had gone ahead and moved the camera.
“My roommate is taking me out to the site so that should be fun,” REDACTED replied that same day. “I am glad the camera might be on track now.”
A week later she wrote again with an update on her observation site.
“When I got out there, the tripod had slipped. Footage from the video card showed that it happened at night during the week (owl?).”
When she asked seashore scientist Ben Becker to write her a letter of recommendation to go along with a fellowship application, he suggested that she “be sure to closely tie anticipated study results to inform park management.” In other words, one can extrapolate that if the oyster farm was disturbing seals, this study hoped to document it. However, she encountered problem after problem. In May the camera was knocked askew again, and she thought she’d fixed it, but when she went back to check the latest batch of photos she noticed that it was aimed too high and had been photographing nothing; one photograph of nothing per minute, all day every day. She emailed the monitoring coordinator to see if she could maybe go out and fix the camera, but the monitoring coordinator was busy and couldn’t. Then a second camera was installed, but REDACTED had a hard time programming it. She couldn’t get the card reader to work. Did it need a special computer program? Could anyone help her out?
“We’re not sure why it’s not working or how to install the program,” the monitoring coordinator wrote to her towards the end of May 2010. “So I think you are going to need to call Reconyx. Sorry.”
On June 5th 2010, REDACTED wrote to Ben Becker with her worst news so far.
“Hi Ben, I have some bad news. . . . I had an accident . . .”
It turned out she had fully dislocated her kneecap and after spending all day in the hospital was discharged with crutches and a leg brace.
“I can’t believe this has happened,” REDACTED wrote. “It has ruined all my plans for the summer. I can’t move up to Point Reyes now. I can’t do my research. I will be stuck in the city for 6 weeks and then have physio [ . . . ] Sorry for any inconvenience.”
The very next day, on Sunday, June 7, Corey Goodman was reviewing an NPS document when he noticed a reference in one of the appendixes to what the Light referred to as “a renaissance camera.” The next day he announced the discovery during a meeting with seashore officials and Tim Ragen of the MMC, whose report was not out yet.
“We were stunned to learn that the park has been secretly photographing oyster farm activities, using a camera hidden in thorns and bushes,” Kevin Lunny told the Light that week. Corey Goodman demanded that park staff dismantle the cameras immediately. Superintendent Don Neubacher had recently been transferred to Yosemite National Park, and Point Reyes had a new chief, a local woman from Sausalito named Cicely Muldoon. She was forty-four, with a brown, face-framing bob. Corey said the park needed to “rebuild trust with the community” and that Cicely must assure the public that “on her watch, there will never be hidden cameras or listening devices spying on ranchers and farmers within the seashore.”
Wildlife cameras for the purpose of research, set to record both animals and the possibility of humans interacting with them, are fairly common in national parks and other protected areas around the country. Plus, if the public had complained that NPS did not have enough data on whether or not the oyster farm was bothering seals, then in theory at least this seemed like a reasonably effective way to remedy that. Here was an attempt to collect concrete data. Nevertheless, the media picked up on the “hidden camera” story, and locals were outraged. The San Francisco Chronicle said the cameras were “trained on workers in Drakes Estero.” ABC News said there were three hundred thousand “hidden camera” photographs “showing Drakes Bay Oyster Company over three years.” A Harper’s article refers to them as “hidden surveillance cameras.” Corey later referred to it as a “hidden camera system.” At least locally, it was a public relations disaster for the park.
A reporter for the West Marin Citizen wrote to Sarah Allen and other park scientists hoping to get an inside scoop. When and why was the camera set up in the estero? Why wasn’t the public informed? She wanted Sarah’s personal point of view on the matter.
“It’s important considering the other paper is now run by Dr. Goodman,” the reporter wrote.
Corey sent Cicely a long email. “[ . . . ] I have some advice and a request concerning the secret camera photographing Lunny’s oyster beds and oyster workers [in the estero] for the past 2? years,” he wrote, seven paragraphs in.
If you simply say that this camera is aimed at wildlife, you will regret such a statement as the photographs themselves, and their use in the May 1, 2009 “Briefing Statement,” reveal the true intent—the focus is on the lateral channel and the oyster beds, and is not optimized to get as many harbor seal haul-out sites as possible. I would recommend that you say that the hidden nature of the cameras disturbs you—as is the fact that Lunny was never told—and that you will investigate its purpose and history, and that you will assure the agricultural community that you will not allow spying on ranchers and farmers.
He requested that the park service email him the photo files. Cicely replied:
You talked at the Monday meeting about how divisive this issue has been in the community. I agree, and believe we all have a real opportunity to change the tone of the discussion, acknowledge where we disagree, and doing so [sic] without rancor or malice. I confess the tenor of your message concerns me, as it seems to perpetuate the divisive tone that we are all committed to moving beyond. I look forward to discussing this further with you.
Next came a slew of emails about whether or not REDACTED, still laid up with her busted knee, would be able to get her boyfriend to go out and check the camera for her. Corey wrote to Cicely again, expressing concern about the way she was running the Seashore, in a message that was over 1,700 words long and peppered with detailed questions. Again he said that if the goal of the camera was to observe wildlife, he could think of “a half dozen” better locations from which to do so.
Corey would not be the only person to find the park’s science lacking. In November he requested that the Department of the Interior conduct yet another investigation into the park’s science with regard to Drakes Estero, determined as he was to prove that Sarah and her colleagues had committed scientific misconduct. Attorney-advisor Gavin Frost of the Department of the Interior submitted his report in March of 2011 on “Allegations of Scientific Misconduct at Point Reyes National Seashore”—what was called “the Frost report.” While Frost was clearly unimpressed with the rigor of the science in question, he did not issue a guilty verdict.
“The factual record firmly supports conclusions that there was no criminal violation or scientific misconduct, but that NPS, as an organization and through its employees, made mistakes which may have contributed to an erosion of public confidence,” Frost wrote. Indeed, one can even read a whiff of weariness into the amount of quotation marks Frost places around Corey’s (“the informant’s”) chosen language, especially the prevalence of the word “false,” as in “false claims,” and “false science.” (In fact, after reading through the Frost report I encountered the word “false” so many times that I started picturing the character Dwight Schrute from the television show The Office, who likes to refute statements by first loudly declaring “False!”) Frost paints a rather unflattering portrait of the Drakes Estero science, and makes it seem like the wildlife camera was exclusively Sarah Allen’s project, rather than the half-committed student affair of REDACTED’s that it seems to have been upon closer examination. While Sarah may have instigated the research, she did not conduct it or directly supervisor the graduate student who did. Frost noted the problems plaguing the camera research, but managed to make it sound like these deficiencies were all Sarah’s fault. He notes that Sarah did manage to analyze more than five thousand photographs, although this was a relatively low percentage of the overall volume.
It seemed that outrage over the state of research at the National Park Service had eclipsed the conversation about environmental policy, and supporters of the oyster farm had changed the conversation completely. It was no longer about policy, but about science. Fred Smith and others in the environmental camp would argue that the debate about “false” science was a straw man argument. Besides, the park service was not the only one finding environmental fault with the oyster farm.
Tom Baty is a local fisherman, beachcomber and forager who had lived in Point Reyes for the past fifty-two years. When I finally met him, he reminded me of the sort of man you might encounter on a ship a hundred years ago, shouting something about jibs and forestays in the middle of a gale while other men scrabbled to do his bidding. He has a keen look in his eye and a firm handshake, and I want to say there is something vaguely ursine about him, but I don’t know what. He is tall, handsome and darkish, and when we met it was at a luncheon where he’d brought salmon he caught himself, so maybe that had something to do with it. I know he caught the salmon on his own boat with a fishing rod, and not in a stream with his bare hands, but nevertheless that was the image that came to mind when he said it. In any case, Tom was fed up with the oyster farm and wanted to do something about it.
He wrote to the California Coastal Commission in September of 2011 under the subject heading “the stream of plastic debris flowing from the Drakes Bay Oyster Company,” and said that in a single month he decided to walk nearly all of the beaches in the seashore with a handheld GPS unit, to record where he found debris from the oyster farm. He says he collected 726 pieces of mariculture debris, in 607 locations. Although DBOC claimed the debris was old, left over from the Johnson Oyster days, Baty asserted that much of the debris was obviously new and used exclusively by the new operation. He said that over the space of a year he had picked up literally thousands of pieces of mariculture debris, including mesh bags and PVC tubes. He even brought bags of the garbage to a Board of Supervisors hearing, echoing the avalanching arrival of Save Our Seashore petition letters in 1969, as orchestrated by Katy Miller, Congressman Clem Miller’s widow. While Kevin acknowledged that the items had indeed come from his farm and promised to institute a “zero tolerance” policy, Baty said he’d since seen more debris, not less.
In 2010, Fred had decided to take a break from West Marin and go back to grad school to get a business degree. He was replaced at the EAC by a pretty woman in her thirties named Amy Trainer, with long brown hair, a history of teaching yoga, and a serene golden retriever named Henry (after Thoreau) who went with her most places. She was also a lawyer, and came in with a much more hard-line attitude with regard to the oyster farm. However, despite her efforts it seemed like the pro-wilderness side was already losing in the court of public opinion.
After the park published the draft Environmental Impact Statement for Drakes Bay Oyster Company in the fall of 2011, Corey Goodman gave a lecture at a Point Reyes Station community center called the Dance Palace to take a public look at the science in the 722-page report. He stood behind a wooden podium wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, and noted with disappointment that members of the park service were not present.
“You know, I grew up in a scientific culture,” he said, “in biomedical research where you are quite used to having to defend science. Now what I mean by that is we go constantly to scientific meetings where people who think you made a mistake or think you’ve said or done something wrong are always asking you tough questions.” He expressed frustration that he could not seem to get that kind of scientific debate going in West Marin.
“Excuse me,” he said, “the scientific community is one where we debate and we probe, and we try to actually shoot down dogma.” He went on to explain that in science, you never actually “prove” something to be correct, but rather you make hypotheses and models and then see if you can disprove them. “You’re always looking to ask what’s wrong,” he said. “I know there are lots of legislative and regulatory and policy issues. I don’t consider myself an expert on those. People here know a lot more about those than I do.” He scanned the room with his palms facing up and out, as if in surrender to what he didn’t know. “So I’m going to try and stay focused on what is the environmental impact. Because after all, if we’re going to keep or get rid of the oyster farm, or rather, if Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior is going to, it should be based on environmental impacts.”
He related the story of being asked to get involved, and how Steve Kinsey told him that Kevin Lunny could face jail time over the alleged environmental “felonies” being committed in Drakes Estero. He explained how blown away he was by the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report, finding in his estimation that the conclusions of the source material were in fact the opposite of those stated in the brochure. His style was friendly and professorial, and a comment about oyster feces got a giggle from the audience. He then went on to eviscerate the Draft Environmental Impact Statement.
“Now mind you, this is all spending our money,” he said, casting a side-eye around the room. “This is taxpayer money. This stuff doesn’t come cheap. These are half-million and million-dollar studies.”
He said that when Feinstein wrote her rider to give the option of an extension, she added language that “legislatively instructed” NPS to base their Environmental Impact Statement on the conclusions of the report put out in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific body in the United States—of which Corey is a well-respected member. In his mind, this meant that the DEIS should have reached the same conclusion reached in that report.
“Well, we don’t need a seven-hundred-page EIS if it’s going to be based on those conclusions, because that was a pretty simple sentence, wasn’t it? ‘There is a lack of strong scientific evidence that shellfish farming has major adverse ecological effects on Drakes Estero.’”
In fact, the DEIS had, in a sense, dismissed the NAS report, because as Corey put it “they don’t define the word ‘major.’” As I see it personally and as NPS scientists have also argued, it isn’t the absence of the definition of the word “major” that poses a problem, but rather the failure to establish what was meant by a “major impact” or the lack of “strong” scientific evidence. Was there perhaps moderate evidence of major adverse ecological impact? Or strong evidence of moderate impact? There is no universal understanding of what a “major” impact entails, either with regard to a wilderness area or a federally protected animal. Therefore, defining those terms was of fundamental importance.
Corey broke the report down into word frequency, saying that the word “potential” occurred 514 times. He said the word “data” also appeared frequently, but that most of the instances were not “relevant for today.” He said the only “piece of data” came from the Becker report, which he then also dismissed.
“Five hundred and fourteen ‘potentials’ and one actual piece of data,” he said. “[ . . . ] we’ve spent millions of dollars, taxpayer money, the oyster farm’s been there for eighty years, and what I’m struck by is—no data. Seven hundred pages and no data.”
The DEIS detailed potential impacts to seven endangered species that live in the estuary including the Myrtle’s silverspot butterfly, the Western Snowy Plover and the California Least Tern, and Corey decided to tackle the possibility of harm with regard to the endangered California red-legged frog.
First of all, I’m an environmentalist, and I hope all of you are environmentalists. We live in an incredible place—I mean, one of the most beautiful places in the world—and it’s, you know, it’s an honor for all of us to live here and we want to preserve it. We all know about endangered species all over the world, and we want to keep endangered species, we want to maintain biodiversity, keep species, we don’t want things to go extinct. And we’ve seen lots of extinctions. So anytime someone raises the word about an endangered species, we should all be alarmed. And I’ll show you that those words have been used to alarm people here.
He got a chuckle from the audience when he pointed out that the reason the frogs could potentially be threatened was by getting run over by oyster workers’ or visitors’ vehicles on land. This didn’t make sense to him, since the road to the farm runs along a salt marsh, and frogs are averse to saltwater. There was also a drainage pond right next to the oyster worker housing where frogs have been observed, but he didn’t mention this.
“How do you become endangered if you don’t live in saltwater?” he asked. “Maybe the oyster workers, you guys, are gonna catch frogs and throw frogs in saltwater. [ . . . ] You’ll find out the word is, ah, direct quote is ‘increased risk of vehicle strikes.’” The audience laughed. “Driving at fifteen miles an hour over that dirt road—half a mile road—you guys are gonna run over red-legged frogs.” More laughter. “Please no laughing here—this is what the EIS says.” The audience laughed louder.
“For many of you who I believe live in the Inverness area, I have to tell you the fate of your homes,” he went on.
And I’m really sorry. Because the biologist in me says if it’s legitimate to call the red-legged frog being endangered by a half-mile piece of road right along saltwater, um, where you have to drive about fifteen miles an hour, if you have 2.6 million visitors to this park each year running around fifty miles of roads, um, I think we have to ban all motor vehicles. I think we have to cut out Inverness. We might let you stop at Point Reyes and you can walk your groceries over—I mean, I, I, I don’t, I just simply don’t get it. And you can go through each one of the endangered species this way, but I’ll suggest to you that the endangered species simply—they become code words for us to say “My God, there’s something wrong.” There is no impact on endangered species. There wasn’t in 1998, there isn’t now.
Later, oyster farm advocates would find even more to critique with regard to the park science. In an attempt to illustrate other possible impacts, such as noise, the decibel level of a Jet Ski was used as a stand-in for the farm’s much quieter oyster boats. In the absence of very much hard data on environmentally harmful effects, the biggest strike against the shellfish grower seemed to be that the presence of the farm impacted the “wilderness experience.” Many seemed to find this laughable, given the neighboring dairy farms—or, at the very least, easy to dismiss.
IN OCTOBER 2012, a month before Secretary Salazar arrived in the Seashore to make his decision, celebrity food writer Michael Pollan wrote to Dianne Feinstein to express his support for the farm.
“I’ve followed the saga for several years now, with a mounting sense of wonder and disappointment in the behavior of the Park Service,” he wrote, in a letter on UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism letterhead.
Drakes Bay is an important thread in the local sustainable food community, and it would be a shame—in fact an outrage—if the company were closed down as a result of the Park Service’s ideological rigidity and misuse of science.
Pollan said that an “all or nothing” ethic that pitted man against nature, wilderness against agriculture, might be useful in other instances, but not here. He said the park was twisting history and science to promote a “fantasy” of wilderness restoration in what was really a “beautiful semi-domesticated landscape.” He hoped that Feinstein would be able to persuade Salazar to offer an extension of the Special Use Permit, but that was not to be.
IN NOVEMBER, SALAZAR flew out to California. He visited Point Reyes and Drakes Estero, spoke with the Lunnys and with their cattle ranching neighbors. But while he vowed to make a more substantial commitment to the ranches and dairies in the pastoral zone, he decided not to offer an extension for the oyster farm. This was the opportunity that Feinstein had fought to give the Lunnys, and now it had passed them by. Kevin said his family was beset with “disbelief and excruciating sorrow.” Thinking back to the ecological design that architect Sim Van der Ryn created, I can understand just a fraction of how strong their hope must have been that they’d be able to put those dreams into action. Now, just eight years after purchasing the farm, they were being told they had to go. But Kevin was not prepared to go quietly, and right away filed a lawsuit against the United States Secretary of the Interior.