ON THE FIRST day of the New Year, the oyster farm stood empty, doors gaping, tarps fluttering in the breeze. The shacks and sheds were still present on shore and the surface of the estuary nearby was flecked with hundreds of bits of wood and plastic foam. The old oyster barge had to be broken up into pieces so it could be removed from the water. In the coming weeks the buildings would be torn down too and their rubble scraped from the shell-encrusted ground with bulldozers. The Lunnys’ permit had called on them to remove all traces of their operation from the premises, on land and in the water, however the family had argued in court that doing so would bankrupt them. Therefore, a settlement was reached by which the oyster farm’s owners were required to remove all of the oysters themselves from Drakes Estero, leaving the rest of the cleanup to the National Park Service, with the taxpayers footing the bill. The first three weeks of work cost more than $200,000 alone, and the cleanup was expected to take up to a year.
Hopeful until the very last, the Lunnys had kept planting their oysters until as late in the game as possible, so that many of the bivalves were forced to go to waste. Unable to be sold, they were packed out of the seashore by the truckload, destined for the landfill. Even after the New Year, and despite the settlement, many bags and strings of oysters remained. In January, park employees pulled up fifteen tons of oysters in hundreds of bags and a staggering amount of oystering paraphernalia from the water bottom. Still more remained. Underwater video shot by local conservationists while snorkeling showed still more oysters in bags sunk on the bottom throughout the estuary, their shells edged with orange Didemnum lahillei, and plenty of debris. There were empty black mesh bags, and rods, and wires, and treated lumber, not to mention the five miles of treated redwood that the Johnsons’ racks were made of, which would require strong equipment to pull out.
The story I have written here is not the story I thought I would find when I set out to write it. I began my investigations wholly sympathetic to the oyster farm, but that sympathy eroded over time as the evidence I found did not support the arguments I had heard in favor of the farm staying. I was told that the Lunnys were given the impression, if not the promise, that they could stay past 2012, but this was not the case. Even though no such evidence was supplied during any of the court proceedings, the idea that the oyster farm was told it could stay past 2012 was so entrenched locally that I had a hard time believing it wasn’t true. At the eleventh hour I found myself pressing anyone I could think of who had lent vocal support to DBOC, to the point of hounding them, asking them to help me strengthen their case. I wrote to the fifteen people who had been most involved—Kevin, and his main lawyer at the end, Peter Prows, and citizen allies who ran websites in support of DBOC, and others including journalists and academics. I asked for any evidence or documentation at all that Kevin was told he would be able to renew, thinking that there could have been some scrap of evidence that was somehow overlooked or inadmissible in court. But no one was able to come up with anything. I could not even find any on-the-record instance of Kevin saying that he was confused or misled about the lease and the wilderness designation. I wrote to Kevin repeatedly, asking him if I had gotten it wrong. I asked him to explain it to me, and to go on the record saying he was told he could renew, even though there is documentation that NPS told him otherwise.
For all I knew there had been mixed signals or a gentleman’s agreement of some kind, but he declined all of my invitations to give an alternative story in his defense. I exchanged many emails over several weeks with Sarah Rolph, a woman who had offered her public relations and communications services to the Lunnys in support of their cause. The message I got was that, No, nobody with NPS told Kevin he could renew per se. Both Tom Johnson and Don Neubacher had in fact told him that NPS did not plan to renew; he just didn’t agree with that decision and hoped he could change it. He felt that the weight of the farm’s legacy would win out in the end.
As for the function of the oysters in the estuary and the argument that the commercial Japanese oysters were replacing the ecosystem services of a large and thriving population of native Olympia oysters, I am convinced that this was not the case, either. There is no convincing evidence to support this assumption, and rather strong historical and scientific evidence to suggest otherwise. Similarly, if the absence of the oysters would cause Drakes Estero to become a “cesspool” due to cattle runoff, as one Internet commenter on a Los Angeles Times article put the common conspiracy theory, then those oysters should not have been for consumption. In places where oysters are used to clean the water, such as with native oyster reef restoration projects for ecological reasons, those oysters themselves are too polluted to eat. Oysters do not make toxins or other pollutants magically vanish from the water, they merely take them into their own bodies. When fertilizers and treated sewage cause elevated levels of nitrogen in a waterway, this can result in algae blooms. And since oysters eat algae, an oyster population can mitigate overabundant algae and help prevent the increase in carbon dioxide produced underwater when those blooms inevitably die off and decompose—a process called eutrophication, or ocean acidification from within. But oysters do not eat fecal coliform, other animal waste, or untreated sewage. Pollutants won’t be extracted from an ecosystem until the oysters that have absorbed those pollutants are removed and disposed of. Edible oysters are only grown where the water is already clean enough to grow food.
THE STORIES I heard that the park had once planned to build a gleaming new and permanent “oyster palace” were also untrue. One can argue that the historical value of the farm should have been enough to allow it to stay; that its role in the community spoke for itself and should not have been removed. This I can understand. As for the original intentions for the oyster farm, the opinions discussed in the House Report that accompanied the 1976 Point Reyes Wilderness Act were varied. Some thought the farm was not compatible in a wilderness area while some did. Some argued that even allowing the forty-year lease to continue would erode the strength of wilderness designation everywhere. Some called for its removal and others for its continuation. It also seems clear that if the government decided to allow the oyster farm to stay past 2012, that an adaptive management approach could have been developed to minimize impact to the seals. At the very least, the millions of dollars spent in the course of the legal battle could have been better spent on real, original studies to find out what was best for the estuary and its non-human inhabitants, rather than rehashing old data gathered for other purposes. Some felt that the presence of the farm took away from the “wilderness experience,” and others found it to be an asset.
I suppose then, in the end, I agreed with the “dangerous precedent” argument. I don’t think it is a coincidence that a Koch-backed group chose to fund the fight for the farm, and that to pry open a wilderness area for commercial use would indeed put wilderness everywhere at risk. I do not see how a government solicitor could recommend renewing the lease of a commercial operation inside wilderness when that lease was set to expire, especially when that business’s environmental practices were so very much less than stellar. Still, there was a false dichotomy set up, pitting wild landscapes against cultivated ones. Wallace Stegner himself even wrote that a carefully managed landscape with grazing animals on it could offer the same kind of solace as an empty and uncultivated field. Despite arguments to the contrary, the removal of this particular oyster farm did not threaten other agriculture in the area, or oyster farms generally, which are fighting hard battles and doing wonderful things all over the country, helping with research and illustrating the stark reality of ocean acidification and what we stand to lose if we do not begin addressing climate change more actively.
The more I researched and wrote or thought about this case, the more it seemed like a Rorschach inkblot test, with people seeing within its sprawling little mess whatever monsters they already found most frightening. Depending on who was doing the looking, it was a story about “big” government, or about sloppy science, or about the vanishing nature of small-scale farms, or the struggle of the “little guy” against corrupt and unseen forces beyond his control. It was about how we have largely become separated from how our food is grown, to the detriment of both ourselves and the environment. It was a story about how stories can be twisted and histories changed, simply by repeating selective or erroneous information, whether on purpose or by accident. To some it was really a story about gentrification, with urban elite kayakers and day trippers displacing blue-collar farmers and immigrant oyster workers—people who really used the land for practical purposes rather than something as abstract as spiritual renewal. It was a tale of bogeymen, like the Koch brothers, and what their money could (almost) accomplish. Most of all, I think, it was a story about loss and the seeping panic we feel at that loss—whether it be the loss of nature or the loss of a way of being in the world that feels sane, where men and women pull sustenance out of the lands and water. The natural world is everywhere under attack, as we enter a new geological age influenced by man: the Anthropocene, the age of humans. Even within protected areas, ecosystems are still vulnerable and many cannot be left to their own devices in order to flourish—invasive species must be removed, and predators added or supplemented via culling programs. Acidic water washes in, destroying shellfish and other organisms. It is too late for a hands-off approach. Humans and our waste are a part of nature, and our impacts must be actively mitigated. Based on the available science, drastic changes lie ahead of us as stewards of this planet. We do not know exactly how climate change will manifest, or how quickly.
As for the people who fought in the oyster war, most would rather put it behind them. Sarah Allen has a desk job now, leading the Ocean and Coastal Resources Program for the National Park Service’s Pacific West region. “I’m a bureau-ologist now,” she joked over the phone. She works on mitigating and studying marine debris, among other initiatives. Kevin Lunny and his family have lost their oyster farm but still have their cattle ranch, compost business and quarry. With the funding help of their many supporters, they planned to open a restaurant on Tomales Bay in Inverness, so the family could still all work together. Brigid, the Lunnys’ daughter, married the son of one of the farm’s longest-tenured employees and they now have a child together. Oscar, the worker who was fired for showing me around the oyster farm in 2013, was forced to return to Mexico where he struggles to find enough work. He lives with his family in coastal Jalisco again, and his Facebook feed shows cell phone pictures of his young son, smiling under the shade of a too-big cowboy hat, or perched on the edges of colorful wooden boats. Still, he has written to me asking me to help him return to America, although there is nothing I can do. Corey Goodman continues his work as a neuroscientist and venture capitalist. Fred Smith works as a business consultant on environmental issues and sustainable agriculture. The Mendoza family continues to run their dairy.
Even at the very end, I wondered if there was some way I had gotten it all wrong. People on both sides had passionately accused me of bias—declaring that I was alternately biased in favor of the oyster farm or that I was biased against it. It is true that I have presented the facts I found to be most pertinent, and that not every incident made it into my telling of the story. Ultimately, I had to walk away, knowing I’d gotten as close to the truth as I could reasonably be expected to come. Pursuing that truth felt, in the end, somewhat like pursuing the white stag of legend: even if we can never catch it, it is the pursuit of it that matters, as the mythical beast leads us ever onward through the fog and towards transformation.