THE STRETCH OF road from Point Reyes Station to the little seaside hamlet of Marshall is, I’m convinced, one of the loveliest drives in the world. It follows the eastern shore of Tomales Bay up towards where it meets the Pacific Ocean, at Bodega. In the very early morning, the world as seen from that drive is all blue, in electric shades of cobalt and cerulean, with fog softening the horizon line so that it isn’t always clear where the blue of water stops and the blue of sky begins. The trees are sculpted smooth by wind, like topiary, and in the summer the roadsides sing with wild sweet peas, radish and mustard, their blooms lavender, bright pink and yellow. Drive up it on any weekend day from April to October and you’ll see that the two biggest oyster operations in Tomales Bay—Hog Island Oyster Co. and Tomales Bay Oyster Company—are clearly booming. The narrow highway near both is usually lined with cars. Visitors often don’t seem to realize they are on a major thoroughfare and not a sleepy country lane, as they snap Instagram photos in the middle of the road and park their Zipcars dangerously close to the whirring traffic of speeding local teenagers and trundling milk trucks.
If you continue up past both oyster farms and take a turn at the abandoned Catholic church, you’ll eventually reach Barinaga Ranch. It is a sheep’s milk cheese operation in the Basque tradition and the home of one Corey Goodman. With close-cropped hair that was once dark but is rapidly graying, Corey has a smallish, spare frame and intense brown eyes so dark they are almost black. If you’re even the least bit aware of the Drakes Bay Oyster controversy, you will have heard about Corey Goodman before. The New York Times has called him both the “avenging angel” of the oyster farm, as well as the National Park Service’s own Inspector Javert. It’s unclear if the reporter in question meant the latter nickname to be flattering or not, since, as anyone familiar with Les Misérables can tell you, Javert is not the hero of that story.
It all started one Saturday morning in April of 2007, when Corey got a phone call out of the blue, asking him to take a look at a scientific report put out by the Point Reyes National Seashore. It concerned one of the local oyster farms. It was not one of his Marshall neighbors, the oyster farms he was more familiar with, but the one across the bay on the Point: Drakes Bay Oyster Company. Corey had never met the owners before, he says, and didn’t know them from Adam. Still he was intrigued.
Corey is a scientist, but not just that. He founded two public biotechnology companies, Exelixis and Renovis, as well as a San Francisco venture capital firm called venBio, of which he is a partner. His stock holdings from Exelixis alone were significant enough that they allowed him to buy his acreage in Marshall and build both Barinaga Ranch and his dream home, not far from where he and his wife had kept a waterfront vacation property since 1993. The ranch is run by his wife, Marcia Barinaga, who modeled it after the traditions of her Basque ancestors. Her cheeses regularly win awards, and by 2007 she and Corey were already well-liked and well-respected by their neighbors, many of them struggling sixth- or seventh-generation ranchers. If there was a problem in the community, both Corey and Marcia were usually quick to help out.
When I visited the Goodman-Barinaga house in 2012, it was a late afternoon in July, and a battalion of ashen fog was already coming in off the ocean and beginning to roll between the hills. The house is new construction, and though humble and tasteful in design, it nevertheless glows with an art and sturdiness in the way that only the expertly made houses of the rich can do. If the beautiful wood floors did not have radiant heat, it looked like the kind of place that would have radiant heat floors. Many of the walls were decorated with oil paintings of local landscapes by famous or semi-famous Bay Area artists, and the guest room (the door was open) is appointed in such a way that it looks more like a boutique hotel room than a room in a regular house. It’s the kind of house that can easily make you wish that the people living in it would adopt you. Outside the large picture windows, Marcia’s sheep grazed in the fields, and a few large, peaceful Great Pyrenees dogs stood stoic and magnificent as Luck Dragons in the encroaching mists, nobly guarding their charges. The day I visited, the sheep were just coming in towards the house from over the pastures. In the distance, Tomales Bay was visible, steely gray but for patches of bright sun falling on the water through gaps in the clouds. Corey’s office was clean and tasteful, with lots of exposed wood and a shelf for his scientific awards. His desk sat under another large window that overlooked more rolling golden hills, and more sheep, and more dignified sheepdogs.
The villages of West Marin are all unincorporated areas, not official towns, and thus have no mayor or mayors to speak of. From time to time, a citizen who is particularly active, beloved or charismatic will be affectionately dubbed the “mayor” of somewhere. Because of the alliteration, and because it is particularly small and remote (the road sign says POPULATION 50, though this is no longer true), Marshall is a popular place for people to say that they are the mayor. However, County Supervisor Steve Kinsey is truly the closest thing that the towns of the region have to a mayor, and he takes the concerns of his constituency seriously. Fred always used to say to me that Kinsey kept his focus on the three F’s: farms, family and fish—by which he meant watershed and fisheries restoration. He has a BA in architecture from Arizona State University and bears a passing resemblance to an older Bill Paxton. In many ways, he is local government.
It was Kinsey who reached out to Corey about the oyster farm. Being a venture capitalist with a background in neuroscience, Corey had never studied the topics mentioned in the scientific report in question before. But Kinsey knew that Corey was not only brilliant, but possessed both influence and an interest in public policy. Indeed, what Corey may have lacked in marine biology experience, he more than made up for in clout. His curriculum vitae is nineteen pages long. With a BS from Stanford and a PhD from UC Berkeley, Corey was an assistant and then associate professor of neuroscience at Stanford from 1979 to 1987, and a professor at UC Berkeley from 1988 to 2007. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. His CV lists 193 academic papers of which he is coauthor, with titles like “Analysis of gene expression during neurite outgrowth and regeneration” and “Heterogeneity in synaptic transmission along a Drosophila larval motor axon.” A drosophila is a fruit fly, and for years that is what Corey studied: the neuroscience of fruit flies. There is also considerable ink given to locusts, or rather locust brains, and grasshoppers. Lots of grasshoppers. In fact, the phrase “grasshopper embryos” appears in his publication titles with startling frequency. Sometimes the papers covered both grasshopper embryos and fruit flies, as well as a lot about cell signaling pathways and “growth cones” and “ablating axons.” In 2007, at the age of fifty-six, Corey had just been hired by Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, to overhaul their global research and development model. They made him president of the Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center (BBC), launched the same year Kinsey invited him to weigh in on the oyster farm. “That’s the sort of thing that gets me going,” Corey told Nature Biotechnology of the Pfizer appointment. “I did it in my academic career. People said ‘you can’t do a genetic screen for brain wiring and axon guidance.’ But we did it.”
Unmistakably, there is something of the rebel in Corey. He is an innovator by trade, is used to getting a lot done and by all appearances does not like for things to stand in his way. He speaks with precise diction and a soft voice. He likes to use casual language in a way that can be a little jarring coming from a man who has written regularly in a distinctly erudite academic style about such things as “Slit and Robo proteins in midline commissural axon guidance.” For example, he would later refer to adult female harbor seals as “moms” and their pups as “little boys and girls,” even in correspondences to high-ranking government scientists. He can come across as deceptively unassuming at first, and I say this is “deceptive” only because Corey is one of the most passionately motivated people I have ever met. Wrangling a succinct narrative out of him can be something of a challenge. His brain is clearly chock-full at all times with information, which he is happy to send your way with machine-gun-like intensity.
The first time I interviewed Corey was over the phone from New York, before heading out to California to work for the Point Reyes Light. My travel had been delayed and I was trying to write an article for the paper long distance. Corey called me and proceeded to talk for two and a half hours straight. There was no opportunity to ask questions or interrupt. I had the phone squeezed between my shoulder and my ear the whole time as I typed furiously, a posture that was growing increasingly painful. By the end of the conversation, when I told him I really had to go, I was looking at thirty pages of typed notes on my laptop. The day before we spoke, he’d sent me hundreds of pages of documents via email to read as prep, including elaborate PowerPoint presentations that he himself had made. This was all for an eight-hundred-word article. It would not be the last conversation we had that went that way. From talking to other reporters who have covered the oyster farm controversy, I understand that this is a fairly standard Corey Goodman experience. Said one seasoned reporter from a major national newspaper to me: “I’m afraid of him.”
When Kinsey first asked Corey if he would take a look at the park’s science, he thought it would be a fun distraction for a week, maybe two. He had no idea his involvement would spool out into a seven-year saga, or that he’d become the oyster farm’s fiercest defender, pitting himself against other scientists, the environmental community, and the United States government.
AFTER THE SALE of the Johnson Oyster Company was finalized at the start of 2005, Kevin Lunny and his family got to work on their new farm. As he later told Marin magazine, he was excited to invest in cleaning up the operation with the hopes that the park service would see his hard work and extend the lease. But there was a wrinkle to this plan right away. When the park presented him with his new Special Use Permit at the start of their very first year, it was different than the lease for the Johnsons, which he’d seen. The new document contained a provision that he must clear out after 2012. The Johnsons’ agreement had contained language that Kevin and his lawyers thought was the key to getting his lease extended. This new lease had no such clause. When he complained, Don Neubacher told Kevin that this was because the Johnsons’ permit was drafted in 1972, before the federal wilderness designation in 1976. Don explained that the previous lease had been from before the park “matured,” and what the Lunnys were being asked to sign was now completely standard. Also, he’d explicitly told Kevin that they were not going to renew the lease. The park drew Kevin’s attention to the solicitor’s opinion of 2004, which they’d also shared before the sale was final, stating the estuary must become wilderness after 2012. Kevin didn’t sign it. Instead, some squabbles commenced over details on the property; road maintenance, and whether or not an older land survey was more or less accurate than a new one that Lunny himself had commissioned—things that put off the signing of the new Special Use Permit that said the Lunnys would have to leave in 2012.
In June, Kevin emailed Don and asked that they add the following language to the permit:
Permittee and Permitter acknowledge and recognize that [ . . . ] the Reservation of Use and Occupancy [ . . . ] does allow for issuance of a special use permit for the continued occupancy of the property . . . beyond the 2012 term, at the discretion of the Permitter.
Don told Kevin that this wasn’t going to happen. Again, this was due to the wilderness designation, and the fact that the legislation came after the initial drafting of the Johnsons’ lease. The park sent Kevin a second draft of the Special Use Permit, containing the following clause as added by the solicitor’s office:
The Permittee acknowledges that they have been informed about the Congressional designation of the adjacent Drakes Estero area as potential wilderness. The Permittee also acknowledges that they have been provided the National Park Service legal opinion dated February 26, 2004, regarding the future of the potential wilderness area and legal options after the expiration of the 1.43 acres of land under the 2012 Use and Occupancy Permit.
Two days later, Kevin faxed the permit back to the park with that language deleted.
The Lunnys continued setting up their oyster operations based on the Johnsons’ infrastructure, and were already the largest oyster farm in the state. But they didn’t have a permit. Later that year, Kevin started meeting regularly with Supervisor Steve Kinsey, to see if he could help. At the end of December 2005, Kevin received a third draft of the Special Use Permit from the park, containing a space for the “Permittee’s Initials” next to the following text:
The permittee and permitter acknowledge and recognize that extension of this permit is not currently authorized beyond the expiration of the reservation of use and occupancy referenced in the deed from Johnson Oyster Company to the United States of America. [ . . . ] This Reservation of Use and Occupancy expires on November 9, 2012. The permittee acknowledges that they have been informed about the Congressional designation of Drakes Estero as potential wilderness. The permittee also acknowledges that they have been provided the Office of the Solicitor legal opinion [ . . . ] regarding the future of the potential wilderness area.
Both sides were starting to realize that this wasn’t going to be as easy as they had previously thought.
EARLY THE NEXT year, Kevin began a project that he thought would strengthen his claim to the estuary as a worthy steward of water and land: he decided to begin a “native oyster restoration” project. Now, with the research well and truly considered, there is little to no evidence that “native” oysters were ever historically present in Drakes Estero, let alone plentiful, but Kevin didn’t know that. There was a popular myth that “native” oysters had been abundant in the San Francisco Bay until the Gold Rush. A small number of prehistoric Olympia oyster shells were found inside shell middens near the estero, i.e. the Olympias, but carbon dating has revealed that those shells varied in age between 1,200 and 2,200 years old—more on that later. These scant shell samples could have come from the estero as living oysters, perhaps during a time when conditions were different, or the shells themselves could have been traded from tribes living further north, where the native oysters were known to be abundant. After all, the Miwoks used seashells as currency, and it isn’t impossible that these were simply foreign mint. Because oysters require hard substrate to attach to, the soft-bottomed estuary was a natural habitat for clams, but an unlikely one for oysters. Even John Stillwell Morgan had been obliged to create most if not all of his oyster beds artificially by destroying the existing tideland habitat in San Francisco Bay with landfill, so he could grow them the way he had seen it done in the rocky-bottomed East. Now, some newer Olympia oyster shells have been found in the estuary. But both the original Drakes Bay Oyster Company of the 1930s and the Johnson Oyster Company experimented with Olympias at one point or another. There are no shells that have been found that are proven to be from the period after as late as 800 AD and before their introduction by European settlers. None of the commercial oyster operations in Drakes Estero ever harvested native oysters, but rather, as previously mentioned, they failed to get eastern oysters to thrive before landing on the hardier Pacifics, and experimented with the smaller, less lucrative Washington Olympias here and there. The newer Olympia shells could easily have come from these more recent efforts. Besides, John Stillwell Morgan, who was well familiar with the coastal character of the Bay Area, had failed to find any native oysters anywhere near San Francisco or Point Reyes—not in Tomales Bay, and likely not in Drakes Estero, either, though he did not deign to mention it.
It was only due to the aggressive marketing attempts of John Stillwell Morgan’s competitors that the idea of an abundant “native California oyster” in the Bay Area had persisted despite its fallacy. Some of this confusion can be blamed on the terminology used at the time on maps of the San Francisco Bay made in the nineteenth century. There are maps that show the beds of the “eastern” oysters versus the “native” oysters. But the “native” oysters were actually the Olympias, shipped down from Washington State, being stored in the bay along with the eastern ones from New York and New Jersey. Morgan’s records confirm this. However, a quick perusal of these maps would easily lead one to believe that native oysters were once plentiful in the Bay Area, while deeper research proves definitively that this was not the case. All of the oysters in the nineteenth-century San Francisco Bay were imported.
Around the country since the mid-1990s, scientists were beginning to experiment with oyster reef restoration. In many areas where oysters were native, the loss of the oyster reef habitat was the harbinger of doom for many a waterway. Since most people who gave a thought to oysters at all were under the (false) impression that oyster reefs had once been a natural part of the San Francisco Bay prior to Morgan’s efforts, it made sense to begin “restoring” those reefs, too. Oyster restoration was becoming trendy. After all, some Olympia stragglers have managed to survive both the many decades since Morgan brought their ancestors down the coast, and the bay’s less-than-ideal conditions. Beginning in 2006, groups like Save the Bay began working on various oyster restoration projects. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) invested $50,000 in an oyster restoration project for the San Francisco Bay, and hired MACTEC Engineering and Consulting, Inc., to implement the project. When still in the planning stages, one of the MACTEC biologists got in touch with Kevin. If they were going to plant oysters in the bay, they would need to “rebuild” oyster reefs using oyster shells for the new, baby Olympia oysters to attach to. As the largest oyster farm in the state, volume-wise, and one of the few local places that offered oysters out-of-shell, Drakes Bay Oyster Company was a natural choice to approach for shells to use as cultch. Kevin quickly got excited about the idea of putting “native” oysters in Drakes Estero, either to sell or just to have growing there. But this idea, too, quickly ran into a snag.
Meanwhile, Sarah Allen, seal counter and beach walker, had come a long way since her days as a Point Reyes Bird Observatory administrator with a bachelor’s degree in conservation. She was less lanky than she had been in the 1980s, but no less earnest. Her thick brown hair had now begun to turn gray and was more likely to be held back in a ponytail than with a bandana. While still working on her research with the observatory, she received her master’s from UC Berkeley, writing her thesis on the movement and activity patterns of Point Reyes harbor seals. The dissertation for her PhD, also from UC Berkeley, was on the distribution and abundance of marine birds and mammals in the Gulf of the Farallones and surrounding waters. For eight out of the ten years between 1990 and 2000 she spent the months of May and June on the NOAA research vessel the David Starr Jordan, conducting seabird and marine mammal surveys. In 1995 she began work as an ecologist with the Point Reyes National Seashore, and two years later was appointed science advisor for the park. Eventually, the word “senior” was added to that title. Active in local community organizations, she could frequently be found leading educational tours of the now thriving elephant seal colony. She loved talking about the marine life of the region as much as ever, and whether she was needed in supplying technical guidance to local environmental efforts, or if they just needed another pair of hands to pick up trash from along the shore—Sarah was there. She sometimes still conducted research away as well, and from 2000 to 2001 she served as a research assistant studying penguins in Antarctica. She was still passionate about preserving the local environment, too. In a video from one of her lectures, she describes her grief at the ecological degradation she had witnessed in her lifetime alone.
“When I was a child—and I’m not that old!—I remember when I was a child in San Geronimo Creek watching thousands of salmon migrating up a narrow stream, a narrow tributary,” she said with emotion. “And to me, it’s stunning that there are so few now. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. And marine mammals are one of those cuts.”
By the time a marine biologist from MACTEC requested permission from the park to use shells from Drakes Bay Oyster Company for oyster “restoration,” Sarah had been walking the beaches of Point Reyes and studying its marine animal life in some official capacity for nearly thirty years. But park staff were disturbed by the new oyster farm owner’s clear efforts to get them to allow DBOC to stay. Sarah called the MACTEC biologist, Robert Abbott, and told him that not only would a “restoration” of oysters in the estuary be impossible, but that he couldn’t even have the oyster farm’s shells. He later did obtain permission to take the shells, but in a phone conference with both Sarah and Don Neubacher that April, they explained to him why the Olympia introduction was not something that the park wanted.
Neubacher said that since the Wilderness Act required the estuary to be given full wilderness status (or “revert” to wilderness, as he put it), he did not want to do anything that might encourage the Lunnys to stay past 2012. According to a government report filed later, he also gave Abbott a “heads up” that Kevin was “not good with money” and was late paying his bills. Further details of this “warning” were not supplied.
The previous spring, the park had sponsored a UC Davis study of eelgrass in the estuary, conducted by grad students but overseen by Dr. Deborah Elliott-Fisk, with help from Sarah. In March of 2005, a draft of the report entitled “Drakes Estero Assessment of Oyster Farming Final Completion Report” was released, though not published. Despite being labeled “final,” it would undergo revisions. In it, the grad students assert that the oyster company caused “no significant or negative impacts” to sedimentation or water quality in the estuary, and that introduced organisms, aka non-native species, were “not definitively found.” It also said that the oyster racks had “no pronounced impacts” on the eelgrass beds, which existed both under and away from the racks and was “an incredibly rich habitat type.” That report was soon revised and published two months later, in May, under the same title and with the same comment about the richness of the eelgrass both under and away from the racks.
The new version, however, did mention invasive species, noting that a non-native species of tunicate or “sea squirt” called Didemnum lahillei was present as “a fouling community,” and had likely been introduced through oyster farming. The report thus concluded that “oyster mariculture has had an impact on the marine fish and invertebrates of Drakes Estero.” Elliott-Fisk later told government investigators that the change was made after speaking with experts about non-native species and realizing how “bad” they were. Although researchers could not definitively attribute the invasive species to the oyster farm, the fact that non-natives existed in the estero was significant enough to document in the revised report, she said. This is true. The tunicates were and are present in the estuary, as a kind of orange, underwater slime mold that clings to the oysters and their racks, and over the years their presence only increased. It has been nicknamed “marine vomit” by environmentalists and it plagues bays from British Columbia to Ireland, never without complaint. Like oysters it requires hard substrate of some kind, and so without the presence of mariculture it would have nothing to cling to.
In early 2006, Kevin received a $10,000 grant from the National Marine Fisheries Service to help fund his “native oyster restoration” of Drakes Estero. But the money was withdrawn when the park would not approve the project.
“This is just a real disappointment,” Kevin told Peter Jamison, a reporter at the Point Reyes Light. He said the proposed research had “no particular financial advantage.”
“We’re not going to harvest these guys. But to learn about them is big. I’m not sure why that’s unacceptable to the park,” he griped.
In his grant proposal, Kevin suggested that “restoring” the native oysters could lead to a permit reprieve: “Increased use of the oyster farm for research, education, and restoration activities may facilitate negotiation with the National Park Service to keep the oyster farm operational beyond 2012,” he wrote in the proposal. But not only did Don not want to encourage Kevin in that vein, park scientists were rightly unconvinced that introducing Olympia oysters would be any kind of restoration at all. Sarah pointed out to the Light that oyster shells were not found in any significant quantity in the park prior to their introduction by European-Americans, and were unlikely to have grown in the estuary.
“Any restoration that we target for Drakes Estero would not have native oysters as a keystone restoration component,” she told the paper.
“I thought the park would be thrilled to have this research going on,” Kevin said.
Then on May 18 the Point Reyes Light published an article claiming that the Drakes Bay Oyster Company had been scientifically proven to have little impact on the estuary. It was based on the unrevised March version of the Elliott-Fisk report, which the paper’s energetic new editor had obtained. Sarah was annoyed.
“Check out the article,” she wrote in an email to Deborah Elliott-Fisk. “As is usual, I am misquoted and the article is heavily slanted pro oyster. I stated to them that when your study occurred that the oyster farming was at its lowest level in 30 years, talked about other invasive species introduced by oyster farming, and about the major source for sediment being from oyster feces based on a [U.S. Geological Survey] study, but he chose not to include that information.” The USGS study she was referring to was the one conducted by Roberto Anima, when he had helped her net harbor seals for tracking in the 1980s while studying pollutants and eelgrass in the estuary.
The park was already starting to have problems with the advocates of the non-native deer, and knew they needed to take corrective public relations action. Thus, Sarah was instructed to begin work on a report to support the government’s decision to close the oyster farm down. Kevin, his family and supporters, on the other hand, were already in love with the operation and would continue their efforts to stay. All three Lunny children were involved in oyster farming now. That June they graduated from high school—one step closer to carrying on the agricultural tradition begun by their great-grandfather in 1947 when he quit the timber industry.
In July, Don Neubacher went on the local radio station and announced that Sarah was working on a report to counter the assertions made in the Point Reyes Light. He said it would list “long-term, serious impacts” caused by oyster farming, and opined that having a commercial operation inside “pristine” wilderness was “just intuitively negative.” Sarah also spoke, focusing on the fact that the invasive tunicate could change fish diversity and abundance. As usual, her attentions were on science, not policy.
Sarah spent the summer working on the report, and in it there is evidence of her deep love for the place itself. It describes its flora and fauna, the pickleweed, arrowgrass and saltgrass, and the abundance of birds—ten thousand to one hundred thousand of which are present in the estuary at any given time—including Osprey, White and Brown Pelicans, Peregrine Falcons and the Western Snowy Plover. Other species occurring in large numbers, she wrote, were the Caspian Tern, the Ruddy Duck, the Bufflehead, and the Least Sandpiper. It was one of the few places that black Brant geese overwinter. Harbor seals, sea lions and elephant seals were present as well. Although live whales did not venture past the estuary’s mouth, several dead ones had washed in and decomposed, including an adult male sperm whale. The report also explained the wilderness designation, the park’s version of the situation with the oyster farm, and included two main negative impacts. It said that oyster feces—and yes, oysters do have feces or “pseudofeces” as they are called, since some of the substance is in fact regurgitated and not digested—were a primary source of sedimentation in the estero. The report also stated that the activity of oyster workers scared away seals, and that one sub-colony, on a particular sandbar, had produced 80 percent fewer pups one year, likely due to the activity of oyster workers. The report also pointed out the dire nature of ocean conservation in general, and said that all fish species worldwide were expected to collapse within the next fifty years if current trends persisted.
That fall, when seeking input on the report from fellow biologists, Sarah misquoted Roberto Anima’s study. According to a government report, a colleague said she had misunderstood or misinterpreted Anima’s eelgrass work.
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Sarah purportedly told him once he discovered her mistake the following spring, but she did not change the language in the report that autumn. On October 23 2006, a draft of the report was made available in hard copy at park headquarters, and Don gave a copy to the chair of the local Sierra Club group, a man by the name of Gordon Bennett, the founder of a prominent natural foods company, Westbrae Natural. The report was called “Drakes Estero: A Sheltered Wilderness Estuary.” It was seven pages long, included photos, and was more like an extended informational brochure than a scientific paper, intended for public consumption. A few days later, Gordon took it upon himself to distribute copies of the text, on site at Drakes Bay Oyster Company, to attendees of an agricultural tour being given by the Main Agricultural Land Trust. Naturally, all hell broke loose in the pro-oyster farm faction.
On December 4, Sarah wrote to an NPS fisheries biologist by the name of John Wullschleger, asking for his advice:
I have been in a dilemma about the Drakes Estero report. We were going to have it revised because there were recommendations in the final draft that we were concerned about but the report was released to the oyster farmer and a few others (in error) before it was completed and peer-reviewed. [ . . . ] We could submit the report as is if you feel alright with that. I also believe that it would be politically difficult to revise it now since it is out already. The oyster operator has been misusing some of the information out of the report to support his position. We have produced a follw [sic] up document summarizing the negative effects of the oyster operation (I attach for your reference). . . .
Wullschleger would later tell government investigators that he was “concerned” about Elliott-Fisk’s study, and what Sarah was doing with it. He suggested that perhaps Point Reyes National Seashore was “aiming to find out a little too much in a relatively short period of time with a small amount of money.”
IN FEBRUARY OF 2007, NPS uploaded the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report to its website under the section on “Park News,” and on April 1st the media battle over the oyster farm began in earnest with an article called “Ollie ’Erster vs. Smokey the Bear.”
“I had wanted to interview [Kevin Lunny] for quite a while, ever since I heard he had purchased the place from Johnson’s with a warning that the Park Service wanted to close off aquaculture in the Bay by 2012,” wrote Jeanette Pontacq in the local Coastal Post. She went on to say that the Johnsons had left several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of environmental mess to clean up, and that the Lunnys’ decision to buy the place was an “early present” for the park. She said that the Lunnys had not signed any statement promising to decamp in 2012, but failed to mention that they had been repeatedly presented with just such a document but refused to sign it.
A few days after the article came out, county supervisor Steve Kinsey met with Neubacher at park headquarters. Lunny later said Kinsey warned him that Neubacher was “crazed” and that he was “going to war” against the oyster farm, wanting it out even before 2012. Speaking to government investigators, Kinsey confirmed that he and his aide met with Neubacher but “could not recall” whether he told Lunny that Neubacher was “crazed.” (The term most frequently used to describe the place where Don had assembled information on the oyster farm was “the war room.”) However, Kinsey did feel it was accurate to say that Neubacher was “very upset” and “seemed obsessed” with proving the oyster farm was harming seals and eelgrass. According to Kinsey, Neubacher made “strong environmental accusations” against Kevin and made reference to “environmental felonies.” Again, as oyster farm advocate Corey Goodman likes to stress, that would mean jail time for Kevin. Kinsey’s aide, Liza Crosse, on the other hand, recalled that Neubacher was “entirely courteous” during the meeting, but was surprised by his “vehemence” about Kevin’s supposed disregard for the environment. Kinsey confirmed that he told Kevin that Neubacher intended to shut DBOC down. Although Kinsey did not specifically remember the exact words spoken, he said the “tenor” of the meeting left no doubt in his mind that Neubacher intended to shut DBOC down prior to 2012. (Neubacher later conceded that he told Kinsey about some criminal violations he believed had occurred related to the family’s lease on G Ranch, not the oyster farm.)
A few weeks later, Kinsey called and got Corey Goodman involved. Before that, in mid-April, Sarah and her colleagues began more closely documenting disturbances by the oyster workers in the estero. On April 13 she wrote that she observed an “oyster operator” who was “clearly disturbing and displacing seals.” On April 23 she made another entry, noting that oyster bags had been placed on seal haul-out sites, and that oyster farm workers were disturbing seals. She also wrote about the presence of a white boat with two people in it, poling through an eelgrass bed. When the boat went by a group of seals, all but one of the animals flushed into the water. She wrote that the boat landed and two men then “got off the boat, one taller in a green slicker and another in yellow slicker pants.” Both reports note the specific start and stop times of each phase of the “disturbances.”
A few days prior to the latter trip report, Kevin Lunny wrote to the United States government and requested that the Department of the Interior do an investigation into the actions of Point Reyes National Seashore. He also hired a D.C. lobbyist named Dave Weiman, who ran an operation called Agricultural Resources. (When I asked Dave years later if he was paid to advocate on behalf of the Lunnys, he demurred at first. When pressed, he admitted that yes, he was, but it was “not very much and not very often.”)
IN MAY, THE County Board of Supervisors held a hearing on the oyster company issue. Normally Fred would have attended, having started his tenure at EAC that January, but the business with the fallow and axis deer and other local issues kept him away. The purpose of the meeting was to consider the adoption of a draft letter to federally elected representatives from the board, supporting the continued operation of the oyster farm. Essentially, Kinsey sought unanimous support from the board to write a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, asking her to step in. Sarah gave a presentation.
“My name is Sarah Allen, and I’m a scientist with the National Park Service,” she began. “And, more specifically, I’ve been studying the ecology of Drakes Estero for almost thirty years. I completed my master’s thesis on the harbor seals in Drakes Estero, so I have some familiarity with that population.” This was an understatement, as there was likely no one else in the world more familiar with the Point Reyes harbor seals of the last thirty years than Sarah. Later during the presentation, she stated, “The damage of the commercial oyster operations on Drakes Estero is more easily documented, because the park service has over twenty-five years of continuous monitoring data from Drakes Estero.” However, Sarah collected the majority of that seal data while at UC Berkeley or with the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, so it was technically not the park’s data. It was only the park’s “data” in that the data was Sarah’s, and she worked for the park.
Then it was Corey Goodman’s turn. He immediately began poking holes in the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report, and correctly raised the issue that Sarah had misstated Anima’s work. She responded that this was her first realization of this, and when she later reviewed Anima’s studies, she realized she had “blundered.” She told government investigators later that she “felt like she let Neubacher down by her mistake.” Neubacher claimed that this was the first he had heard of any problems with the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report, when Goodman quoted Anima’s work. Neubacher later said he “honestly didn’t think it was a big deal” that the report indicated that oyster feces was the primary source of sedimentation, but nevertheless agreed to fix it.
Later, Sarah said she was “devastated” by the error.
“It was just an honest mistake on her part,” Don said in her defense.
That May, Sarah oversaw the installment of several wildlife observation cameras in the estuary. The projects were run by grad students of UC San Francisco biologist Ellen Hines, and they were trained on areas where oyster workers might disturb harbor seals. The oyster farm and members of the public were not notified about the placement of the cameras.
ON THE 15TH of that month, a week after the humiliating meeting, Sarah finally spoke directly with her old colleague Roberto Anima. She telephoned and asked him to read the two relevant local newspaper articles in which his work was referenced. He was not only “not happy,” as he told her at the time, but he later said he was “ticked off” by Sarah’s portrayal of his research, and did not feel she offered a good justification for inaccurately referencing his work.
But hadn’t he voiced concern about oysters contributing to sediment in a portion of Drakes Estero? She wanted to know. According to Anima, on the phone Sarah tried to justify her actions by telling him about the oyster company feud. He said he just wished she’d let him review the work before she published it with his name on it.
“I know, Roberto,” she replied. “This is getting ugly.”
Anima conceded that Sarah could quote him as saying that the oyster operation played an “important” role in sedimentation, but not a “major” one. He also sent her an email.
Hi Sarah. After reading the Kinsey-Goodman Testimony and the statements made in the Pt. Reyes Light, and the Coastal Post, I really can’t support the statements made that: ‘Research has identified oyster feces as the primary source of sediment in the Estero, and this sediment smother [sic] native species.’ or ‘Furthermore oyster feces add sediment to the eelgrass beds of the Estero. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey identified the feces of oysters—as much as a metric ton per 60 meter square oyster raft—as the primary source of sedimentation, which degrades eelgrass habitat and its ability to support abundant marine life.’ After re-reading my thesis I do suggest that the quiet water environment of the upper parts of the estero could allow for the deposition of silt-sized material in the form of feces and pseudofeces produced by oysters. And that once deposited the material is resistant to erosion. I end by stating that more research is needed to ascertain what amount of silt-sized material is being produced by oysters in the lagoon. I did not directly study the amounts or the areal extent of the deposition of feces in the estero. The statements made in the thesis were based on observations and literature sited to support the observations. No hard evidence of the effects of oysters on fine sediment accumulation were made. I wish I could have been more help. —Roberto
At some point in the next two months, this email was deleted from Sarah’s computer. Her response, which began “many thanks for your quick reply,” was not deleted, however, and would later be referred to by Corey as “the smoking gun.”
This was the summer right before the exotic deer extermination, and park staff were busy. Still, they had even more work on their hands when Corey Goodman submitted his first Freedom of Information Act request, asking for all of the seal data that Sarah had mentioned at the hearing, and a number of other documents. He requested harbor seal monitoring data pertaining to Drakes Estero from 1973 through the “day you provide the data” in 2007. It was clear already that Corey wanted to get to the bottom of all this. He was hooked.
In May the park uploaded a revised version of the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report, with Anima’s requested corrections. But then Senator Dianne Feinstein got involved. After being contacted by the Marin County Board of Supervisors, she called a private meeting at the Olema Inn with Corey, senior park staff (but not Sarah), and the Lunnys. Afterwards, and at her request, the “Sheltered Wilderness Estuary” report was removed from the park website altogether and replaced with a notice saying “acknowledgment of errors.” In August, with the whirr of White Buffalo Inc.’s extermination helicopters in the air, the investigation set in motion by Kevin back in April began.
Sarah’s office was searched by federal investigators from the Inspector General’s office. In a file marked “communications” they found the deleted email from Anima, which the park had failed to give to Corey in his FOIA earlier that summer. Investigators then began interviewing some seventy individuals from the park service, scientists and members of the community. They interviewed Fred. It seemed like they were interviewing everybody. Things were starting to get ugly, indeed. This continued through the fall. It wasn’t the first time that Feinstein had gotten involved in agricultural issues in Point Reyes. One rancher, who was a proud Republican and active in politics as pertained to his family business, told me that he got on so well with Feinstein, Senator Barbara Boxer and Representative Lynn Woolsey that he jokingly referred to them as his “Democratic girlfriends.” But Senator Feinstein not only got involved with the Drakes Bay Oyster issue, she even went to meet with the Lunnys in person at their home. Still, even with her guidance, the Lunnys and the park could not reach an agreement on the oyster farm permit. The park wouldn’t allow a permit that didn’t explicitly mention the solicitor’s decision to return the acreage to wilderness after 2012, and Kevin wouldn’t sign anything that included it.
In January of 2008, Kevin wrote a letter to Jonathan Jarvis, then-director of NPS’s Pacific West Region.
“Something is terribly wrong,” he wrote. “Instead of resolving our differences, you are working overtime to make them worse. For that, our hearts are heavy. We are being treated unjustly. Our family is intimidated and fearful for our future and our financial survival.”
“Kevin,” Jarvis replied. “You have stated many times that you would like to go back to a former time, when the relations with the NPS were cordial. I agree. Unfortunately, this issue now involves attorneys, reporters, DC lobbyists, environmental and agricultural constituency groups, elected officials, scientists, investigators, state regulators and now the highest scientific body in the United States.”
He urged Kevin that the best way to bring the relationship back around would be to negotiate in good faith.
“We have attached a permit that meets all the points we discussed with the Senator and it is my hope you will sign it,” Jarvis wrote. “With your signature, we can move this back to an on-going operation and collaborative relationship.”
With advice from Senator Dianne Feinstein, Kevin Lunny decided to sign.