For years everyone involved in the West Marin scene denied there was any desire to eject or limit cattle ranching within the boundaries of the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Marinites were assured by those successfully fighting to shut the Lunny family’s oyster farm that the effort wasn’t a preliminary step toward closing the peninsula’s historic cattle and dairy ranches.
That fiction has now evaporated.
A lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by a trio of environmental groups — the Resource Renewal Institute, Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project — whose object is to end or greatly restrict cattle grazing in the park.
It’s another step by a faction of the green movement that’s long been frustrated by any private use within the park. Their dream, exemplified by the oyster farm fight, is for Point Reyes to be wilderness.
It’s a form of utopianism that has much appeal to a segment of the green community that hails mostly from East Marin, San Francisco and urban America. What for some is the ideal, for others — longtime ranching families and the Hispanic community that’s thrived working in agriculture and ranching — is a potential disaster.
The impetus for the suit is the U.S. Department of the Interior’s updated Ranch Management Plan which should be unveiled this fall.
After the Lunnys lost their lease, senior Interior Department officials made it clear that they did not intend to evict the cows and steers.
The National Park Service’s accommodation to the ranching status quo led Chance Cutrano of Mill Valley-based Resource Renewal Institute to say, “What’s really needed is a plan for the ranches to fit into the park, not how the park fits into the ranches.” One goal of the litigation is to force their former Interior Department allies into conducting a full environmental impact statement highlighting the long-term implications of all park uses.
Ranching critics wrongly relegate to history’s dustbin the impetus behind the late Rep. Clem Miller’s 1962 legislation creating the Point Reyes National Seashore. The goal was protecting the peninsula’s ranches from real estate speculators.
That vision galvanized those who valued the sustainable agriculture tradition preserved by Point Reyes’ true guardians, the old ranching families, to support the seashore’s formation.
The tactics of green activists, whose goal is a West Marin version of wilderness, have wide implications. Their efforts to cripple the ranchers’ economic foundation by cutting the size of herds, allowing invasive elk to ravage the cattles’ forage and removing fencing is heard around America.
It exemplifies why there’s much opposition to the acquisition of additional land for national parks.
The ripple effect is seen in opposition by longtime backwoods locals to the proposed Maine Woods National Park. The pledge is that the Maine park will be a high-use facility providing desperately needed tourism jobs. Mainers’ justifiable fear is that those environmentalists who pine for an Allagash wilderness will, as in Point Reyes, ultimately sue with the goal of ejecting private-sector “inholdings.”
While courts are poor forums to resolve public policy disputes, that increasingly common trend won’t discourage advocates on either side of the Point Reyes divide from getting passionately involved.
Fights over seashore-located ranches will inevitably result in hard feelings and divided friendships within the environmental movement. The positive side is that it provides opportunities for East Marinites who value ranching as a last bastion of old Marin to vociferously support Point Reyes’ beleaguered agriculture community.
The dispute will make the bitter Oyster War resemble a kindergarten skirmish. The ranchers versus the wilderness advocates will play out as the 21st century’s battle for West Marin’s soul.
Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley writes about local politics on Sundays and Wednesdays in the IJ. Email him at spotswood@comcast.net.
