Documents: The National Park Service Really Doesn't Seem to Have Minded the Point Reyes Settlement

The public posture doesn’t match the internal discussion.

Discussing the recent litigation over the 170-year presence of cattle ranches on Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS), ranchers have expressed a suspicion that the National Park Service welcomed the lawsuit filed against the agency by environmental activists who wanted to end ranching on that public land — because they shared a desire to get rid of the ranches. In this best-guess version of the behind the scenes reality, activists sued the federal government to “force” government officials to do the things that those officials already wanted to do, overcoming political realities and prior agreements that prevented them from adopting their preferred course.

For their part, Park Service officials have publicly postured as impartial actors, disinterested observers to the outcome of negotiations between activist groups and the ranchers who joined the lawsuit as “intervenor defendants.” In a local town hall discussion after the settlement to end most ranching on Point Reyes was signed, a carefully neutral PRNS Superintendent Anne Altman said that her agency had signed onto the settlement “to basically be able to move on.” The ranchers and the environmental groups negotiated the outcome, and the National Park Service passively accepted a decision that was made under a different roof.

Both the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior — which oversees the Park Service — have declined my requests for interviews with officials regarding the Point Reyes settlement, and have offered no opinion on the matter. They’re just, you know, standing around watching, and they’ll work with whatever outcome happens to fall out of the sky.

In a January 3, 2025 briefing document for members of Congress, the National Park Service made its bystander status explicit: There were discussions between ranchers and the Nature Conservancy that led to a settlement agreement which would remove the Point Reyes ranches, but “the NPS played no role in these arms-length, private transactions.”

This afternoon, though, the National Park Service sent me a series of email messages in response to a request I filed under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. You can evaluate these yourself to see if you think the National Park Service and its parent agency took a neutral view of the agreement to close down most of the cattle ranches on Point Reyes National Seashore:

The settlement agreement was signed by all parties on January 8, and passed around to Interior and NPS officials on January 9. They regarded an agreement to remove ranches, an outcome that environmental groups sued the NPS to accomplish, as a “big win for NPS.”

The NPS victory is that the NPS signed an agreement to do what it was forced to do.

To interpret the “Woooohooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!” and the “big win” as mere relief that the lawsuit was over, without an interest in the specifics of that outcome, you have to overlook the rest of the sentence: Removing ranches is a big win for conservation. Federal land agencies were sued by environmental activists to force them to remove ranches from Point Reyes National Seashore, and then officials at the federal land agencies celebrated the outcome of the lawsuit — the removal of ranches — as an environmental victory that they shared. They were forced by hostile action to do what they regarded as the winning move.

Response from the then-Director of the National Park Service, Charles Sams:

Response from Barbara Goodyear, a former Department of the Interior lawyer who pitched in as a management consultant to the National Park Service during the litigation:

The National Park Service seems to have gotten exactly what it wanted from a lawsuit filed against the National Park Service.