Squinting Through the Fog at the Future of Point Reyes National Seashore

I’m home this morning from a trip to Point Reyes, during which I mostly walked laps and tried to talk to people who became or remained unavailable.

Tomales Point, at the northern end of Point Reyes National Seashore, with a long-closed historic ranch that now has historical exhibits and NPS staff housing

My conclusion at this point is that there are some significant mysteries that aren’t going to crack open in the near future, starting with the early-January decision by Point Reyes ranchers to agree to a settlement — right before a significant change in the political winds regarding agriculture and public lands. The terms of the settlement, and the substance of the mediation that led up to it, have been successfully hidden by a nondisclosure agreement, and the ranchers won’t discuss the conversations they had between themselves that led to the decision to settle.

So the bottom line for now is this: Twelve of the fourteen ranchers at Point Reyes National Seashore have signed a settlement agreement that obligates them to leave the seashore by 2026, and that’s going to happen. They’re leaving.

However.

The battle over the future of Point Reyes is far from over, and it’s not getting simpler. Let’s cover some developments, one by one:

First:

What does the federal government think?

In January, as I’ve written before, the National Park Service adopted a revised Record of Decision regarding its park management plan that reflects the changes on the landscape implied by the settlement of the lawsuit. I thought the new planning document didn’t make much sense, so I’ve spent weeks trying to get the NPS to discuss it. I started by sending email messages to the superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore, Anne Altman, but her entirely predictable response was to direct me to discuss my questions with a public affairs officer.

I did that for a while, by email, hoping for a chance to have a face-to-face discussion with a living human. I noted, for example, that the new record of decision says that cattle grazing is harmful to the landscape and has to be ended, but cattle grazing will be needed for the management of brush and the reduction of wildfire risk, so the park service will rent cattle to graze the land after it removes cattle from the land. So here’s an example of a question I asked the NPS: How do you explain the replacement of cows by cows? What’s the logic?

Final answer, delivered in late February by NPS Public Affairs Officer Earl Perez-Foust: “Thank you for the patience and apologies for the delay. Unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate your interview request and respectfully decline.”

And that’s it. The National Park Service would prefer not to. I stood just outside the NPS administrative offices at Point Reyes this week, watching deer eat the grass, but I might as well have been on the moon.

Similarly, I spent a week in February laying siege to new Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, asking him questions through email messages to his office, repeated posts on I-still-call-it-Twitter, and — long story how — a text message to his personal cellphone number. The only answer I ever got was also the final answer, delivered by Senior Public Affairs Officer J. Elizabeth Peace of the Department of the Interior: “The current operating plan resulted from a settlement resolving a lawsuit with the General Management Plan Amendment. The Department does not have anything further to add at this time.”

So the federal government has nothing to say about any of the developments at Point Reyes, at any level.

But the National Park Service has spoken, in a sense, and its answer is written on the landscape. In December, ahead of the settlement that will force ranchers to leave, the park service did this:

That’s the fenceline at the southern edge of the Tomales Point elk reserve. The fence kept the elk on the reserve from getting onto ranches, which can end with bull elk attacking cows. The park service cut down a long stretch of the fence; in the picture above (which you can click to enlarge), you can see the little circles in the gap where fenceposts were cut to stumps. A court order stopped the NPS from fully removing the fence, but the court didn’t require the park service to rebuild the portions of the fence that were already destroyed. When I walked the fenceline this week, the elk reserve was to my north, and I saw elk to my south. Ranching is already substantially impaired by a new physical reality, well ahead of the legal resolution: The elk are in the pastoral zone, throughout the seashore, and the federal government decided to allow them to move there. Through the official silence, that’s the real answer.

Second:

What does the community think?

West Marin is an outpost of Bay Area affluence, and therefore an activist community, much inclined to engaging in protest marches and political display. People there have many thoughts about Palestine, Ukraine, climate change, and Mean Orange Fascism.

Playground sticker, Point Reyes Station

Sample story in the local newspaper:

But I began to notice an absence in the middle of all the proud political display: In a town that still has fading “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs from a fight over public land more than a decade in the past, the community is quite noticeably not leaping to the defense of the ranches. As my planned interviews mostly fell apart, this week, I wandered the town of Point Reyes Station and tried to strike up random discussions. In a business, the owner responded to a question about the ranches with the answer that yes, people are very worried, because those ranch workers are immigrants, and now Trump is going to send ICE after them. So:

Q: What do you think of the ranches being forced off the seashore?

A: Oh, yes, Trump is very racist!

The local political activism strikes me as being deeply channeled into existing forms of fashion and sentiment, with little hope of a hard pivot to a practical fight with the National Park Service. I talked to the longtime Point Reyes rancher Kevin Lunny this week — in a bar where every single person who walked through the door said, “Hey, Kevin” — and he suggested that the appearance of local apathy is being driven by the degree to which a secret settlement led to an announcement of a done deal. He’s hoping for a future shift in which the community might start to stand up for ranching on the seashore. But it’s not there yet.

Third:

What do the remaining ranchers think the future might look like? This one is interesting.

New lawsuits are blossoming at Point Reyes. In one, ranch workers who live on the Point Reyes ranches argue that they’re low-wage residents being deprived of affordable housing by a legal settlement, and by government planners, in processes they weren’t allowed to join — essentially making them homeless in an expensive housing market. The environmental groups that filed the original lawsuit against ranching say they’re working to provide transitional support for the ranch workers, and I suspect this lawsuit will result in payments rather than a reversal of the decision to remove ranches.

The other lawsuit has been filed by Point Reyes ranchers who aren’t leaving, Bill and Nicolette Niman, who argue that the NPS has violated federal law by agreeing to the removal of ranches without proper administrative process. The Nimans also argue that the planned transition to a free-ranging elk landscape across the whole seashore also makes ranching untenable, regardless of the new lease terms they’ve been offered.

You can read that complaint here:

Niman Complaint

511KB ∙ PDF file

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Some news stories have said that two of the fourteen ranches on Point Reyes are staying on the seashore because the conditions of the settlement allowed them to stay. That’s not it. Twelve of the fourteen ranchers intervened in the original lawsuit and became third party “intervenor defendants,” parties to the action. Those twelve ranchers are parties to the settlement because they were parties to the lawsuit; the other two ranches weren’t involved in the litigation, and so couldn’t have been covered by the settlement. One is the Niman ranch. They’ll be allowed to stay, with new leases that give them twenty more years on the seashore — but under new terms that the Nimans describe as onerous.

The complaint filed by the Nimans in federal court is the first hint of a remote possibility that I heard discussed in West Marin this week:

Congress authorized the Secretary of Interior to lease the Seashore first to the ranchers who were there when the Seashore was created, including the Departing Ranchers, but also authorized the Secretary of Interior to lease the Seashore to others should those ranchers opt out. 16 U.S.C. § 459c- 5(a). The Departing Ranchers have now opted out. The Secretary of Interior is now authorized by statute to lease those lands to others (which could include Plaintiffs, who would be interested in leasing at least some of those lands). But NPS did not consider the reasonable—and Congressionally authorized—alternative of leasing those lands to others, in the 2020 EIS, the 2025 ROD, or anywhere else.

So the argument is that twelve ranchers have agreed to leave the seashore, but the NPS doesn’t have to transition to a post-ranching future on the land occupied by those ranches — which the park service could just lease to new ranchers. This is an argument to keep an eye on, and one that environmental groups will resist.

So. What does the future look like at Point Reyes?

I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The silence of the new administration is striking, Burgum is a ghost, and the NPS seems determined in the absence of political intervention to aggressively transition to a post-ranching future at Point Reyes, even with two ranches formally being permitted to stay. Some litigation is settled, some ranchers are leaving, and some litigation continues.

In a panel discussion on a college campus this week, which I’ll say much more about when video becomes available (soon!), one of the plaintiffs suggested that elk should be allowed to spread beyond the limits of Point Reyes National Seashore, which would suggest that ranching on the adjacent Golden Gate National Recreation Area could be challenged in the future. He also suggested that a real and full rewilding of Point Reyes might allow for the return of wolves to West Marin, so that the wild elk population could be balanced by serious predation. The difference in vision between the local agricultural community and the environmental groups couldn’t be bigger, and both the community and the federal government are so far mostly missing in that debate. While humans puzzle out what comes next, here’s some footage of new neighbors that I took at Point Reyes this week: