The Debate Over the Uses of Public Land Is an Environmentalist Monologue

"Trump unleashed all the bloodthirsty rednecks"

Cattle ranching started on Point Reyes in the 1830s. Just short of 200 years later, the National Park Service is preparing to end most ranching at Point Reyes National Seashore, following the settlement of a lawsuit filed by environmental groups.

A while back, one of my FOIA requests turned up a set of email messages in which NPS managers who appeared to have been forced into ending ranching on Point Reyes by litigation from outsiders actually celebrated the outcome and treated it as an institutional victory. A lawsuit against the NPS produced a result that the NPS wanted: Hooray, we’ve been defeated.

Last week I got my second batch of documents about Point Reyes from my other FOIA request, the one I filed with the Department of the Interior — the parent agency of the NPS. These documents show who was talking to Biden-era Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland as park service managers wrote a new management plan for the national seashore that proposed the continuation of ranching, before the lawsuit was filed. It’ll be tough, but try to guess what percentage of messages to Haaland were pro-ranching. Here’s the whole fairly short package of documents as a PDF file, if you want to wade through it:

Doi Foia Point Reyes

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The opening salvo, a June 30, 2021 letter to Haaland warning about “a groundswell of opposition to the plan from environmentalists, members of the local tribe, wildlife biologists, and a broad spectrum of the public,” appeared to be from…pretty much everybody on the planet:

Next page:

See, a veritable juggernaut of public interest groups. Opposing this list of major players would be like opposing the force of nature itself. If you actually start trying to figure out what some of those groups are, though, the results quickly become somewhat less impressive.

And yes, that’s the most recent financial reporting I could find for that group which included any actual numbers. They’ve been filing the abbreviated Form 990 postcard with the IRS since then.

The signatory Miyoko’s Butter makes vegan cheese, in addition to “plant butter,” so it’s hard to know how to weight their opinion on the use of public lands.

Still, there are some major players on that list, including the Sierra Club and the private corporation Patagonia, which sometimes appears to sell outdoor products as a sideline for their activism. So the first time the Secretary of the Interior heard about ranching at Point Reyes, she heard that every group under the sun absolutely hated it.

There are national, statewide, and local pro-ranching organizations that could have sent word to Haaland, but if your guess was that they don’t show up in the record, award yourself a blue ribbon.

A modest campaign of handwritten letters followed, and take a moment to really dig the vibe, here:

This one-sided storytelling is old, old, old news. Before the cattle ranches were thrown out of Point Reyes, the National Park Service ejected a small and quite pleasant oyster farm from the same national seashore. Again, the public was supposedly united in opposition to the operation, but with an interesting detail about the outpouring of public sentiment. This is from Laura Alice Watt’s book The Paradox of Preservation:

Over and over and over again, only one side takes the field in debates over the uses of public land. Environmental activist groups are extremely good at manipulating the public record, and then at using the manipulated public record to push for a desired outcome. Pro-agriculture groups are much less successful at just getting their message into the record.

Elsewhere, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat recently added to our understanding of the stakes as environmental groups maneuver for control of public lands:

As I noted earlier this month, the Nature Conservancy — which brokered the settlement deal to end the litigation over ranching at Point Reyes — just received a $2.7 million grant from the California Wildlife Conservation Board to manage the post-ranching future of Point Reyes. But that grant is only one piece of their total state government funding for that purpose, and the Press Democrat found the rest. The Nature Conservancy will bring in a lot of money from the State of California to stay on the ground at Point Reyes and manage abandoned ranchland for the federal government.

Draw your own conclusion. But mine is that activism is a business, played against minimal competition. And business is good.