Below is an excerpt from a New York Times Story on Drakes Bay.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ended a longstanding and bitter dispute that pitted wilderness advocates against supporters of a Northern California oyster farm, announcing that the farm’s lease from Point Reyes National Seashore would end in late November as originally planned. An estuary known as Drakes Estero, where the oyster operation has existed for the last 40 years, will become a federally designated wilderness area.
Map of Marin County North of San Francisco shows Drakes Bay |
In a statement, Mr. Salazar said, “We are taking the final step to recognize this pristine area as wilderness.” The Interior Department has given the farm 90 days to fold. More than a decade after the park was created on Point Reyes in 1962,
Congress mandated that part of it be designated as wilderness; the
section included Drakes Estero, a 2,500-acre rich marine estuary that is
home to scores of seals. The oyster farm is the source of roughly 40
percent of California’s oysters and is part of a local food web that
makes the surrounding Marin County area a mecca for locavores.
In 2004, the oyster farm changed hands, and the lease was taken over by
the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which is run by a local rancher, Kevin
Lunny. Mr. Lunny was notified that the lease was set to end this year, but
indicated about six years ago that he hoped to have it extended. In the ensuing years, park service scientists questioned the farm’s
environmental record, and were in turn accused of skewing the science to
paint Mr. Lunny as a despoiler of the ecosystem.
In an interview Thursday, Mr. Lunny said: “We’re trying to get over the
devastation, the surprise and the disappointment. To have to deliver
this message to our staff is beyond imaginable. To have to tell them
they’re going to lose their jobs and their homes.” He said about 15 of
the 30 oyster farm workers lived on the site with their families. The department indicated it would do what it could “to help employees
who might be affected by this decision” but there is no provision for
any payment to Mr. Lunny.
Illustrating the point that there usually are two sides to every issue, three environmental groups — the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife
Federation and the National Parks Conservation Association — immediately
praised the decision. In an interview, Neal Desai, a West Coast
representative of the Washington-based Conservation Association, said,
“This is a very big gift the secretary has given the public.”
While the policy issue was always whether to extend the lease, the
parallel debate over park service science moved to the forefront in
recent years. The park service had to backpedal on some of its original claims about
environmental damage, and its subsequent scientific efforts were
scrutinized by outside scientists who identified significant
shortcomings. Repeated investigations confirmed many of these
shortcomings, but never found that park scientists had engaged in
outright scientific misconduct. The memorandum supporting the secretary’s decision played down the
scientific issues, saying that the environmental impact statements that
reviewed the science and recommended ending the lease had been helpful,
but in no way indicating they were central to the decision.