Tag: national parks

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Habitats, Land Use, WildlifeTags , , ,

Point Reyes Seashore is one step closer to national dairy farm

Joe Sweeney, THE CALIFORNIA AGGIE

The Park Service’s proposed management plan of the Point Reyes Seashore prioritizes agriculture over wildlife in a national park

In Marin County, ranching is more than just a nine to five for many residents, but a way of life. Roughly half the land in Marin County is designated for farming or ranchland. Ranching has existed in the Marin for years, going back to the first settlers’ arrival in the area. Nestled within this agricultural landscape are a few conservation gems like Mt. Tamalpais, Muir Woods and most of all the iconic Point Reyes National Seashore. Keeping this lengthy history in mind, agriculture has outstayed its welcome in the Seashore. The Point Reyes peninsula was just narrowly saved from development and remains a slice of wilderness in the rapidly changing landscape of California. There are thousands of acres of farmland across the Golden State, but only one National Seashore on the entire West Coast.

Point Reyes is so unique in fact, it is designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as an international biosphere preserve—home to hundreds of species which are endangered and only found in the peninsula. Despite this status, roughly a third of the park’s land is designated for agricultural use. This prevents visitors from using a large portion of the park and contributes to growing concerns about the environmental impact of ranching on the Seashore’s ecosystems. To truly understand this complex issue, we have to understand its history.

The modern history of Point Reyes has been characterized by compromise. When the park was founded in the ‘60s, it was not without controversy. Initially both sides, parts of the federal government and the ranching community, were vehemently against the Seashore’s establishment, but the Ranchers’ tune quickly changed realizing that federal subsidies would help keep the industry afloat.

Additional concerns were raised by members of Congress about leasing the park land as a national park, which would be a first. When the park was established, there was no mention of permanently establishing ranching in the 1962 legislation. Although later amendments added the possibility of extending leases, the intention that ranches be phased out is present from the very beginning of the Seashore. The original agreement was that the ranchers were allowed to reserve a right to use the land for 25 years or the life of the original owner. As that period came to an end, ranches were still there and coming up with any reason to stay.

“I know the people who put [The Point Reyes Act] together. At the 40th anniversary I talked to Stewart Udall, the Secretary of Interior. He remembered the same thing I did, that ranching was never intended to be permanent,” said Ken Brower, an environmental writer and son of David Brower. “The founder’s idea had nothing to do with what you’re hearing now from ranchers, that they’d be here forever.”

You may often hear that the Seashore ranches are “historic” and must be preserved on that basis for future generations. This is blatant propaganda. If these ranches truly had historic value, this “historic” status would logically also be applied to the oyster farms, which had been in business for nearly a hundred years before being shut down by the park service due to a variety of reasons.
Continue reading “Point Reyes Seashore is one step closer to national dairy farm”

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, Water, WildlifeTags , , , , , , ,

Apocalypse cow: The future of life at Point Reyes National Park

Peter Byrne, THE BOHEMIAN

The North Bay community is divided by conflicted views on whether commercial dairy and cattle ranching should continue at Point Reyes National Seashore. This reporter has hiked the varied terrains of the 71,000-acre park for decades. Initially, I had no opinion on the ranching issue. Then, I studied historical and eco-biologic books and science journals. I read government records, including the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on Point Reyes released by the National Park Service in September. The 250-page report concludes that the ranching industry covering one third of the park should be expanded and protected for economic and cultural reasons. This, despite acknowledging that the park ranches are sources of climate-heating greenhouse gases, water pollution, species extinctions and soil degradation.

The Bohemian/Pacific Sun investigation reveals that the EIS is deeply flawed scientifically, culturally and ethically. It is politicized.

Sixty million years ago a chunk of granite located near Los Angeles began moving northwards. Propelled by the energy of earthquakes over eons, Point Reyes slid hundreds of miles along the San Andreas fault at the divide between two colliding tectonic plates.

During the last Ice Age, 30,000 years ago, much of the Earth’s waters were locked up in glaciers, and the Pacific Ocean was 400 feet lower than it is today. “The Farallon Islands were then rugged hills rising above a broad, gently sloping plain with a rocky coastline lying to the west,” according to California Prehistory—Colonization, Culture, and Complexity.

Humans migrated from Asia walking the coastal plains toward Tierra del Fuego. Then, 12,000 years ago, the climate warmed and glaciers melted. Seas rose, submerging the plains. A wave of immigrants flowed south from Asia over thawed land bridges. Their subsequent generations explored and civilized the Americas, coalescing into nations, including in West Marin and Point Reyes.

Novelist and scholar Greg Sarris is the tribal chair of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria. The tribe’s ancestors are known as Southern Poma and Coast Miwok. In The Once and Future Forest, Sarris tells the story of how the first people came to be in Marin and Sonoma counties. “Coyote created the world from the top of Sonoma Mountain with the assistance of his nephew, Chicken Hawk. At that time, all of the animals and birds and plants and trees were people. … The landscape was our sacred text and we listened to what it told us. Everywhere you looked there were stories. … Everything, even a mere pebble, was thought to have power … Cutting down a tree was a violent act. … An elder prophesied that one day white people would come to us to ‘learn our ways in order to save the earth and all living things. … You young people must not forget the things us old ones is telling you.’”

Read more at: https://bohemian.com/apocalypse-cow-the-future-of-life-at-point-reyes-national-park/

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , , , ,

Huffman bill assuring 20-year leases for Point Reyes ranchers clears House

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Cattle ranchers would be assured a lengthy future in Point Reyes National Seashore under a bill written by Rep. Jared Huffman that was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives, with environmental groups divided over the issue.

The bill by Huffman, a San Rafael Democrat known for his environmental politics, would require the Secretary of Interior to issue 20-year permits to the long-standing family-operated beef and dairy ranches in the scenic Marin County seashore managed by the National Park Service.

The four-page bill also orders the government agency to manage the seashore’s famed tule elk herd to keep the grazing animals separate from the ranches and dairies.

“We’re thrilled,” said Jackie Grossi, whose family runs a 1,200-acre Point Reyes cattle ranch. “We just want to ensure that there is long-term stability for the ranches.”

Jackie and Rich Grossi, their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter manage the ranch, which is, like all of the affected cattle operations, on federally owned land purchased by the government decades ago.

Ranchers say they need long-term permits to justify investment in their operations.

In an unusual exercise of bipartisanship, the bill, HR 6687, was co- authored by Rep. Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and last year advocated for repeal of the Endangered Species Act, a move Huffman has vocally opposed.

Read more at https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8782302-181/huffman-bill-assuring-20-year-leases?ref=mostsection

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , ,

Future of Point Reyes cattle ranches at stake in National Park Service planning process

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
The future of cattle ranching and herds of tule elk in the Point Reyes National Seashore is at stake in a policy-setting process that will culminate in four years and is already attracting thousands of public comments.
The National Park Service, which manages the sprawling seashore on the Marin County coast, has received about 2,800 comments on a list of six tentative management alternatives, including one that maintains the status quo for 24 families engaged in beef and dairy cattle ranching and three others that would eliminate or reduce ranching.
That trio of alternatives was required by a settlement agreement between the Park Service and three environmental groups that sued the agency nearly a year ago alleging decades of cattle ranching had trampled the seashore’s landscape and polluted its waterways, claims that the long-established ranchers and Park Service rejected.
Two other alternatives — including one designated the Park Service’s “initial proposal” — would continue cattle ranching under 20-year permits, replacing the annual permits currently being issued to ranching families. Under the one-year deals, the families cannot afford to pay or borrow money for maintenance, causing properties to deteriorate, ranching advocates say.
Read more at: Future of Point Reyes cattle ranches at stake in National Park Service planning process

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Land UseTags , ,

National Park Service considers fee hike of up to 180% for most popular parks, including Yosemite

Hugo Martin, LOS ANGELES TIMES

The National Park Service will accept public comment on the proposal until Nov. 23 at the park’s public comment website. Under the proposal, fees for commercial vehicles entering the parks would also rise. The increases could go into effect as soon as next spring.

To raise funding for maintenance and repairs, the National Park Service said Tuesday it is considering raising vehicle entrance fees by up to 180% at the nation’s most popular parks during the peak visiting season.
Under the plan to raise funding to fix roads, bridges, campgrounds and bathrooms, the federal agency is proposing a $70 fee for each private, noncommercial vehicle — up from the current fares of $25 to $30, depending on the park. The fee for a motorcycle would more than double to $50 from the current $15 to $25. Visitors on foot or bicycle would pay $30, up from the $10 to $15.
The annual pass for all federal lands would remain $80.
The increase at 17 of the nation’s most popular parks would generate an extra $70 million a year over the $200 million now collected annually from entrance fees, the parks agency estimated. The 17 parks would include Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Yellowstone, Zion, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Read more at: National Park Service considers fee hike of up to 180% for most popular parks, including Yosemite – LA Times

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Habitats, Land UseTags , , , ,

Trump rethinks America's best idea

Tom Molanphy, SF WEEKLY

Nearly 98 percent of 2.4 million people surveyed told the government to leave our national monuments alone.

As soon as President Trump signed his executive order in April to review 27 national monuments, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had his summer travel plans booked. Zinke would fish, kayak, and hike through our nation’s most beautiful landscapes to determine if they were better off being felled, drilled, or fracked. Six of the monuments set for review are in California: Berryessa Snow Mountain, Carrizo Plain, Giant Sequoia, Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow, and San Gabriel Mountains. But the Feds are not touching these Golden State treasures without a California-sized fight.
“This has been nothing short of a cynical assault on our country’s shared value of protecting our public lands,” Victoria Brandon, Chair of the Sierra Club’s Redwoods chapter, tells SF Weekly.
Any reduction — or in some cases, elimination — of these nearby monuments would affect the Bay Area.
Read more at: Trump Rethinks America’s Best Idea – By tom-molanphy – August 10, 2017 – SF Weekly

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Land Use, WildlifeTags , , ,

Op-Ed: An assault on our national parks

Jacques Leslie, THE DAILY WORLD
To learn what most endangers national parks, on the occasion this month of the National Park Service’s 100th birthday, look no farther than Mojave National Preserve, a vast swath of exquisite desert panoramas halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. These days, national parks struggle with all sorts of urgent threats, such as climate change and deteriorating services and infrastructure as a result of underfunding, but Mojave’s biggest menace isn’t what’s happening inside the preserve, it’s what increasingly surrounds it.
Three industrial-scale solar farms adjacent to the preserve are already in operation, the Interior Department has approved a fourth, and a wind farm proposal is getting serious consideration. One of the solar farms, Ivanpah, made news recently for frying birds and setting itself on fire.
Soda Mountain, the solar project approved for construction on Bureau of Land Management land next to the Mojave preserve, would be the largest industrial site within 100 miles. It would isolate and possibly doom a portion of the desert’s depleted population of bighorn sheep, and like the other energy projects, it would be visible from the preserve. By generating enough renewable electricity for 86,000 homes, the project would address one environmental problem, climate change, while creating others: It would show that an energy project can be renewable without being green.
Read more at: Commentary: An assault on our national parks – The Daily World

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags , , ,

Groups ask judge to halt Point Reyes National Seashore farm leases 

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Three environmental groups have asked a federal judge in Oakland for an order to halt the process of granting long-term leases to the cattle ranches operating on government-owned land at Point Reyes National Seashore.
The Resource Renewal Institute in Mill Valley, Oakland-based Center for Biological Diversity and the Idaho-based Western Watershed Project contend the National Park Service is moving to grant 20-year leases to the ranches without completing an assessment of their impact on the 71,000-acre national seashore, a popular wilderness destination visited by 2.5 million people a year.
The original lawsuit, filed in February, rattled ranchers whose families have been working on the windswept peninsula for generations.In the request for a court order filed last week, the groups said the Park Service intends to “short circuit” the case by completing a ranch management plan and issuing the leases, thereby denying the groups “any chance at meaningful relief.”
“The Park Service cannot simply predetermine that ranching should continue long-term at the national seashore without any public input or environmental study,” Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release.
The park is currently operating under an “antiquated plan” prepared 36 years ago with no environmental impact statement, the release said.
The environmental groups contend that decades of cattle grazing have trampled the seashore’s landscape and polluted its waterways. Huey Johnson, a former California secretary of resources who now heads the Resource Renewal Institute, has called the Park Service’s management of the ranches a travesty.
The Park Service, ranchers and their allies contend the agriculture and wildlands can coexist side by side. When the seashore was established in 1962, preserving the peninsula from development, it specifically included the historic ranches, marked by signs along the seashore roads.
Read more at: Groups ask judge to halt Point Reyes National Seashore farm leases | The Press Democrat

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, Sustainable LivingTags , , , ,

Point Reyes ranchers at center of debate over nature of national parks

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Storm clouds shadowed Ted McIsaac as he shifted his battered 1994 Chevy pickup into four-wheel drive and bounced along a muddy track over hills cloaked in brilliant green grass.
His border collie Rollin trotted alongside while McIsaac made a morning recon of his 2,500-acre Point Reyes ranch to scan the slopes near and far for his 160 head of pure black cattle. To the west, the dark spine of Inverness Ridge framed the horizon, and 2 miles beyond winter surf pounded a wild coastline.
“You rely on Mother Nature. She rules your day,” said McIsaac, 65, a lean, sturdy man with a creased face and square jaw. A fourth-generation rancher, he’s accustomed to the vagaries of weather, especially spring rains that can make or break a cattleman.
But a much larger storm now hangs over the remote Point Reyes peninsula, where a legal fight triggered by three environmental groups has profoundly unsettled life for McIsaac and 23 other families who operate ranches on the federally protected landscape.
Theirs is a way of life often as rough as the relentless waves crashing at the edges of this timeless headland. And they believe the future of ranching is at stake in the 71,000-acre Point Reyes National Seashore, where pasture for beef and dairy cattle exists side by side with wilderness, both shielded from development in a unique preserve established by the federal government at the ranchers’ behest more than 50 years ago.
President John F. Kennedy, convinced it was some sort of charmed West Coast Cape Cod, created the national park after ranchers and environmentalists fearful of intense development pressures banded together to stop the encroachment of subdivisions on Point Reyes.
As part of the deal, the ranchers insist they were made a promise specifically designed to endure: They could remain as long their families were willing to work in the wet, cold and wind of an unforgiving landscape.
Point Reyes National Seashore is now at the center of an unfolding dispute that ultimately seeks to define the nature of America’s national parks: Can the treasured public scenery accommodate the country’s ranching tradition?
Read more at: Point Reyes ranchers at center of debate over | Petaluma Argus Courier | Petaluma360.com

Author SuzannePosted on Categories Agriculture/Food System, Land UseTags ,

‘Oyster War,’ what really happened to Drakes Bay farm

Leilani Clark, PRESS DEMOCRAT
The phrase “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” was all over west Marin County in 2013. Hundreds of hand-painted signs were posted in shop and residential windows, along roads, on bulletin boards, and in and around Point Reyes, a rural coastal enclave 30 miles north of San Francisco. Spearheaded by west Marin’s Alliance for Local Sustainable Agriculture, the “Save Our Oyster Farm” campaign gave voice to neighbors and local organizations who wanted the family-owned farm in Drake’s Estero to remain open, at its historic location inside the boundaries of the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Back then, the farm accounted for nearly 40 percent of California’s oyster production, and operated the last oyster cannery in the state. Notwithstanding legal proceedings litigated by a Koch Brothers-backed attorney, and support from Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the National Park Service did not extend the farm’s 40-year lease, and Drakes Bay Oyster Company closed in late 2014.

Journalist Summer Brennan stumbled onto the Drakes Bay Oyster Company fracas after being hired as a staff writer for the Point Reyes Light, a nearby local paper, in 2012. In short order, Brennan, a Point Reyes native who now lives in New York, was embroiled in the controversy, working late nights to discern fact from fiction, and clumsy science from sound policy.

“I found myself wedged between the National Park Service, wilderness advocates, and their defenders on one hand, and the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the local agriculture, community and their supporters on the other . . .” she writes in her new book “The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America.”

Written in a style reminiscent of Rebecca Solnit — the San Francisco environmental writer with a keen ability for melding the poetic and the political — “The Oyster War” makes for a fast-paced and dramatic read about a messy situation with no clear-cut “bad guy.”

Read more at: ‘Oyster War,’ what really happened to Drakes Bay | The Press Democrat