This is the story of another national seashore — Point Reyes north of San Francisco — because what has happened there is something that we need to be aware of as we work with the National Park Service to implement new legislation passed by Congress in December.
The new legislation would make some changes to the Park Service Off-Road Vehicle Plan to give the public more reasonable access to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.
Passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Bill, the legislation instructs the Secretary of the Interior to review and adjust wildlife protection buffers, keep them in place the shortest possible duration, designate vehicle and pedestrian corridors around resource closures, and confer with the state of North Carolina on certain buffers and protections.
It also makes other modifications to the final ORV plan, such as conducting a public process to consider such changes as the earlier opening of beaches that are closed at night during the summer, extending seasonal ORV routes in the fall and spring, and modifying the size and location of vehicle-free areas.
This legislation has the potential to be very significant in the struggle for reasonable public access, but it also gives the Department of the Interior and the Park Service some cover if agency officials decide they don’t want to make alterations to the plan.
Congress instructs the Park Service to make changes “in accordance with peer-reviewed science.”
And here’s where Point Reyes National Seashore becomes instructional.
Point Reyes National Seashore, designated by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, is located about 30 miles north of San Francisco in Marin County. It encompasses 150 square miles of spectacular scenery that includes 80 miles of undeveloped shoreline, 150 miles of trails to and through beaches, headlands, estuaries, forests and historic landmarks.
Although, unlike Cape Hatteras, there are no towns or villages in the seashore, there are working farms and ranches on park land. And until recent years, the park and the community apparently co-existed somewhat peacefully.
This is the tale of one of those working farms — an oyster farm — located at one of the seashore’s most ecologically important estuaries, Drakes Estero, where oysters had been farmed for at least 80 years.
The farm, Drakes Bay Oyster Company, was forced to close at the end of last year after a long and nasty battle with the Department of the Interior and environmental advocacy groups.
The battle erupted in 2007, the same year that environmental advocacy groups sued the National Park Service over its lack of an off-road vehicle plan. The lawsuit ended with a consent decree that heavily clamped down on access in order to protect natural resources and eventually in an ORV plan that many think is unnecessarily restrictive.
I’ve read about the events at Point Reyes over the past few years with considerable interest because much of the fight there was over the science that DOI and NPS used to close down the farm. Specifically, it was about the science that the federal government used to prove that farm operations disturbed the large harbor seal colonies and accounted for their decline.
Much of the fight here has been over the excessive size of the buffers to protect nesting birds and turtles — especially piping plovers. At the time of the ORV rulemaking, the Park Service said that the buffers, which prohibit access not only for vehicles but also for pedestrians, were based on peer-reviewed science.
More recently, the NPS has referred to “the best available science.” But, either way, it’s all about the science here also.
The controversy on the West Coast has been covered well by The Point Reyes Light, a small Marin County newspaper that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1979 for stories on Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program that became a cult.
However, more recently, it was an article in Newsweek by writer Michael Ames that got my attention. The story, published online on Jan. 18, is a terrific piece of reporting about the Drakes Estero situation. Ames chronicles the events and highlights the use and abuse of science, environmental advocacy gone awry, and federal agencies that are seemingly unaccountable.
In the article, entitled “Oyster Shell Game,” Ames calls the events at Point Reyes “one of the ugliest environmental fights in the country.” He also says the closure of the farm is “a critical victory for environmental lobbying groups.”
Several environmental organizations, led by the local Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and the National Parks Conservation Association, waged a war to have Drakes Estero converted to a “full wilderness, a sacrosanct designation that prohibits oystering, along with any other mechanized or motorized interference with the subtler designs of nature.”
The groups called the oyster operation “an ecological disaster” and said the owner’s attempts to get a lease extension from DOI amounted to “a precedent-setting land-grab effort.”
DOI and NPS officials claimed that the oyster farm was a heavy industry that imperiled wildlife. However, the science the agencies used to back up their assertions came under heavy fire. Ames calls the methods used by the feds to prove the oyster farm needed to be closed “scientifically unsound” and “at times bizarre.”
The local community and the oyster farmer had some important allies, including Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and two scientists.
One of the scientists who joined the fight against DOI was Corey Goodman, a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) member and a former biology professor at the University of California Berkeley and Stanford.
The other is Brent Stewart, a marine biologist and seal behavior expert with the Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute in San Diego.
Goodman found that one seal colony the Park Service said had an 80 percent decline because of the oyster farm had merely relocated to another area.
Feinstein called on the NAS to conduct an external review of the Park Service’s environmental studies. The NAS agreed and issued a report that said NPS scientists had “selectively presented, over-interpreted, or misrepresented the available scientific information” and “exaggerated the negative and overlooked potentially beneficial effects of the oyster culture operation.”
The senator later said that the NPS scientists “acted as if they were advocates with no responsibility to fairly evaluate the scientific data.”
In the course of events, it became clear that NPS had secretly installed and then concealed remotely controlled wildlife monitoring cameras to document the movements of the seal colonies.
Goodman filed a formal scientific misconduct complaint against the National Park Service. A DOI solicitor wrote that the NPS scientists were “blurring the line between exploration and advocacy,” but, in the end, his report found them guilty only of “scholarly” and “administrative” misconduct.
In 2012, the Park Service asked the U.S. Geological Survey — the same agency that published the science known as the Patuxent Protocols upon which the Cape Hatteras buffers are based — to produce a definitive study of the photos of the seals’ movements.
The USGS asked the marine biologist Stewart to evaluate them. In May of 2012, Stewart turned in a report that found “there were no disturbances attributable to the oyster farm boats.” But when the report was published in November, Stewart discovered that his findings had been altered.
Stewart told Michael Ames that he notified his contacts at USGS that the report had errors and asked if he could correct them. He said he was told that “it’s been done” and “it can’t be changed.”
Goodman filed another scientific misconduct complaint — this time about USGS. In November of last year, it was dismissed.
In November of 2012, then- DOI Secretary Ken Salazar ruled against renewing the lease of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, saying that the farm violated park policies for commercial activities.
The farm’s owner took the case to court, with much community support, and lost. It is now closed down and the unsold oysters have been removed.
The most disturbing passage in Ames’ articles comes at the end, under the subtitle, “You’ve Been Shucked.”
He writes that Park Service and wilderness advocates “now say that the issue was environmental policy not environmental law.”
?Science will always be debated, like climate change,? said Melanie Gunn, outreach coordinator for Point Reyes National Seashore. ?But the law and policy of the Wilderness Act is very clear,? she said in defense of Salazar?s decision to shut down the farm.
So, in the end, it wasn’t about the science at all?
Could it happen here?
We can hope not. We can hope that DOI and NPS officials don’t want to see a replay of their sloppy science being debunked.
On the other hand, the officials could figure that since it worked before, it might work again.
Whatever the outcome, those of us who want to see more reasonable public access here will have to work with the Park Service and try our best to hold officials accountable — and so will Congress.
There’s nothing some environmental advocacy groups would like more than to see portions — if not all — of Cape Hatteras National Seashore designated a “wilderness.” In fact, they raised that possibility during the ill-fated Park Service attempt at negotiated rulemaking on the ORV plan.
I like what Corey Goodman, the NAS member and biology professor, told Michael Ames when he explained that he hasn’t given up the fight for good science, but is discouraged by the politics.
“The environmental movement has lost its way,” he said. “And I say that as an environmentalist and a lifelong Democrat.”
Nowhere has the environmental movement lost its way more than here on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, where the advocacy groups are fighting us on not only seashore access but also on replacing our bridge, keeping our only highway open, and making our living on the water.
Michael Ames’ article is long, but it’s very well reported, well documented, and well written — and more than worth our time, especially now. I have only hit the highlights of his reporting in this blog, so I really hope you will read it.
It is, as they say, a cautionary tale.
Click here to read “The Oyster Shell Game.”
