“… most ranchers and farmers in the West care as much for the health of their land, air, and water as any member of the Sierra Club.” (Mark Dowie)

This was the second September in a row in which we decamped for two weeks to Point Reyes Station, California. The town, with a population of about 350, is in western Marin County, an hour north of San Francisco; it lies at the foot of Tomales Bay, which separates the Point Reyes peninsula from the mainland, and is a gateway to the Point Reyes National Seashore, some 70,000 acres of pristine beaches, rocky cliffs, historic dairy farms, redwood and eucalyptus trees, and tule elk. It is one of the most beautiful parts of a beautiful state, popular with hikers, kayakers, campers, horseback riders, and mountain bikers.

Point Reyes Station is also a foodie mecca, even by the rarefied standards of northern California. The nationally renowned Cowgirl Creamery is based here; the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Toby’s Feed Barn bears witness to the stunning variety and fertility of the surrounding farms and ranches; and the town features several fine restaurants, including Osteria Stellina, and a variety of enticing nearby dining options, including Saltwater, in nearby Inverness, and the renowned Hog Island Oysters, a few miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of the bay.

Natural beauty and agricultural plenty, plus a temperate climate: Point Reyes has it all. Even though Tomales Bay actually rests atop the dreaded San Andreas Fault, which means that there’s an excellent chance that it’s ground zero for the Next Big One, this may well be as close as we can get to an earthly paradise. All of which is by way of trying to put the controversy surrounding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which harvests more than a third of the state’s oysters, in some kind of context.

People have been harvesting oysters commercially in the waters of Drakes Estero, an estuary on the southern edge of the Point Reyes peninsula, for more than a century; President Kennedy signed the bill creating the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, and ten years later the government paid the Johnson Oyster Company nearly $80,000 for the property for inclusion in the park, offering the company a forty-year nonrenewable permit to continue operating.

In 1976, Congress passed a law designating the 2,500 acres of tidelands and submerged land of Drakes Estero as a marine wilderness effective upon the termination of that permit. In 2004, the Johnsons sold out to the Lunny family, longtime local cattle ranchers, who continued operating as the Drakes Bay Oyster Company; apparently the Lunnys assumed that the government would let them continue harvesting oysters in the estuary past 2012, even though the government told them that “no new permit will be issued.”

In November 2012, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally announced that he was allowing the permit to expire, though various court orders allowed the company to keep operating. Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the federal government was within its authority in terminating the permit. The next step is uncertain, though the company will probably seek a hearing before the full court.

The case has become something of a cause célèbre in normally mellow Marin. While the Interior Department tries to do what’s right from a national perspective, fulfilling a Congressional directive and following the letter of the law, Point Reyes Station and the surrounding rural areas are thick with hand-painted blue-and-white signs begging “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm”—hardly surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the Lunny family has been here for a century, and the general antipathy toward Big Government among small farmers and ranchers. Supporters of the company have even started a Website, SaveOurShellfish.com, which is full of populist fervor, arguing that the feds “are illegally denying Californians their rights to shellfish cultivation in Drake’s [sic] Estero” and urging people to “Join us in standing up for the People’s right to this remarkable food source!”

The company’s own Website makes much of the Lunnys’ commitment to environmentally sound practices. Its mission statement reads, in part, “All of our growing, post harvest and delivery practices are built around sound and sustainable agricultural practices with ecological responsibility and a long-standing attitude of stewardship for the land and sea that we farm.” A number of local restaurants and farm bureaus have weighed in on the company’s side. The legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse noted the importance of “a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers, such as the Lunnys, whose dedication to sustainable aquaculture and agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.”

Meanwhile, critics of the Lunnys argue that they have not always lived up to their lofty claims. The California Coastal Commission charged the company with “illegal coastal development, violation of harbor seal protection measures, and failure to control significant amounts of its plastic pollution.” Various environmental groups have arrayed themselves on the government’s side. Neal Desai of the National Parks Conservation Association said that the decision “affirms that our national parks will be safe from privatization schemes, and that special places like Drakes Estero will rise above attempts to hijack America’s wilderness.” A Huffington Post story noted that the Washington nonprofit providing the company with pro bono legal representation had ties to the arch-conservative Koch brothers and was a front for the nationwide effort to open public lands to private exploitation.

It is impossible for an outsider like me to know what to make of all this; the controversy quickly becomes a morass of he said, she said charges and countercharges. Without knowing the details of the situation or the principals involved it is impossible to tell where the objective truth lies, if there is such a thing—which is, I grant you, a pretty big if. It seems, however, that each side has come to believe the worst about the other.

When I was a kid growing up in Mill Valley, Marin County was a byword for a laid-back lifestyle. Beads, patchouli, incense, peacock feathers, and—I admit it—large quantities of high-quality dope were part of the equation, as was one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, and while it has always been easy to make fun of “Mellow Marin” (see Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, for example), many people here seem genuinely committed to living in gentle harmony with each other and with Mother Nature.

Mark Dowie is an environmental journalist who lives on the western shore of Tomales Bay. In the latest issue of the West Marin Review, he writes: “I remain an environmentalist. I believe we all are at heart. But I’m a hybrid, a fence-sitter, observed with caution by ranchers and Greens alike. I’ve lost a few friends on both sides of that fence.”

He adds, “The science of land stewardship is still unfolding and it’s hard to know what’s right. But it seems clear that one right thing is communication. Close, patient, and honest dialogue between ranchers and enviros will make great strides toward right-stewardship and toward consensus in the land disputes that plague the West. Those conversations are often best had around kitchen tables.”

Given the apparent intransigence, suspicion, and bitterness on both sides, the opponents in this controversy aren’t close to sitting down at the kitchen table together; hell, they’re not even in the same building, figuratively. (Literally, it’s a different story: a block from the house we rented is a 114-year-old former livery stable with one of those blue-and-white “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs on the wall facing Third Street, and in that building is the office of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, which supports the decision to close the company down.)

Perhaps I’m being childish, but I can’t help wishing, with Dowie, that the locavores and the environmentalists could find common ground. This is a special and beautiful place, and it shouldn’t be that hard to agree on the need to keep it that way. But right now “Mellow Marin” seems a little less mellow, a little more like the rest of the world, and that’s a shame.

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Last week, during a visit to San Francisco that also took us to the nearby Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Martin and I spent a day exploring the Point Reyes National Seashore with his childhood friends Brad and Hans. Before setting off on our hike, we wandered into Point Reyes Books and wandered out again with the first two volumes of the West Marin Review, a nifty literary journal whose inaugural issue considers Wallace Stegner’s claim that “[w]e simply need… wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Even if I can’t give coordinates for the geography of hope, I like the idea that it might exist on some map buried deep under the mess in my brain’s glove compartment. In current mainstream environmental thinking, however, humans and wilderness cannot exist together because humans are an inevitable contaminant. Having spent the drive from San Francisco to Point Reyes with my face glued to the car window taking in an enticing new vocabulary of birds, I’d like to think that the geography of hope includes a place where humans are part of wilderness, not set off from it.

Our hike took us north between Tomales Bay and the ocean, through herds of tule elk, watching waves crash on the rocky shore and tender crocuses and poppies huddled in the chilly wind. As we returned to the parking lot at Pierce Point Ranch, we heard the whine of chainsaws; the Park Service was taking down an enormous Monterey cypress, maybe 75 feet tall. The presence of rot in some branches posed a threat to the uninhabited cluster of historic ranch buildings at the head of the trail. The decision to cut down the tree seemed iconic of the destruction endemic to human activity in the natural world.

So it was with interest that I saw an essay in the West Marin Review entitled “The Fiction of Wilderness,” by Mark Dowie, the former editor and publisher of Mother Jones. Dowie suggests that the Wilderness Act of 1964 set in stone the idea that wilderness was best preserved by balkanizing large tracts of land and ejecting any permanent residents who might have lived there, as the Miwok tribe was ejected from Yosemite. He says this creates “a commodified wilderness… a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier their ancestors ‘discovered’ then tamed—a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead.” (Ouch.)

But Dowie suggests an alternative. His research revealed that many aboriginal peoples have nothing analogous to the Western conception of wilderness and were stumped when he tried to explain it to them. The closest equivalents in their languages were domesticated ones: “back yard,” “big farmyard,” “food,” or “pantry.” There was, in other words, no sense of separation between the people and the landscapes they lived in. Dowie quotes a Tarahumaran ethno-ecologist from Mexico who says that in his culture the landscape is granted the same love and affection as family, resulting in a “kincentric ecology.”

Dowie hopes that environmentalist notions of wilderness can change to include the possibility of human activity intimately embedded within the land in a mutually profitable relationship. When we see ourselves as apart from a pristine nature that exists outside the bonds of kinship, we are more likely to commodify and exploit it.

Serendipitously, my reading took me from the West Marin Review to a publication that our friends Hugh and Sarah Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison gave me just before we left for San Francisco. Entitled Five Ways to Value the Working Landscapes of the West, it may not rise immediately to the top of the New York Times best seller list, although it makes for compelling reading. The first essay, “In Praise, and in Appraisal, of the Working Landscapes of the West,” begins with this heartening pronouncement: “The simplest fact about Western ranches tends to be the one which most folks tend to forget: raising range-fed livestock is one of the few economic activities that produces food—and potentially ecosystem health and financial wealth—by keeping landscapes relatively wild, diverse, and resilient.”

We’re planning our first bison harvest in the near future and have hopes of developing a food culture that will feed whoever happens to be staying at Madroño Ranch and perhaps others in the immediate community as well. Our concern can’t stop at our bellies, though: what feeds us must be fed as well, and well fed. The essay’s authors, Gary Paul Nabhan and Ken Meter, write of working landscapes: “if we commit ourselves to eating their bounty, we derive a good portion of our nourishment from the very ground on which we stand. We do not stand apart [my emphasis] from the energy and water flows of our home ground. Instead, they work through us, and we work because of them. The land is not mere scenery suitable only for tourism and leisure. It is a functioning community in which we either live well or poorly, depending on how efficiently and conservatively we participate in the land’s work.” And then, as the clincher, they quote my new hero Henry David Thoreau: “[P]erhaps we are here to ‘meet the expectations of the land’ and not the other way around.”

This whole blog post may be nothing more than a stemwinding rationalization for contaminating the rapidly disappearing Texas wilderness. But I hate the idea that there is no room for an ongoing and mutually satisfying exchange between the landscape and its human inhabitants. We need guides to lead us from here to there, though, guides who know both the intimate history of the land and the capacities and limits of new technologies. Increasingly, these guides are ranchers like Hugh and Sarah who cherish their working landscapes and who, in return, receive its abundance, even in lean times. We’d like Madroño Ranch to find its own place in this geography of hope.

What we’re reading
Heather: Henri J. M. Nouwen, In Memoriam
Martin: Jay Parini, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America