“To Conserve Unimpaired” Lawsuit Challenges Point Reyes Ranching, Elk-Killing Plan

Jan 11

On January 10th, the Resource Renewal Institute and our co-plaintiffs—the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Northern District Court in San Francisco challenging the National Park Service’s (NPS) controversial management plan for ranching at Point Reyes National Seashore and the northern district of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which remain among a small handful of national parks where commercial beef and dairy ranching reign.

The plaintiffs, represented by the nonprofit, public-interest, environmental law firm Advocates for the West, cite multiple violations of multiple federal laws—the Point Reyes Act, which established the national seashore in 1962 for “public recreation, benefit, and inspiration;” the Organic Act of 1916, which established the National Park Service and requires it to leave natural resources unimpaired for the benefit of future generations; the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA); and the Clean Water Act.

The Resource Renewal Institute’s late founder, Huey Johnson—who also founded the Trust for Public Land—had been instrumental in acquiring land to create Point Reyes National Seashore and the adjacent Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He had long been upset by NPS policies that prioritized commercial cattle operations on parkland intended for wildlife protection and public recreation.

In 2015, the NPS belatedly admitted that half the confined tule elk herd at Point Reyes National Seashore had died during the two-year drought. The image of hundreds of majestic elk wasting away behind a fence while domestic cattle grew fat in the national seashore was the final straw. Huey assembled a team of public lands experts to hold the National Park Service accountable.

The NPS’s long-outdated management plan had enabled ranchers and the NPS to divvy up the park behind closed doors. The public had no voice in whether commercial ranching and dairying even belonged at Point Reyes National Seashore or the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, let alone nearly six thousand cattle occupying 28,000 acres. Ranch leases were routinely renewed without any environmental review.

In fact, the NPS and ranchers were hashing out a plan for rubber-stamping long-term leases when our last lawsuit stopped them. An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) would be required. The public needed to be at the table.

Nearly five years and tens of thousands of public comments later, on the 59th Anniversary of the Seashore’s founding, the NPS released their plan for the future Point Reyes National Seashore. It was far from what the plaintiffs and the public had tried to bring out.

Disregarding findings from their own environmental review, the NPS plan paves the way for 20 year-leases for private beef and dairy ranches in perpetuity. The plan also allows for: previously unpermitted livestock, expansion of agricultural activities such as row crop cultivation, operation of mobile slaughterhouses in the National Seashore, and killing of an arbitrary number of tule elk. Tule elk, a species endemic to California, were brought back from the brink of extinction and exist in no other national park. Ranchers say they interfere with their cattle operations.

This plan is more of the same—a giveaway of public land to the cattle industry. It perpetuates decades of negligence by the very agency charged with protecting this national treasure. Huey would have been mad as hell; he would want us to fight back. And we are.