[News] Apocalypse Cow: The Future of Life at Point Reyes National Park

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://pacificsun.com/apocalypse-cow-the-future-of-life-at-point-reyes-national-park/
Apocalypse
Cow: The Future of Life at Point Reyes National Park
By Peter Byrne - December 9, 2020
------------------------------

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.’”

It is 2020. California is burning, beset by plague, violence and cultural
dysphoria. It’s way past time to start listening to lessons encoded in the
land. But can we still hear?

If so, Point Reyes has a story to tell us.
Ecological Turning Point

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.

Since 2013, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Jared Huffman have pressured the
Park Service to prioritize the preservation of private ranching profits
over environmental concerns. In 2017, the Park Service hired a contractor
with a record of defrauding the federal government to produce the EIS. The
study is structured to support the Park Service’s prior commitment to
expanding commercial ranching, retailing and hoteling at the expense of
endemic wildlife and plant life and regional water safety. It ignores the
cumulative impacts of climate change. It minimizes and ignores the benefits
of eliminating greenhouse gas- and pollution-producing ranching and
transforming the park into a carbon sink.

The EIS’s privatization plan is also wildly unpopular. Members of the
public and environmental organizations submitted 7,627 comments on the EIS,
many of them factually detailed and consequential. The Park Service has not
published an analysis of the comments. But, a statistically robust analysis
by the Resource Renewal Institute determined that 91 percent of the
comments called for eliminating ranching and restoring degraded lands.

The Park Service disregards these public concerns. It greenlights the
further ecological destruction of Point Reyes National Seashore. Lawsuits
will most likely be filed by environmental groups to challenge that action;
the Park Service may not prevail.

How did we arrive at this juncture?
The Weight of Water

It’s a blue-sky Saturday, I’m hiking the bluffs of Tomales Point at the
northern tip of Point Reyes. It’s hot and drought-dry. The hard-packed
trail edges a fenced preserve for the world’s few remaining tule elk, a
federally protected species. Small bands of the creatures chew near the
trail. Sloe-eyed, meditative, they trade curious looks with
socially-bubbled hikers crowding the trail, pixelating the elk with phone
snaps.

Five years ago, several hundred tule elk perished of thirst during a
drought that dried up the seeps inside this enclosure, according to the
Park Service. But the Park Service did not come to the aid of dying elk
then, nor will it now. The only water in sight is bottled and Camel-backed.
There is a wire barrier between the thirsty elk and the park’s many ponds
and streams, which are reserved for use by about 6,000 privately-owned cows.

There are smaller herds of tule elk in other areas of the Point Reyes.
These free-rangers are the bane of ranchers. They drink water and eat grass
that would otherwise fatten cattle. The Park Service favors controlling
elk-herd size with bullets, but it needs permission from an EIS to justify
draconian culling. Fortunately for the tule elk, people all over the world
adore them. The national media publishes stories about their plight.
Protesters demonstrate to free them. Kayakers deliver jugs of water to them.

Elk-worshipping aside, it is the nature of the terrains divided by the
fence that illuminate the most pressing ecological issues at stake. On the
elk side, native grasses and deeply rooted ground covers grow thickly,
harboring birds, lizards and small mammals. This wild and perennially green
foliage builds the planet’s carbon storage capacity, pulling globally
heating carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, emitting oxygen and slowing
the rate of climate doom.
A National Park Service map shows the boundaries of the 31 existing dairies
and cattle ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

On the cow side of the fence, the land is barren, churned into a gray dust
by hooves and crusted with methane- and nitrogen-emitting manure. When
first emitted, methane is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide as a global
warmer. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The manure from a
dairy milking 200 cows produces as much nitrogen as is in the sewage from a
community of 5,000-10,000 people.” The cow herds at Point Reyes annually
excrete 130 million pounds of nitrogen-laced manure into pastures, ponds,
streams and loafing barns, according to USDA statistical methods. Park
Service studies show that this decomposing waste releases harmful chemical
elements into the park’s streams, ponds, wetlands, estuaries, Tomales Bay
and the Pacific Ocean. Polluted ground waters carry loads of nitrogen,
ammonia, phosphates, phosphorus and fecal bacteria. Aquatic and plant life
of estuaries is choked to death by oxygen-depleting algae, by opportunistic
lily plants feasting on excess nitrogen.

The EIS acknowledges that removing the pollution produced by the ranches
would save federally protected or threatened species from extinction,
including Coho and Chinook salmon, steelhead, red legged frogs, California
freshwater shrimp, Myrtle’s silverspot butterflies and snowy plovers. Local
species of insects, birds and plants would thrive in the absence of
commercial ranching. As would globe-trotting flocks of birds that shelter
at the seashore.

During the winter wet season, the ranchers sow muddy, lifeless pastures
with shallow-rooted, non-native grasses grown as silage to feed calving
cattle in the spring. Tanker trucks pump liquified manure seething with
nitrogen and E. coli out of holding ponds and spray it as fertilizer on the
cow food. Mainlining the nitrogen, invasive thistles swoop into the fields.
Rare native plants, such as the coastal marsh milkvetch and the
checkerbloom, lose the struggle for existence.

A 2013 study by U.S. Department of Interior scientists determined that
California’s highest reported E. coli levels occurred in wetlands and
creeks draining Point Reyes cattle ranches near Kehoe Beach, Drake’s Bay,
Abbotts Lagoon and Tomales Bay. E. coli is an animal-waste bacteria that
can be lethal to humans. Notwithstanding, the directors of the California
Regional Water Quality Control Board regularly grant Point Reyes ranchers
waivers from complying with water safety regulations that limit discharges
of fecal matter and pesticides. In the EIS comments, the board’s lead
scientist criticized the EIS for failing to advocate realistic remedies for
curing the expected increases in toxic discharges from extending ranching
operations. But the politically-appointed directors proceeded to “strongly”
support the expansion of cattle ranching, telegraphing that the board will
continue to waive pollution problems. And those problems are guaranteed to
increase.

Ranchers regularly bulldoze tons of manure gathered from loafing barns into
holding ponds called lagoons. The rotting, liquifying pools puff methane
into the atmosphere. According to a 2010 Park Service climate study, Point
Reyes–based cows belch thousands of tons of the poison gas into the
atmosphere. Studies claim that one billion cows pose a clear and present
danger to the continuance of oxygenated life on Earth. While eliminating
the gases produced by commercial herds in the seashore park is not going to
cure the global problem, we must start somewhere. It makes sense to tackle
the issue on public lands that are supposedly dedicated to conserving
natural resources. But, since 2012, the Park Service is on record as
intending to expand ranching at Point Reyes no matter what scientists and
the public say. That regressive attitude was not always so.
<https://pacificsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Manure-Truck-PointReyes-JKnight-scaled.jpg>Cow
herds at Point Reyes annually excrete 130 million pounds of nitrogen-laced
manure, according to USDA statistical methods. Some is gathered in ponds
before being sprayed on fields for fertilizer. Photo by Jocelyn Knight. The
Miwok Way

In 2009, the Park Service published an environmental history of the Tomales
Bay region by historian Christy Avery. It relates how the Miwok nation
scientifically tended the natural environment for thousands of years. By
contrast, the EIS liquidates Miwok history, choosing instead to idealize a
few hundred European settlers who immigrated to the region after the 1850s.
Those tenant farmers and their three-legged milking stools, elk-tallow
candles and 19th century social practices ruined the native ecology of the
seashore lands with overgrazing, mono-cropping and 150 years of
agricultural pollution. Oddly, the Park Service prioritizes conserving the
“farming culture” of the “founding families,” whose descendants are still
ranching in the park using thoroughly modern technologies.

In a more harshly historical view, the Irish, Croatian and Italian
immigrant farmers were squatters on Indian land stolen centuries before by
Spanish priests and Mexican militarists and eventually deeded over to a
firm of San Francisco lawyers.

According to Avery, “The Coast Miwok were a semisedentary people who …
depended on the fish, wild plants, and waterfowl of the estuary [and used
fire and pruning and seeding] to manage and modify the land surrounding the
bay.” On Tomales Bay, the Miwok families lived in villages protected by
coves near freshwater streams. They “netted eel, sturgeon, flounder, perch,
and herring … from rafts and boats made with tule reeds.” They fished for
smelt, dove for abalone and hunted wild fowl. Seasonally, the Miwok “set
fires to suppress disease and pest. … Fire turned older and dead plants
into organic materials that fertilized the soil, and encouraged the growth
of plants and grasses whose seeds were made into pinole, a staple, flour.”
Point Reyes was a carbon sink of interdependent animal, plant and human
life.

Sarris was told by elders that such was the abundance of the land and sea
that the Miwok’s working day left time for making medicine and singing and
dreaming about the spirit worlds and weaving the baskets for which the
Miwok culture is world-renowned. “Often a person never traveled more than
30 miles from their home place during a lifetime,” Sarris told me. “If you
lived on the coast, you might go as far inland as Lake County to trade for
obsidian. But most people stayed in place, cultivating a mutually
beneficial relationship with the landscape. Our ancestors knew the animals,
they knew the trees. They pruned the oaks and burned to kill acorn-eating
worms. They did not question their responsibility to keep the waters clean
and free-running.” Miwoks shaped the present to preserve the future of
life. “Most tribes had legends that vividly told of the consequences that
would befall humans if they took nature for granted or violated natural
laws,” writes M. Kat Anderson in *Tending the Wild*, an ecological account
of how California’s first peoples engineered their surroundings.
The Rancher Way

The Europeans did not learn from the ways of the Miwok. They overgrazed
lush pastures on the fog-watered coastal ranges. They did not
systematically burn land, nor prune it. They killed vastly more game than
they needed for sustenance. The tap-rooted grasses went extinct, replaced
by stubby-rooted silage, imported ryes, oats and alfalfa that require
annual re-seeding. The ranchers dammed the waters. They sprayed chemical
fertilizers and pesticides. Thistle, wild oats and mustard displaced plants
that had co-evolved with animals. Elk, wolves, lions, bears and, yes,
humans were hunted toward extinction. Cattle churned fields of moss and
grass into infertile slurry. Concrete scabbed the land. It is* this*
exploitative version of Point Reyes’ ecological and cultural history that
the Park Service intends to preserve, promoting the worst sort of
profit-driven environmental depredations.

In the 1850s, dairy and meat ranches owned by the law firm Shafter & Howard
exported products to San Francisco and beyond. Chinese and Indian laborers
did the heavy lifting. The bodies of non-white men, women and children were
violated by Europeans, both sexually and as sources of cheap labor.
Overgrazing caused catastrophic flooding, eroding the peninsula. The
silting of Tomales Bay from agricultural run-off destroyed the habitats of
sea creatures. Entrepreneurs constructed railroads on top of bayside
levees, reconfiguring ecologies. (A few Miwok families held onto bay lands
such as Laird’s Landing; lands that incubated the revival of the tribe in
the 1990s, when the Miwok and Pomo people succeeded—against great odds—in
reclaiming their sovereignty.)

As dairying expanded throughout California at the turn of the 20th century,
milk and cheese prices plummeted. The lawyers sold their Point Reyes farms
to tenants. Investors developed a tourist trade. Newly constructed
residences, hotels and restaurants spewed raw sewage into a Tomales Bay
slick with oil spilled from boats. Dairy-industry effluvia killed fish and
stank. Point Reyes became hellish.

Starting in the 1960s, environmentally minded Marin residents had had
enough. They passed zoning and environmental laws to stifle further
commercial development of the county’s rural areas. Congress legislated
Point Reyes as a national park, “protected” from further environmental
degradation. During the 1970s, the feds paid the park’s ranching families a
fair market value of $57 million ($382 million in today’s dollars) for
their properties. Most of the ranchers signed below-market value leases and
agreed to vacate in 25 years. The bold idea was to phase out ranching and
allow native flora and fauna to regenerate; the park’s undeveloped beaches
were set aside for recreational picnics, swimming and fishing.

But instead of leaving by the millennium, the ranchers formed the Point
Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association. The group has lobbied Feinstein,
Huffman and the Park Service to keep the cheap rents in perpetuity; to
expand livestock and agriculture operations; to run bed and breakfasts and
retail stores on the ranches; and to “extirpate” the park’s free-ranging
Tule elk, effectively signing their death sentence. Environmentalists
fought back with lawsuits.
Promises, Promises, Politics

In 2012, Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Kenneth Salazar, a cattle
rancher, intervened in the dispute over commercializing the park and cut
the baby in half. He ordered the removal of a rancher-owned oyster farming
and retail operation from Drakes Estero because it “violated the policies
of the National Park Service concerning commercial use” and its removal
“would result in long-term beneficial impacts to the estero’s natural
environment.” Then, Salazar directed the Park Service to “pursue” the
possibility of offering the ranchers 20-year commercial leases in accord
with applicable laws. Salazar’s direction was not a law, nor a regulation,
nor an order binding upon future governance. Nor could the leases be
legally extended without first assessing the environmental consequences;
although, at the urging of two members of Congress, the Park Service
pursued extending the leases without first doing an EIS.

In 2013, newly elected congressman Jared Huffman lobbied the Park Service
to extend the leases. Although he calls himself a “progressive” and an
“environmentalist,” Huffman accepts major campaign donations from the
dairying, logging, sugaring, real estate and weapons industries. (See
“Where Jared Huffman Gets His Campaign Money” below.)

In 2014, Feinstein, who also accepts donations from agribusiness, urged
Salazar’s successor, Sally Jewell, to “renew the leases for at least twenty
years as Secretary Salazar *promised*.” Feinstein did not mention the many
promises the federal government has broken with the Coast Miwok.
Rep. Jared Huffman has pushed the National Park Service to extend rancher’s
commercial leases in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Derailing the politically-powered rush to renew the leases without an
environmental review, the Resource Renewal Institute, Center for Biological
Diversity and Western Watershed Project won a federal court order in 2016.
The court required the Park Service to produce an EIS laying out the
environmental pros and cons of continuing commercial ranching versus
requiring the ranchers to vacate as they had *promised*.

Then, undoing a century of environmental protections, the Trump regime
moved to massively privatize parks and forest service lands for
exploitation by logging, mining, energy and cattle industries. In 2018,
Huffman attempted an end-run around the EIS process. He authored a House
bill ordering the Park Service to sign perpetually renewable 20-year
leases. The bill passed with enthusiastic support from anti-environmental
regulation Republicans, but died in a Senate committee.

Since 2012 there has never been any doubt about the outcome preferred by
the Park Service—the granting of ranching leases in perpetuity. But the EIS
was not principally researched and written by Park Service employees. The
$559,000 job was contracted to Louis Berger Group, Inc. despite the
engineering firm’s shadowed past. In 2010, Louis Berger Group paid $69
million in civil and criminal fines for defrauding the federal government
in war-zone contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Adding to its ethically
troubled record in 2015, the firm paid “a $17 million criminal penalty
[for] bribing foreign officials [to] secure government construction
management contracts,” in India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Kuwait, according
to the U.S. Department of Justice. The World Bank debarred the firm “for
engaging in corrupt practices.”

The Park Service hired the Louis Berger Group in 2017, despite wide
reporting of the group’s transgressions by the media, and despite the
existence of any number of environmental firms able to conduct an
impartial, scientific investigation.

Attorney Dinah Bear has served the White House through successive
administrations as an expert on the National Environmental Policy Act
(NEPA) which governs the EIS process. In a telephone interview, Bear
excoriated the practice of outsourcing an EIS to consultants who are easily
incentivized to deliver results desired by political decision makers.
“Trump has eviscerated the scientific legitimacy of the EIS process,” Bear
said. For example, an EIS is no longer required to examine the long-term
impacts of climate change. Regardless, said Bear, “The courts are inclined
to invalidate an EIS if it ignores the cumulative impacts of climate
change.”
Climate Change?

The EIS barely mentions climate change, except to dismiss it as a serious
threat. Despite ample scientific research demonstrating that Point Reyes’
ecological health is and will continue to be distressed by extreme heat,
rising seas and dramatic shifts in weather patterns, the EIS claims the
impacts of climate change are “difficult to predict,” and in any case the
effects will be negligible, because “all ranches in the planning area are
at an elevation where sea-level rise would not have a direct impact.”

Contradicting the benign climate future postulated in the EIS, the
California Coastal Commission predicts regional sea levels to rise
catastrophically, as much as 12 inches by 2030, and up to 66 inches by
2100. In the short term, “Beaches, estuaries, marshes, wetlands, and
intertidal areas on the Marin Coast … will experience inundation, erosion,
and the potential for complete loss.” The stability of water, septic and
sewage pipelines serving Point Reyes are threatened. Entire species of
animal and vegetative life could be extinguished. Expected flooding from
heavier rains will worsen erosion and increase ground pollution from
agricultural activities throughout the park and along Tomales Bay. While
ocean waves are not likely to roll over bluff-top ranches, that does not
mean that climate-induced catastrophes will not vastly worsen the
peninsula’s already-untenable ecological situation.

According to Avery’s environmental history, “Dairy waste management became
one of the most problematic issues for ranchers in the late twentieth
century. Dairy farmers had typically sought properties with creeks that
would provide water for their stock, but these same creeks carried animal
wastes into the bay. When manure washed into the estuary, the high levels
of ammonia in the waste poisoned fish and posed threats to human health. In
rainy weather, sewage ponds overflowed, and waste material washed into the
nearby waterways. The 10,254 dairy cows and beef cattle in the watershed
produced 1,066,574 pounds of manure per day in 2000. Cattle also increased
erosion as they trampled streambanks, causing [48,000 tons of] silt to wash
into the bay [every year].

“By the late twentieth century, Tomales Bay exceeded federal limits on
fecal coliform more than ninety days each year. … In addition to dairy
wastes and human sewage, the waters of Tomales Bay have also had to absorb
excessive amounts of mercury—one of the most toxic metals.” Mercury mined
at the Gambonini ranch was sold to manufacture dental fillings,
thermometers, and fluorescent lights.

The good news, according to Avery, is that the bay can be regenerated by
“restoring wetlands and wildlife populations [and eliminating] unwanted
outcomes of human activities.” Avery praises the Park Service’s restoration
of a wetland on the decommissioned Giacomini Ranch at the head of Tomales
Bay as an example of responsible land management and of human agency
allowing the land to heal.
Ranchers have lobbied federal officials to “extirpate” the park’s
free-ranging Tule elk, an action which would effectively condemn the
animals to death. Photo by Hari Nandakumar/Unsplash. Greenhouse Gas Doom

The EIS acknowledges ranching will “continue to emit pollutants and
greenhouse gases associated with cattle grazing, manure management on
dairies [and] combined with the impacts from past, present, and reasonably
foreseeable actions, the total cumulative impact on air quality would be
adverse.” In dire fact, methane generated by dairying and cattle ranching
contributes at least 30 percent of the globe’s greenhouse gas load.

Investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham’s *This Land: How Cowboys,
Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West* notes, “In 1991,
the United Nations reported that 85 percent of Western rangeland was
degraded with overgrazing … the impact of countless hooves and mouths over
the years has done more to alter the vegetation and land forms of the West
than all of the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and
subdivision developments combined.” That statement is worth pondering.

Influential groups such as the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) and
Marin Conservation League pride themselves on stopping strip mall-type
development in rural areas. But their advocacy of ecological damaging
commercial ranching development on private and public lands is a sign of
cognitive dissonance—believing what you prefer to believe even when the
facts rebut.

For instance, the belief that eating grass fed beef is a “sustainable”
practice is a misnomer when it comes to stopping global warming. Multiple
studies show pasture-bred cattle emit substantially more methane than
penned-up, grain-fed cattle who move about and burp less. Transitioning
consumers to buying only grass-fed beef products would require increasing
the national cattle herd by 30 percent, nearly doubling the amount of
methane emissions and greatly exacerbating the stresses of global heating,
according to a 2018 study by the Animal Law and Public Policy Program at
Harvard Law School.

There are huge economic benefits to keeping our public lands cow-free,
Ketcham explains: “Photosynthesis and biomass production, carbon
sequestration, climate regulation, clean air, water retentions and
filtration, fresh water, soil retention, nutrient cycling, pollination—all
[are] products of public lands” valued in trillions of dollars, worldwide.

The relatively small portion of the EIS devoted to Alternative F, the
option to remove commercial ranching from the park, acknowledges that
eliminating ranching would “end ranching-related emissions,” including
methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and ammonia, four of the main drivers of
global heating. The EIS notes that Point Reyes ranches account for 22
percent of the greenhouse gases generated by agricultural activities in
Marin County. Eliminating dairy and cattle ranching in the park would
significantly reduce its contribution to the hockey-stick curve of global
heating. Dodging that inconvenient fact, the EIS suggests ranchers could
combat global heating by “voluntarily” practicing carbon farming.

While carbon farming is an effective way of slowing global heating, the EIS
does not lay out a plan for implementing the practice. In fact, quite the
contrary.
The Ins and Outs of Carbon Farming

In October, Science published a plan to conserve one-third of the world’s
potential farmlands as wildlife havens and carbon sinks, without
diminishing the food supply. The Global Safety Net is a blueprint for
sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and trapping it in non-agricultural
vegetation. It would reverse the rate of global heating. It makes an
empirically grounded case for returning nutrient-depleted, over-grazed
public lands to carbon-storing native plantings. The scientists
acknowledge, “The tools and designations will vary by place and must be
locally appropriate. … to be politically achievable [the plan] requires
broad engagement from civil society, public agencies, communities and
indigenous peoples.”

Half of California’s land area is grassy rangeland, much of it overgrazed
or farmed without regard for carbon sequestration. Restoring Point Reyes
National Seashore is a logical place to start the healing. The EIS
references a local non-profit called the Marin Carbon Project as its
carbon-farming expert. That organization is not calling for reducing or
eliminating cattle ranching. Rather, it calls for spreading manure-based
“compost” on silage crops; the solid compost emits methane and nitrogen,
just less of it than liquid waste. Looking for a technological fix, the
Marin Carbon Project calls for installing methane digesting machines on top
of lagoons of putrefying poop. The suggestion is that if the ranchers buy
barn-sized digesters for construction on top of the holding ponds, then the
explosive hydrocarbon can be usefully transformed into electricity.
Digesters of this type cost $1.5 to $5 million dollars apiece, plus tens of
thousands of dollars a year to operate, and require cow herds numbering in
the thousands to be cost effective. Why not just get rid of the methane’s
source—the cows?

Dr. Jeffrey Creque directs the Marin Carbon Project. He farmed in the
seashore for decades and favors extending the leases at Point Reyes. Creque
wrote, controversially, in Point Reyes Light that “methane from ruminants,
whether cattle or elk, is essentially, irrelevant in the global warming
equation.” In an interview, Creque said he had meant that carbon dioxide is
more dangerous than methane in the long run. He agreed that methane heats
up the atmosphere faster. Methane eventually morphs into carbon dioxide,
adding to the long-term greenhouse gas load. Creque then argued that we
have to keep the thousands of cows on Point Reyes because the ranches are
vital to the local economy.
Local Economics

The ranches support 64 full-time jobs—out of 124,700 jobs in Marin
County—and generate $16 million in annual revenue. By contrast,
park-related tourism revenue dwarfs this agricultural output. According to
the EIS, “In 2018, visitor spending [in the park] supported 1,150 jobs in
the local area and had an aggregate benefit to the local economy of $134
million.” Visitors do not come to Point Reyes to watch cows. And the park’s
contribution to the $260 million regional dairying and cattle raising
economy is fractional.

The ranching businesses are also an economic burden on taxpayers. Public
records reveal that ranch rents are fifty percent below market; the Park
Service spends $500,000 a year on ranch maintenance and capital
improvements; the ranchers have received $2.2 million in federal farming
subsidies since 1995. Without receiving millions of dollars in government
handouts, the Park Service argues, these ranchers would likely go out of
business. Or not.

Many of the Point Reyes–based ranching clans operate cattle and dairy
spreads outside the park in West Marin which are capitalized by tens of
millions of dollars in conservation easements (“Malted Millions
<https://pacificsun.com/malt-board-of-directors-conflicts-of-interest-exposed-as-legal-battle-unfolds/>,”
Sept. 30).” While the loss of the seashore-based ranches might negatively
impact some private profit margins, the effect to the regional and state
economies would be negligible. Contrast that to the social, economic,
ecological and educational gains to be made from allowing the Miwok lands
to regenerate as carbon sinks that are of incalculable value to life in
this age of burning ecosystems. If we cannot save our once-vibrant seashore
park from further ecological destruction, how can we save ourselves and our
planet?
Weaving the Future

Sarris tells me a story:

“It was around 1988 and I was driving up the coast with Mabel McKay, the
last of the medicine dreamers. And she looked out the window of the car.
And she said, ‘This is my dream. It’s all going to burn. Everything’s going
to go dry. And there’s no stopping it. The ocean is going to get warm.
Everything’s going to burn and go dry.’

“And I was a younger man, and I excitedly said, ‘Oh, Mabel, what do I do?
What do I do?’

“And she started laughing. And she said, mocking me, ‘That’s cute. What do
I do? What do I do? How cute.’

“And I said, ‘No, seriously, what do I do?’

“And she took a silent beat. And she turned to me and she said, ‘You live
the best way you know how, what else? The earth will be replanted, it will
be replanted. There will be people here. But we don’t know who they’re
going to be.’”
Where Jared Huffman Gets His Campaign Money

Northern California Rep. Jared Huffman is on record as supporting
legislative acts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Which is why his 2018
bill to protect the expansion of cattle ranching at Point Reyes surprised
his environmentally minded supporters. Data provided by OpenSecrets.org
<https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/jared-huffman/contributors?cid=N00033030&cycle=CAREER&type=I>
shows that during the course of Huffman’s congressional career he has
accepted large sums of campaign money from corporations whose environmental
and health agendas may not reflect the political wishes of his more
greenish constituents.

*Dairy Farmers of America* ($5,000). DFA donated to Huffman’s campaign
shortly after the congressman lobbied the U.S. Department of Interior in
2013 to extend cattle ranching leases at Point Reyes.

*American Crystal Sugar Company* ($40,000). Based in the Midwest, the
United States’ top sugar manufacturer and distributor markets millions of
barrels of high-fructose corn syrup to breakfast cereal brands and bags of
white sugar to households. It chops sugar beets into feed for cows.

*Honeywell International *($39,000). The Environmental Protection Agency
lists the weapons and chemical manufacturing behemoth as one of the most
toxic corporations in the United States, with more than 100 Superfund sites.

*Berkshire Hathaway* ($37,999). Billionaire Warren Buffet’s holding company
is heavily invested in environment- and health-destroying corporations,
including Barrick Gold, Coca-Cola, Apple, Bank of America and a portfolio
of carbon-spewing railroads and airliners.

*Green Diamond Resources *($18,384) Huffman has received regular
contributions from this clearcutting logging company throughout his time in
Congress, according to federal campaign finance records. In the Nov. 2020
election, Huffman was the top recipient of campaign donations from the
company ($6,500), which also gave money to the anti-environmentalist,
pro-fossil fuel campaigns of Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa
Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Huffman’s campaign portfolio of global heaters includes Sierra Pacific
Industries, PG&E, Goldman Sachs, Carnival Corporation, Bechtel Group and
General Motors.

Huffman commented, “I receive contributions from hundreds of groups and
thousands of individuals, including far more from the environmental
community than from the groups [your newspaper] portrays, and none of these
donations has ever influenced my policy decisions.”

Huffman’s congressional career donations total $138,529 from environmental
groups and $189,477 from agribusiness, according to Open Secrets. He gets
27 percent more money from agribusiness than from environmental interests.

*Please support investigative reporting:
<https://www.peterbyrne.info/>www.peterbyrne.info
<https://www.peterbyrne.info/>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20201211/5dc1b016/attachment.htm>