.Given, Then Taken: Point Reyes Plan Ends Most Ranching at National Seashore

Driving out across the Point Reyes National Seashore on Highway 1, one is often surrounded by cattle, long rolling hills and telephone lines. 

Perched atop are red-tailed hawks, looking into the short-grazed grasses beside the open Pacific Ocean for their next meal. 

These vistas, across much of the 71,000-acre park, from Kehoe Beach to Palomarin north of Bolinas, are defined by cattle. For more than 150 years, cattle have grazed these lands in the area we call Point Reyes National Seashore, which has become a defining feature of the park and region for many residents and some 2.5 million visitors.

However, on Jan. 8, the Point Reyes National Seashore announced an amended management plan, which included the voluntary ending of six dairy and six beef ranches in the National Seashore in 15 months. This will reduce the ranching land from 18,000 acres (around a quarter of the park) to about 1,000 acres. Two beef ranches will still operate. Seven ranches in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area will also continue to operate. The Point Reyes National Seashore staff manages these sites.

This decision, coming after a legal settlement agreement from a 2022 lawsuit, is the final compromise in a legal battle that has pitted conservationists determined to return Point Reyes to its wild state against ranchers who have lived and worked on these lands for generations that have now lasted just over a decade.

To be clear, this was a voluntary agreement. But some rancher lease owners did not agree to this voluntary settlement and so will continue operations through their current lease agreement with the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Ranchers, working with the Nature Conservancy, will now begin to work toward phasing out current operations. This includes partnering to ensure that families living on the land, many of whom are employees of the ranchers who made this agreement, are given a fair payout. Ranchers will also help find housing to ensure they do not leave their West Marin community.

“It’s going to present challenges for the local community that are economic, that maybe involve the viability of our local schools, a whole bunch of things that we’re going to need to acknowledge and find ways to come together and work on as a community,” said member of Congress Jared Huffman at a town hall Jan. 11 at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station. “So I do support the deal…but I do it in a clear-eyed and sober way.”

Once this process is complete, key changes will begin in the park. The Nature Conservancy, which voluntarily helped in the mediation process and has been appreciated by both sides of this conflict, along with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, will start a conservation and land management process to help preserve and care for this newly de-agriculturalized land. 

What’s more, the herds of tule elk, a native species that was introduced to the area now called Tomales Point in 1978 and to Limantour in 1998, will be managed as a free-ranging herd. This likely means that the elk fence, which has also been a particularly divisive public conflict in the West Marin community, will be augmented. Hence, the elk will be free to roam as far as the seashore, which is more than at any time since their reintroduction. 

Elk Issues

Since their return, the tule elk have been the centerpiece of many disputes in Point Reyes National Seashore, with ranchers claiming they are encroaching and damaging their land while having the potential to be harbingers of disease and taking up food resources from their cattle. Conservationists contend that the elk’s impact on the land, compared with cattle, is far lighter and shouldn’t be a concern for ranchers or the land. This will no longer be an issue, as the elk have essentially won.

“It’s the only National Park where [tule elk] occur,” said Jeff Miller, senior conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity and one of the plaintiffs in the settlement, speaking in a phone interview. “They’re an emblem of the grassland ecosystem out there. They’re a surrogate for the health of the native grasslands.”

According to the amended management plan, the area that will no longer have cattle will be managed as a Scenic Landscape Zone. This would mean that the tule elk could inhabit this new area, and Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, along with the Nature Conservancy, would help manage the rewilded lands. 

The Future

This will pose some initial and prolonged challenges for the future. While it is true that cattle and other domesticated farm animals consume and graze down much of the native vegetation in an area where they live, harming natural ecosystems and hurting native species, they also help contribute to reducing the chances of large wildfires breaking out in the park itself by eating what might otherwise remain on the land during dry seasons, ready to burn.

The Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria Nation, working with the Point Reyes National Seashore and the Nature Conservancy, will likely use localized grazing by rented cattle, complemented by additional prescribed burns in the park. 

The grazing, in particular, used in smaller areas and not for commercial use, will help reduce the fuel loads and, therefore, wildfire risk while preserving the current natural beauty of the area. Similar grazing is done at the ecological center in Sonoma County, Pepperwood Preserve.

“So there will be grazing in these new conservation leases,” said Miller. “And the difference is it’s not going to be commercial grazing…They’re basically grazing to achieve these ecological effects.”

Miller pointed out that the grazing will not be year-round but seasonal.

“This is a pretty epic chapter in the history of Point Reyes,” he noted. “This agreement, I think, allows a different management approach. And the thing I’m most excited about is the opportunity to expand the tule elk herds.” 

Miller also mentioned their brush with extinction in the 1800s and how larger herds could help protect tule elk populations across the state.

This settlement was a voluntary mediation agreement between local ranching families and the plaintiffs of the Resource Renewal Institute, Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project. Due to the process requiring all involved to sign non-disclosure agreements (a customary practice in mediation) and the lack of public input because of this, many in the community have been angered and saddened by the news and their inability to contribute to the discussion. They have shared their frustration online, in the comments of Instagram posts and Facebook groups, as well as at the local town hall on Jan. 11. 

“I see this as the problem: Eleven families get enough money to go out and buy a house or try to make a life somewhere else, and everybody else has to weather the damage that results from that,” said Kevin Lunny, rancher and part of the mediation and settlement agreement, at the town hall.

Make no mistake that while the overarching goal of the National Park Service is to protect lands and heritage sites, and while this agreement was voluntary, meaning the ranch owners signed and consented to this mediation ending in this agreement, what the ranchers were giving up were multi-generational ranches—their homes and culture. 

Many of us who watch from the sidelines and hear of these legal disputes might marvel at community members’ drama and emotional outpouring. However, what they are losing, regardless of whether one agrees with their decision to do so or not, is a place they have called home for generations. In other words, no part of this decision was easy for them.

“I couldn’t even tell my dad about this decision when it was time. He’s 94 years old. He lives next door on the ranch, still helps with the cows,” Lunny said. 

Later, voicing his frustrations with the process, he openly wondered, “We give up our home, our identity, in exchange for a dollar amount. I’m not saying that we aren’t getting anything. But there was a give on the rancher side, and I want to hear about the give on the plaintiff’s side.”

Speaking on the recent settlement, Michael Bell, protection strategy director for the Nature Conservancy, said, “There was just this underlying conflict that was getting stronger and stronger over the years. And really, this current litigation in question is just a symptom. It’s just one manifestation of this longer conflict.”

This, in many respects, is true. In the creation of the park itself in 1962, the ranchers were given 25-30 year-long leases to engender compromise with the ranchers and the Sierra Club, who, at the time, both wanted to protect the land from development. 

At the end of those leases, ranching could end on the seashore. As known, this did not happen. Over the years, conservationists’ desire for more wildlands placed them more and more against the ranchers and farmers in the seashore—in conflicts arising from oyster farms to tule elk fences and the ranches themselves. The settlement is just a piece of the years of conflict between these two groups, which have starkly different ideas of what should be done with this land. 

However, as climate change has dramatically worsened over time, with severe drought contributing to the closure of McClure’s Ranch in 2021, there is a very real question of how long many of these places would have lasted into the future. As droughts last longer, and as winter storms get all the more ferocious, muddying and damaging the grazing land, many ranchers in the greater Marin and Sonoma region will have to wonder about how well they can still successfully tend to the land in this way.

Change on Horizon

Whatever led to this agreement behind the closed doors of mediation, one thing is sure: The landscape of Point Reyes National Seashore will look very different in the coming years. We don’t know precisely what these ranching areas will one day look like, possibly teaming with elk, new woodlands or coyote brush chaparral, bringing their particular beauty, excitement and challenges to the land and communities that live beside it. 

For some, this marks a day of hope for remedying the ecological damage Europeans caused centuries ago to these lands. For others, it is a complete gutting of a beloved history, livelihood and culture that might never be seen again.