Point Reyes agreement shows politics of privilege in action – Marin Independent Journal

Ansel Adams, the venerated photographer of America’s national parks and wild lands famously remarked, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” He would make the same observation today.

Despite an alarming recent report by the United Nations that humanity has only a decade to avert a climate disaster, the National Park Service has succeeded in its long-contested plan to perpetuate commercial beef and dairy at Point Reyes in the only national seashore on the Pacific Coast.

We are now experiencing firsthand the impacts that scientists have been warning about for decades. We have record high temperatures and extreme drought — the worst in more than a century. There is less and less water to ensure the basic function of ecosystems.

The park service projects sea levels to rise three feet by the year 2100 at Point Reyes National Seashore, while allowing some 5,000 cattle to feed off the park. The cattle are by far the largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the park, more than that of cars that deliver more than 2 million visitors every year.

Over objections expressed in the comments of many Americans, the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior have rededicated 28,000 acres of national park land to the use and benefit of an entitled few. It’s not clear what the public gets out of the deal that Point Reyes Superintendent Craig Kenkel claims, “strikes the right balance.”

Kenkel, a 38-year employee of the park service, came to Point Reyes in the final days of the Trump administration by way of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where he oversaw park lands leased out to farmers.

As the closer on the Point Reyes ranching plan, Kenkel’s appears to have been charged with convincing us that the outcome of the yearslong performative planning process is something other than what ranchers had demanded all along. They got what they wanted: 20-year, non-competitive leases for ranchers and their offspring, as well as allowing them to diversify their income streams while mandating fewer elk.

This process — which cost millions of taxpayer dollars — incited thousands of public comments, inspired hundreds of scientists (as well as other experts and stakeholder organizations) to write letters and led more than 100,000 people to sign petitions opposing the plan.

I believe the plan is neither scientific nor balanced. It offers no economic rationale for the subsidies that keep these marginal private ranches operating on these public lands.

Rep. Jared Huffman, who serves on numerous House caucuses — including those in support of national parks, safe climate, water, labor and working families, Native Americans and the California coast — is well positioned to be a champion for Point Reyes National Seashore, which touches on all of those issues.

But Huffman claims that the two-dozen ranches deserve to remain in the park — preferably forever —  because they are “historic.”

His argument for preserving what is “historic” in Point Reyes might be more credible but for the thousands of years of Coast Miwok presence virtually erased from the park service’s version of the region’s history.