By Valentin Kostelnik

Tule Elk in Point Reyes

By Valentin Kostelnik

On the windswept coastal bluffs of Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS), you can see an animal few would expect just an hour and a half north of San Francisco: Tule elk! Yet, these beautiful creatures are at the heart of fierce public and legal controversy because they share the park with several private ranches. Ten elk were relocated to Point Reyes in the 90s, and the population is now at around 500 today. But because a third of the Seashore is leased by cattle ranchers who have been here for a hundred years, the elk’s habitat is restricted to the original 2,600-acre fenced-in plot and two smaller areas of coastal prairie. As California’s droughts become more severe, the restricted herds are unable to move to other areas in the park with better food and year-round water. In 2020 alone, 152 tule elk starved to death behind the fence, prompting massive public and legal backlash even before the park announced its plan to extend the rancher’s leases another 20 years.

Why does the park defend the ranches so adamantly? It is partly because of the ranches’ deep roots in the land, and partly because of ranchers’ claims that they were instrumental in the creation of the park 60 years ago when urban development threatened the entire seashore.

Ranching in Point Reyes began with Mexican cattle ranches in the early 19th century, but the first large dairy operations that the park is famous for today were begun by Vermonters in 1857. James and Oscar Shafter, both lawyers from Vermont based out of San Francisco, saw an opportunity to market high-quality dairy products

to clientele in the Bay Area. Their dairy enterprise was the largest in California for decades, but competition from other parts of the state came at the same time environmental degradation took its toll. It turns out that indigenous burning and tule elk grazing were crucial in maintaining the rolling green grasslands that made the massive Point Reyes dairy operation so successful, and when shrubs started reclaiming the land, the ex-Vermonters couldn’t compete financially with dairies in other parts of the state. Their monopoly fractured in the early 20th century as smaller ranches bought the land. Descendants of these ranchers still operate the beef and dairy ranches that are so controversial today and were the center of another crisis in the 1960s. Spurred on by a rapidly developing Bay Area, real estate developers started eying the vast expanse of beautiful, undeveloped coastlines only an hour and a half from San Francisco. One of the places they came Tule elk beside the Tomales Point fence. Photo closest to developing was Licourtesy of Jack Gescheidt. mantour Beach, now a popular tourist destination and home to 143 Tule elk. Visitors to Limantour can find, nestled among the remote, elk-studded, windswept sand dunes, a 1960s-style model home showing how close Point Reyes came to urbanization. The classic story, as recounted by many guidebooks and the National Seashore website, is one of cooperation and compromise between passionate lawmakers and ranchers, united by a common drive to preserve Point Reyes’s natural beauty from looming urbanization. A law

passed in 1962 and signed by President Kennedy created and preserved the National Seashore, while also explicitly allowing the land to be leased to agricultural operations. It is a story of opposing values finding a middle ground to save the natural beauty of Point Reyes, but its validity is being called into question today.

Depending on who you ask, Tule elk have either been on the land forever or arrived too recently to take precedence over ranching. Once, 500,000 elk roamed the grasslands of California and created rolling prairies just as bison did on the Great Plains. Just as the bison were hunted to near-extinction on the Great Plains, though, the elk didn’t long survive white settlement. By the 1870s, only 27 tule elk remained in the world, protected by a rancher in Southern California named Henry Miller. A tortured century of failed reintegration followed for the elk, and in 1969 only a few hundred lived in 3 herds around the state. Then, in the same decade that Point Reyes was established, California stated its desire to rebuild the population of Tule elk around the state and moved to establish new Tule elk herds wherever possible. One of those places was the former dairy ranch of Solomon Pierce, a Vermonter who built a dairy industry at Tomales Point in Point Reyes in the 19th century.

Tomales Point is a long, thin peninsula of rolling coastal prairie at the northern tip of Point Reyes. At its base, the Park built a 3-mile-long, 8 ft. tall woven-wire fence to create a 2,600-acre sanctuary, then moved in 10 tule elk. The population grew rapidly, and in 1998, the park moved 28 elk to an unfenced area near Limantour beach, where they thrived. Later, several elk swam across to nearby Drake’s Beach and began a new herd, creating the three present-day herds of Point Reyes: the Tomales Point, Limantour area, and Drake’s Beach herds.

Statewide elk populations have rebounded to over 5,000, and in Point Reyes today, there are about 500 elk. The Point Reyes tule elk population is far from stable, however, and fluctuates wildly in drought years. The fenced-in Tomales Point herd, which is by far the largest, is particularly vulnerable. The Tomales herd peaked in 2007 with 585 elk living beyond the fence, then plummeted to 283 in 2015 after a historic drought. Spurred on by the lawsuits that followed the 2015 die-offs, the Park agreed to draft a new General Management Plan to deal with the Tule elk. This is the plan that has angered environmentalists so much in the last few years, in which the park announced it intended to extend ranch leases by twenty years and cull the herds. This led to the Harvard Animal Law and Policy Clinic suing the Park over the Tomales Point elk fence. The lead plaintiff is Jack Gescheidt, and the defendant is Deb Haaland. I interviewed Mr. Gescheidt a week after their case had its first day in federal court, in Oakland, CA.

To Jack Gescheidt, the matter is plain: Point Reyes is public, protected land, and the Park Service’s job is to manage the land for maximum ecosystem health and natural beauty. Regarding the ranches, he claims: “there shouldn’t be any industry allowed in a national park that is taking up a third of the land, is the number one source of land pollution, water pollution, and air pollution [in the form of methane], and harms the very land it claims to be a protected environment. If protected land is exposed to pollutants, in this case, millions of pounds of manure and urine, why have protected the land at all? Cows are only there for profit. It’s a destructive industry.”

His claim is well supported by the law that created the Seashore, which states: “[Point Reyes] shall be administered…without impairment of its natural values, in a manner which provides for such recreational, educational, historic preservation, interpretation, and scientific research opportunities as are consistent with, based upon, and supportive of the maximum protection, restoration, and preservation of the natural environment within the area.”

Does the Park’s policy towards ranching break this mandate? The strongest arguments against ranching are that it confines the elk, degrades the land, and pollutes park waterways. Gescheidt says cattle in Point Reyes dump “millions of pounds of manure and urine” on the pastures, and a lot of this runs off into nearby streams and bays. Water samples in January 2021 found that streams draining from pastureland contain 20-40x as much E. coli as health regulations allow and high levels of Enterococcus, a bacterium harmful to humans. The Park is trying to mitigate the runoff, but new 2021-2022 water testing shows fecal contamination of waterways is still ongoing.

The same law mandating the preservation of the natural environment also allowed for ranching. It states: “where appropriate in the discretion of the Secretary, he or she may lease federally owned land…which was agricultural land prior to its acquisition.” But when it was written ranchers hadn’t yet sold their land to the park yet and wouldn’t have if they weren’t allowed to stay. Therefore, one of the main pro-ranching arguments is that the Park couldn’t exist without the ranchers’ consent.

But, this was 50 years ago, and today, Point Reyes is protected. If ranching is harmful today, should the Park honor its past commitments? Should it try to compromise and allow them to coexist, or choose one over the other?

Even environmentalists are divided over these ques-

tions. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the Park over ranching, while the Sierra Club came out in favor of ranching. The Marin Conservation League announced, “the Comprehensive Ranch Management Plan demonstrates that ranching on the seashore can be sustainable and complement the PRNS’s other values. It is my understanding that the environmentalists’ (Center for Biological Diversity and others) lawsuit would stop this process and we don’t want that to happen. Ranching is a vital part of the West Marin community.”

This leads to the second main pro-ranching argument: ranching is an important cultural and economic foundation of the Point Reyes area. The area is protected from urbanization, but it is still threatened by expansion from the Bay Area. It’s the same story that played out in Aspen and Southern Vermont.

Attracted by the quiet landscape and sense of community, many rich people from the Bay Area have bought vacation homes in small towns near the Seashore. Local landlords realized they could turn a higher profit by renting to short-term customers (via Airbnb) rather than long-term residents, causing steadily declining school enrollments and a shrinking population. The population of Bolinas, a nearby town, was 1,600 in 2010 and just 1,100 in 2019. I have personally witnessed several large families forced out, no longer able to afford the rising cost of living.

Within this changing demographic, 17 ranches and the supporting families still work and live in Point Reyes National Seashore. They make up one of the only local industries not based wholly on tourism left in the area, and currently produce roughly 20% of Marin’s agricultural products. Point Reyes dairies have remained viable in part by producing very high-quality cheeses bought by city-dwellers of the Bay Area, who love the cheese for its exceptional flavor. Cheesemakers claim the superior quality of their products is due to the long growing season, temperature, and refreshing salty ocean air of Point Reyes; all reasons tourists and second homers love the Seashore.

The tensions at the heart of this conflict are playing out all over the United States in different forms. The primary tension is between human uses like ranching, and preservation or restoration of the land. The Point Reyes National Seashore celebrates the return of tule elk, saying: “The majestic animals you see as you travel through the park embody the restoration of the dominant native herbivore to the California coastal ecosystem. They shape the landscape around them as they did for centuries before they were extirpated by humans. They symbolize the conservation of native species and ecosystem processes, one of the primary missions of the National Park Service.”

There are two visions of what Point Reyes could be: a pristine wilderness without any human use beyond tourism, or a place used by ranchers living off the land, using the grasslands to support local communities. Can the two versions coexist? The Marin Conservation League says yes, that the Park’s new plan “demonstrates that ranching on the seashore can be sustainable and complement the PRNS’s other values.”

Jack Gescheidt says, “They are diametrically opposed land uses. One sequesters carbon, and values wildlife, the other does the exact opposite, killing wildlife, denuding the land, destroying the environment, all for profit. It’s one or the other, you can’t do both.” Gescheidt’s lawsuit against the Park coincides with another lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Resource Renewal Institute, and the Western Watersheds Project, that could remove ranching from Point Reyes if the court decides in their favor.

In a tense battle over how we value our public lands, the court must decide between the two versions of Point Reyes: one that prioritizes nature over human-use, and one that attempts a compromise. Should it announce the end of ranches in Point Reyes and allow the restoration of its elk and grasslands, or support the families whose deep-rooted work on the land supports the fading local communities? H

Tule elk on Tomales Point. Photo courtesy of Jack Gescheidt.