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The Battle of Drakes Estero

By Jake de Grazia

Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
Master of Arts (SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)
University of Southern California

May 2017

2

Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3
DEDICATION 4
THE BATTLE OF DRAKES ESTERO, PART ONE: THE ESSAY 5
THE BATTLE OF DRAKES ESTERO, PART TWO: MEMO TO THE EDITORS 14
APPENDIX I: A TRANSCRIPT OF THE COREY GOODMAN-FOCUSED RADIO
STORY THAT I DRAFTED BUT ABANDONED FOR FEAR OF BEING WRONG 68
APPENDIX II: A VERSION OF THE STORY I WROTE FOR A FRIENDLY WRITING
CLASS BUT ABANDONED FOR FEAR OF BEING WRONG 75
APPENDIX III: A ROUGH CUT OF A DOCUMENTARY THAT I’LL PROBABLY NEVER
MAKE (FOR FEAR OF BEING WRONG) 91
APPENDIX IV: MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT A NOVEL OUTLINE 92
APPENDIX V: MY RESPONSE THE GORDON BENNETT EMAIL IN WHICH HE
ASKED ME TO APOLOGISE FOR “BEING (AT A MINIMUM) USED TO FACILITATE”
COREY GOODMAN’S PERJURY ACCUSATION 97

BIBLIOGRAPHY 99

3

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who taught me things about Drakes Estero, the Point Reyes
National Seashore, wilderness law, the oyster business, and the politics of
environmentalism.

Thanks to everyone who helped me get this thing done: Sandy Tolan, Kenny Turan,
Gabe Kahn, Larry Pryor, Dennis Hedgecock, Stephan McCormick, Nick Cruz, my sister
Giuliana de Grazia, and my wife Lauren Whaley.

And thanks to Lauren and our son Malcolm for encouraging to me to take time away
from them and devoting it instead to dragging these words—kicking, screaming, and
clawing for handholds—out of my brain.

4

Dedication
This document is dedicated to my uncle Kim, a bigger, wilder, more tropical Kevin
Lunny.

5
The Battle of Drakes Estero, Part One: The Essay

Not long ago, there was an oyster farm in Drakes Estero, a stunningly beautiful lagoon
on the foggy, jagged mid-California coast, about a 90-minute drive north of San
Francisco. The federal government shut the farm down in 2015. The disagreement
leading up to the shutdown was intense. Hard feelings abounded, as they do when
people argue passionately about work and honesty and money and politics. The stakes
were high and they felt deeply personal for people on both sides. The hard feelings
raised the stakes further. The argument became a battle. And people feared for their
safety.

The United States of America owns Drakes Estero. The National Park Service manages
it as part of the Point Reyes National Seashore. In November of 2012, the Drakes Bay
Oyster Company’s permit to run their business in the lagoon came up for renewal.

Some of the farmers’ environmentalist neighbors wanted the lagoon to become a fully
legally protected wilderness.
1
They joined forces with the Park Service and national
conservation groups to advocate against renewal, and they convinced the Secretary of
the Interior to let the permit expire.

The farmers, in an attempt to save the business, led a persuasive, well-funded
campaign in protest of the decision. They put together a professional-grade volunteer
legal team. They worked with a dissonant combination of political allies that included
both longtime California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein and loudly anti-
establishment Republican Representative Darrell Issa.
2
They rallied neighbors to their
cause, most of whom identify as both environmentalists and liberals. And, as the fight
wore on, they embraced—albeit sometimes reluctantly—support from anti-government
advocates and conspiracy theorists, professional and amateur, local and national. The
friends of the oyster company didn’t always get along, but they agreed on one important
point: The people arguing for wilderness over aquaculture in Drakes Estero had lied and
cheated to get the outcome they wanted.

What happened in the Estero between 2004 and 2015 is a story about shellfish
cultivation and wilderness law. It’s a story about angry local politics and fringey national
politics.

1
The “DEFINITION OF WILDERNESS” section of the Wilderness Act of 1964 begins with the following sentence: “A
wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby
recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a
visitor who does not remain.”
2
Issa has been such a persistent Obama antagonist in Congress that the President traveled to Issa’s district during
the 2016 campaign in a surprising and nearly successful attempt to unseat him.
6
Former FOX News anchor Gretchen Carlson interviewed oyster company owner Kevin
Lunny on Fox & Friends in late 2012. The three-minute segment
3
opened with a smokey
graveyard-themed animation culminating in huge blocky golden letters reading, “THE
DEATH OF FREE ENTERPRISE.” When Gretchen, looking and sounding worried,
asked, "So the Interior Department wants to shut you down. Why?," Kevin framed the
conflict as advocates for a "human-less landscape” working to dismantle a “working
landscape.”

Kevin speaks slowly, deliberately. He’s calm, composed, even a little bit upbeat. He
presents as a happy warrior, someone who either knows he's right, knows how to "act
natural" on TV, or both.

With or without Fox News’s cartoon hyperbole, it’s not hard to see the fight over Drakes
Estero as a classic big-government-tramples-small-business story.

Sometimes feistily independent Americans bump into the cold political messiness of
bureaucratic federal government decision-making. That's a reality of the size of our
democracy and the diverse and competing interests that steer our leaders. And, right or
wrong, Davids usually lose to Goliaths. Our federal government is big and clumsy and
dangerous to whatever small things happen to be in its path. When ordinary people put
up a fight, though, it's easy to root for them, especially if you're a conservative looking to
shrink and limit the powers of the federal government.

The primary action of this story ended more than a year ago. There aren't any more
oyster racks, oyster boats, or oyster workers in Drakes Estero. The Lunny family still
owns the name Drakes Bay Oyster Company, but they're shellfish distributors now, not
producers. And Drakes Estero is a different place, a quieter place.

From the sky, the Estero looks like what remains after a giant sea witch reached her
knobby right talon out of the ocean and sunk her fingers into the coastal cow pastures of
the Point Reyes National Seashore. The southern tip of the four-bayed lagoon is a
narrow opening into a half moon of calm Pacific water called Drakes Bay.
4
A stumpy
little peninsula dangles a couple of miles out to sea, absorbing the pounding ocean
swells and protecting the delicate maze of sandbars and channels that lead into the
Estero from Bay.

When I first visited Drakes Estero, the oyster farm was in danger but defiant. It was 7:30
on a cold, grey, late January morning. The first thing I noticed was the first of the
company’s American flags: a leaning aluminum pole holding loose, gently swaying folds
over the cattle guard that interrupts the farm’s unpaved driveway.

3
You can find the video here: http://causeofaction.org/kevin-lunny-on-fox-friends/. Cause of Action was, for a
time, the Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s most active legal ally. That relationship soured when Cause of Action’s
deep and unapologetic conservatism manifested itself in an attack against a PBS News Hour story about the
conflict. Here is a link to the somewhat apologetic letter Kevin Lunny wrote to PBS:
http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ca/Lunnyletter.pdf.
4
Allegedly, the much-mythologized British Empire sea captain Sir Francis Drake stopped and rested there while
circumnavigating the world.
7

The hard, sandy, quarter-mile track runs along the eastern edge of the tidal wetlands
that separate Drakes Estero’s northernmost bay from the streams, ranches, and high
speed, well-paved country road to the inland north.

I parked in a grassy public lot just east of the witch’s middle fingernail and walked
toward the water. I passed a standard issue National Park long drop outhouse and a
tiny crumbling shed full of buckets and shells. A white egret was hunting just below the
tideline, and the early morning was so quiet, I could hear the underwater mud slurp with
the bird’s every deliberate step.

My destination was an old, deep-bellied motorboat powered by a 40-horsepower
outboard engine. A few minutes after eight, I climbed over the tall, seagull shit-streaked
gunwales with Sean Lunny and five of his colleagues. Sean is one of Kevin Lunny's
triplets. The kids, 24 when I first visited in early 2013, had been working at the oyster
farm since they were in high school. Sean always preferred planting and harvesting to
taking orders for customers in the Oyster Shack. He started rubbing his hands together
for warmth as soon as he sat down in the boat, and someone suggested he retire his
tattered flannel overshirt. Grumbling, he said he’d wear it until it fell off, pulled his knit
cap tighter over his ears and eyebrows, and blew warm air into his fists.

Dampening the conversation was the steady whine of the motor and the backbeat rattle
of one of the workers’ blue-handled fillet knives scraping the edge of a plastic milk crate.

Kevin Lunny and his brothers bought the oyster company in 2004. Kevin, his wife
Nancy, and his parents work the cattle ranch just north of the Estero; their pasture runs
right to the water's edge. Their longtime neighbors, the Johnsons, had been struggling
to keep the oyster farm running since old man Charlie died. Charlie built the cultivation
infrastructure in the lagoon. He learned his system working on farms in Japan in the
1950s. Farmers developed the production process there in the early 1800s.

The Lunnys didn't change much when they took over. Like the Johnsons and the
Japanese before them, the Lunnys grew their crop by helping tiny larval oysters called
“spat” affix themselves to empty half-shells, stringing the “inoculated” shells between
black spacer tubes on bent steel rods, and hanging those “strings” on “racks” in the
cold, clear channels in the Estero. Johnson and his employees fashioned the racks out
of cut telephone poles and two by fours, nailed together in imperfect rectangles about
four times as long as they were wide. At high tide, the wooden structures poked just
above the Estero surface.

As we approached the first set of racks, two of the workers leapt onto the barge we
were dragging and started cutting the plastic bands that held the freshly-prepared steel
strings in bundles of five. Before we’d come to a full stop, all six of my boatmates had
started planting and harvesting, emptying the barge of its infant cargo and filling it up
again, rattling thump by rattling thump, with strings they’d planted twelve months earlier.
As they heaved each piece of bent metal out of the calm, dark water, grey and brown
tiger-striped shell clusters glistened, and a flapping mess of seaweed, minnows, crabs,
8
and baby eels exploded in every direction. Between thumps was a frantic wriggling and
splashing, as the tiny marooned creatures flipped and scampered toward the edges of
the barge, racing the fat, screeching seagulls, who gulped down everything they could
catch.

We spent about two hours at the racks that morning and another 45 minutes on the
mudflats, where the workers hauled black mesh bags out of the shallows and onto the
barge. The thick plastic containers were packed with older individual oysters and placed
neatly in rows for a final few months of growth and beautification.

On the short motor back to the dock, Sean told me what he and his family were facing.
“We want to be on our best behavior,” he said, “show that we respect the rules, respect
the water, respect the estuary. But it's hard to enjoy it out here with the government
trying to run us out.”

There are a number of competing theories on why Secretary Salazar and his Interior
Department colleagues chose not to renew the company's permit. All of them in some
way involve the rare, vaguely-defined legal land use status of Drakes Estero: “potential
wilderness.”

In concluding the seven-page memo announcing his decision not to renew, Salazar said
he was honoring “Congress's direction to ‘steadily continue to remove all obstacles to
the eventual conversion of these lands and waters to wilderness status.’” Salazar saw
the the farm as an obstacle to preserving the Estero “for the enjoyment of future
generations of the American public, for whom Point Reyes National Seashore was
created.” Salazar ended the memo with a quote from President Lyndon Johnson on his
signing of the Wilderness Act in 1964: "If future generations are to remember us with
gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles
of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning,
not just after we got through with it."

People in Point Reyes were divided before Salazar's decision, and the anger heated up
as the legal battle broke out immediately after. Tess Elliott is the editor of the Point
Reyes Light, a weekly newspaper that covers the Point Reyes National Seashore and
surrounding communities. I interviewed her in The Light’s tiny, cluttered headquarters in
Inverness, California in September 2014, about six weeks after the oyster company’s
teary last day of retail operations. The paper shares a building with a post office and an
upscale seafood restaurant in Inverness’s five-maybe-six-business downtown. "You’ve
heard, and everybody’s written that neighbors don’t talk to neighbors," said Tess, "that
Kevin grew up with certain people on the Point, and now they won’t shake his hand.”

Tess said The Light has published “hundreds of articles, editorials, letters, opinion
pieces” about the conflict since 2007, when the National Park Service first accused the
oyster company of causing major harm to harbor seals in the Estero. “A lot of people get
really tired of it,” she said, “and a lot of people also feel that we are biased.”

9
Wilderness advocates and Park Service supporters believe Tess and her colleagues
treated local scientists unfairly in criticizing their conclusions and motivations. Tess
acknowledges that The Light’s reporting and analysis was tough on the Park Service
and their allies, but she considered it her paper’s duty to present what their
investigations uncovered. “It’s very difficult mentally and emotionally,” she said, “to be
coming out with an article that is going to upset and really in a pretty fundamental way
question certain people’s integrity.” And she points out that “it’s been difficult to
adequately in the eyes of readers represent the [pro-wilderness] side because people
just won’t grant us interviews, so we have to just use whatever we can, whatever we
have.”

My own attempts to connect with and fully understand the wilderness advocates were
similar to Tess’s. One of the three primary local voices belongs to former international
soy milk entrepreneur Gordon Bennett. I interviewed him in 2013 on a public bench
behind the more expensive of the two grocery stores in downtown Point Reyes Station.
He was focused, deliberate, guarded, and clearly a little bit nervous. His argument felt
intuitively right: something labeled “potential wilderness” should at some point become
wilderness proper. “It's nothing against mariculture,” said Gordon, “nothing against Mr.
Lunny, nothing against any of that. It's just that this is a place set aside for no
commercial activity.”

I asked him why wilderness was an important cause to fight for. "I've said many times
and people have laughed at me, but I'll say it again,” he told me. “For me it's a kind of
church. And I think for many people it's a kind of a church. And when you're dealing with
your day to day activities and day to day upsets, and maybe some are significant upsets
maybe with work or your family, it's very quieting to go out there in that spot and just
commune with nature. It's very calming, just a great experience. Very hard to do, in my
opinion, when Mr. Lunny's motorboats are running around in the Estero. It makes it a
different experience. I'm not saying it's a bad experience for everyone. Some people
don’t mind the motorboats. But Congress intended some spots to not have the sound of
motorboats and not have commercial activities and be places of quiet and
contemplation, and that's why I like it.”

About a year later, I went for a long walk along the grassy bluffs overlooking the Estero
with Corey Goodman, a local neurobiologist and venture capitalist and one of Gordon's
fiercest adversaries. Corey wrote about our adventure for The Light, and Gordon saw
my name in the paper, leading him to reject my next attempt to interview him. His email
was full of anger. Here’s how it ended:

I deeply suspect, whether you understand it or not, that your "invitation" is yet
another DBOC
5
agitprop effort and thus I respectfully decline to participate. Your
apparent "innocence" is too dangerous for me and my family to be associated
with.

5
Drakes Bay Oyster Company
10
Gordon felt that I was trying to trap him into a conversation that I would use against him
and, by extension, against Drakes Estero. He seemed paranoid.

People who supported the oyster farm were similarly on edge. They didn’t suspect
reporters of collusion with their opponents or consider us un-knowing puppets. Instead
they feared the anger they sensed in Gordon and his allies. There was a rumor going
around the pro-oyster crowd in 2014, for example, that one of the wilderness advocates
had said that she “wouldn't be satisfied” until Kevin Lunny was destitute and
panhandling on the street in San Francisco.

Tess the Point Reyes Light editor told me the National Park Service supporters’ angry
tone and rhetoric was downright scary. "There’s really a dark streak of energy in them
and their arguments," she said. "There is some hatred that’s been generated and
cultivated. It comes out in small ways, but those small gestures can make people feel
really unsafe."

Farm ally Corey Goodman, for example, told me his wife "sees other people on the
other side get so obsessed, and she sees the venom, and she worries sometimes that
someone's gonna take out a gun and shoot me."

Tess got giggly when I brought that up in our interview. She could tell that I thought it
sounded absurd, and she agreed that it was in some ways absurd. But, when I asked
how extreme the anger was, she said, "Did you hear that a deputy told Kevin that there
were people trying to kill him? That he should watch out? There was that too. That’s
another thing. Kevin was warned by the sheriff’s deputies to watch out"—the giggling
continued—"because there was money on his head."

I couldn't help but laugh nervously along with her. "I’ve wondered," Tess added, "like,
should I worry also about my safety?"

Corey thinks the anger stemmed from the intensity of the wilderness advocates' belief in
the righteousness of their cause: “There's a group of people that are so intent on quote
‘wilderness’ that to them the ends justify the means. And I would say to you: Look back
through the entire history of our species, of humans. Any time anybody gets to be such
a true believer that they believe that the ends justify the means, that has been the
reason for most of the horrible things that have gone on in human history.”

The more time I spent with the story, the more warmth and openness I felt from the
Lunnys and their friends, and the more frustrated I felt by the wilderness advocates’
refusal to engage. I witnessed less than 100% honest behavior on both sides. I saw
dangerous political forces rallying in support of the oyster company. But I saw
calculated dishonesty from their opponents. For me, the smoking gun suggesting that,
to the wilderness advocates, their ends really do justify their means, was one
advocate’s use of the word "endangered" to whip up a frenzy of environmentalist rage.

Before Secretary Salazar made his decision to let the oyster company's permit expire,
Neal Desai, then the associate director of the Pacific Region for the National Parks
11
Conservation Association and one of Gordon Bennett's most outspoken allies, sent a
note to the people who subscribe to NPCA's email newsletter, urging them to tell the
National Park Service that "national park wilderness is for wildlife and public enjoyment,
not private commercial use." Neal's email reminded NPCA supporters why they should
help him fight to remove the Drakes Bay Oyster Company from Drakes Estero.

"Drakes Estero," wrote Neal, "is home to several endangered plants and animals,
including eelgrass, harbor seals, and birds including Black Brant and Great Egrets."

That language is misleading. “Endangered” is a scientific classification most of us learn
in elementary school, and “endangered species,” as all environmentalist children know,
are at high risk of extinction. Eelgrass, harbor seals, Black Brant geese, and Great
Egrets, according to scientific consensus, are all at the lowest measured risk of
extinction: “Least Concern.”

When I asked Neal about the email, he evaded. He told me he wasn't sure what I was
talking about. "I send lots of emails," he said.

Neal’s memory was sharper when talking to Michael Ames for a Harper’s story
published in January 2013.
6
He stood by what he wrote. He chose the adjective
"endangered," he said, to communicate that those plants and animals "are at risk of
harm."

Neal is a professional environmental activist. He gets paid to communicate strategic
messages. His email went out to hundreds of thousands of donors to conservation
efforts. Extinction is a big deal both ecologically and ethically, and “endangered” is an
alarming word to those donors, whose shared environmentalist worldview includes a
mandate to work to prevent extinctions. The word “endangered" motivates
environmentalists to act, and Neal wanted political action. I consider that a cynical way
to operate and fundamentally disrespectful of all actually endangered species.

I worry that I’ve come to that conclusion in part because I’ve grown to personally like
Kevin Lunny and many of his supporters. I'm comforted, however, by the fact that Tess
has also wrestled with her attraction to the warmth and kindness on the oyster farm side
of the conflict. “The personalities are very compelling,” she told me, “and not just Kevin
and Nancy. I have a lot of admiration for them. I’ve never felt misled by them. I haven’t
felt used by them at all. I have a positive feeling about any time I’ve voiced my support
for their continuation.”

Other environmentalist voices on the subject—Michael Pollan’s for example—comfort
me as well. In a letter to Senator Feinstein, Pollan, one of the world’s best respected
food production journalists, explained why he was supporting the oyster company’s
efforts to stay open:

6
“The West Coast Oyster War” (http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/the-west-coast-oyster-war/)
12
It is a farm that actually contributes to the health of its ecosystem, demonstrating
a crucial lesson for our times: That the relationship between humanity and the
land need not be a zero sum one, but rather that, when properly managed, the
two can nourish one another. What an inspiring story for the Park Service to tell!

Instead, the Park Service has willfully twisted both history and science to
promote a fantasy of wilderness restoration in what is actually a beautiful semi-
domesticated landscape. It is one thing to insist that agriculture on Point Reyes
meet the highest standards of stewardship - it should - but to suggest that this is
impossible [is] to consign the place to being a museum to an idea rather than a
model for rethinking the relationship between people and the land.

Despite that argument and despite the political pressure Senator Feinstein tried to
muster, Secretary Salazar chose not to let the farm stay open. The Supreme Court
approved that decision in June of 2014. And, in the words of Neal Desai, "After more
than 40 years of waiting, the National Park Service can now rid Drakes Estero, a
picturesque inlet within Point Reyes National Seashore in California, of an industrial
oyster company that has been damaging the seashore’s natural resources for years."
7

Corey Goodman doesn't like how closely professional environmentalists worked with the
Park Service, how closely their talking points resemble local Congressman Jared
Huffman’s, how much influence he thinks they had over Secretary Salazar’s decision: “I
believe the Sierra Club is to the Democrats what the NRA is to the Republicans. They're
afraid to cross it.” Corey, like his nemesis Gordon Bennett, seems paranoid.

And I can't discount the possibility that I'm paranoid too. The night after documenting
the Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s last day of retail operations, my little film crew and I
went for a walk down a quiet country road in Bolinas, CA, about a thirty-minute drive
south of Drakes Estero. As we turned out of a wooded area and looked out over the
ocean, a bicyclist sped out of the darkness behind us and said something we couldn’t
quite understand. We looked at each other, acknowledged that we were all feeling a
little jumpy, and then laughed at ourselves. None of us slept well that night, and we
were happy to drive off the peninsula the next day. One of the things this story reminded
me is just how contagious paranoia can be.

Another reminder was that I have a hard time accepting a conflict’s outcome when I
don’t think the winners fought fairly. Had the Park Service and the wilderness advocates
argued honestly and described the farm shutdown as an unfortunate byproduct of our
federal government’s responsibility to occasionally value non-human stakeholders over
people, even good people, I could feel ok about that. I would be sad for the Lunny
family, of course, and for the dozens of proud, quiet, graceful planters, harvesters,
shuckers, and canners who worked for the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. But I don’t
think humans protect enough wilderness, and I don’t think enough of us share Gordon
Bennett’s reverence for it as a transformative and sacred space. If you stop and breathe

7
Note Neal's use of the word “industrial” to describe the oyster company. Like his use of "endangered," it was an
exaggeration, a dog whistle to concerned enviros.
13
and listen in the wilderness, you can feel the vastness of life on this planet, our great
power over it, and our great responsibility to learn to do our strange and brilliant human
things without destroying it.

As Michael Pollan noted, the oyster company was producing food without making a big
impact on the ecosystem in which it operated. They were doing it in a place set aside to
someday become wilderness. The question at the center of the battle of Drakes Estero
was when that legal transformation should begin.

By winning the battle, the wilderness advocates got what they wanted in the short term,
but, in my opinion, they have contributed to two significant long term problems. First,
they alienated the Lunnys and their supporters with their anger, driving some of them
into the opportunistic arms of Congressman Issa and other anti-government, anti-
environmental regulation activists. And second, by exaggerating the oyster farm’s
impact, they’ve damaged the credibility of honest forces for important environmental
protection, be they activists, legislators, or scientists. If, as a species, we’re going to
agree that we need to change our behavior and learn to live on this planet for as long as
possible, that credibility is far more important than the speed with which we convert our
“potential wilderness” to wilderness proper.

Drakes Estero is quieter now. It’s a more perfect place now for harbor seals to teach
their pups to swim and fish. In LBJ’s words, it’s now fully and completely “something
more than the miracles of technology.” The farm that moved out was a rare miracle,
though. Its value—educational, ecological, and cultural—wasn’t easy to quantify. It will
be missed, fondly, tearfully, and in some cases, angrily.

14
The Battle of Drakes Estero, Part Two: Memo to the Editors

One of the editors of this project suggested that I call this document a “memo to the
editors,” and I think that’s a reasonable way to characterize it.

It’s an organized collection of writings related to the small but quietly consequential
conflict I think of as The Battle of Drakes Estero. The chapters are reports,
conversations, and reflections I extracted, often with difficulty, from my memory, notes,
correspondence, and transcripts. The appendices are other attempts I made over the
past few years to bring clarity and structure to my thoughts about the story and my
experiences learning about it. You’ll see in the titles of those appendices how I felt
about their effectiveness.

What made this writing so daunting, I think, is that it required that I ask myself whose
personal integrity I question. I firmly believe that a huge percentage of destructive
human actions are far more accidental than not. They’re caused by ignorance or
carelessness or unintentional lack of empathy. Only rarely do people convince
themselves that ends justify self-consciously dishonest means. This conflict, I believe, is
one of those situations.

Before you dive in, please take a moment to consider one of President Obama’s takes
8

on his chosen successor’s stunning loss in the presidential election of 2016:

“An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly
the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the
Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy
theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has
accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very
difficult to have a common conversation.”

The Battle of Drakes Estero is a story about propaganda. Be careful what you believe.

8
From New Yorker editor David Remnick’s post-election check-in with President Obama
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency)
15

1. HELLO DRAKES ESTERO, AND HELLO SEAN LUNNY

I arrived at the Drakes Bay Oyster Company for the first time at seven thirty on a cold,
grey, late January morning. The first thing I noticed was an American flag: a leaning
aluminum pole holding loose, gently swaying folds over the cattle guard that interrupts
the farm’s unpaved driveway.

The hard, sandy, quarter-mile track runs along the eastern edge of the tidal wetlands
that separate Drakes Estero’s northernmost bay from the streams, ranches, and road to
the inland north.

From the sky, the Estero looks like what remains after a giant sea witch reached her
knobby right talon out of the ocean and sunk her fingers into the coastal pastures of the
Point Reyes National Seashore. The southern tip of the four-bayed lagoon is a narrow
opening into a half moon of calm Pacific water. A stumpy little peninsula dangles a
couple of miles out to sea, absorbing the pounding ocean swells and protecting the
delicate maze of sandbars and channels that lead into the Estero from Drakes Bay.

I parked in a grassy public lot just east of the witch’s middle fingernail and walked
toward the water. I passed a standard issue National Park long drop outhouse and a
tiny crumbling shed full of buckets and shells before stopping and turning on my
microphone. A white egret was hunting just below the tideline, and the early morning
was so quiet, I was convinced I could hear the underwater mud slurp with the bird’s
every deliberate step.

A few minutes after eight, I was in a boat with Sean Lunny and four of his colleagues.
Sean was rubbing his hands together for warmth, and someone suggested he retire his
tattered flannel overshirt. Grumbling, he said he’d wear it until it fell off, pulled his knit
cap tighter over his ears and eyebrows, and blew warm air into his hands.

Dampening the conversation was the steady whine of the 40-horsepower outboard
motor and the backbeat rattle of one of the workers’ blue-handled fillet knives scraping
the edge of a milk crate.

The Drakes Bay Oyster Company grew its product by helping tiny baby larval oysters
called “spat” affix themselves to empty half-shells, stringing the “inoculated” shells
between black spacer tubes on bent steel rods, and hanging those “strings” on racks in
the cold, clear channels in the Estero. The racks were made of cut telephone poles and
16
two by fours, nailed together in imperfect rectangles most of which were about four
times as long as they are wide. At high tide, the wooden structures poked just above the
Estero surface and looked like they could have been built hundreds of years ago. The
first racks like them were, in Japan, by farmers growing the very same variety of oyster.

As we approached the first cluster of racks, two of the workers leapt onto the barge we
were dragging and started cutting the plastic bands that held the freshly-prepared steel
strings in bundles of five. Before we’d come to a full stop, all six of my boatmates had
started planting and harvesting, emptying the barge of its infant cargo and filling it up
again, rattling thump by rattling thump, with strings they’d planted last year. As they
heaved each piece of bent metal out of the calm, dark water, grey and brown tiger-
striped shell clusters glistened, and a flapping mess of seaweed, minnows, crabs, and
eels exploded in every direction. Between thumps was a frantic wriggling and splashing,
as the tiny marooned creatures flipped and scampered toward the edges of the barge,
racing the fat, screeching seagulls, who gulped down everything they could catch.

We spent about two hours at the racks that morning and another 30 minutes on the
mudflats, where the workers hauled black mesh bags out of the shallows and onto the
barge. The thick plastic containers were full of older individual oysters, placed neatly in
rows for a final few months of growth and beautification. Kiko Hernandez, who
explained this to me, was the most talkative of the workers, and he seemed happy to
walk me through every step of oyster cultivation. He was happiest, however, when he
was making fun of Sean, telling him it wouldn’t be long before he slipped off a rack and
went for a swim in the lagoon. As Sean slowly woke and warmed up, he started jabbing
back at Kiko, and their banter kept everyone smiling.

On the short motor back to the dock, Sean was energetic and eager to talk to into the
microphone.

He told me about his first encounter with bureaucracy. “Point Reyes is not really a place
for a 24-year-old to kick it,” he said. “When I was in elementary school, I tried to write up
a proposal for a skate park. It didn't pass, unfortunately. They ended up putting in a little
playground. I'm 24. I don't want a playground.”

Then he told me what he and his family were facing. “We want to be on our best
behavior,” he said, “show that we respect the rules, respect the water, respect the
estuary. But it's hard to enjoy it out here with the government trying to run us out.”

Things have been changing in Point Reyes for a while now, he told me, even since
before his family bought the farm. “No more four wheeling,” he said. “No more off-
17
roading. We used to have a blast. We used to go hunting, used to make our own jerky.”
The government took it all away.

18

2. THE WHOLE BIG STORY

What happened in Drakes Estero between 2004 and 2014 is a story about oyster
farming and wilderness. It’s a story about angry local politics and fringey national
politics. And it’s the story of what we can expect to happen when a family business run
by nice but feistily independent people bumps into the cold political messiness of
bureaucratic federal government decision-making.

This document is not an attempt to tell that whole story. If you want that whole story, I
suggest you start by visiting a couple of the links that follow and seeing what reporters
with deeper experience than I do have to say:

● First marine wilderness in continental U.S. is designated
○ (Los Angeles Times)
● The West Coast Oyster War
○ (Harper’s)
● Kevin Lunny on Fox & Friends
○ (Fox News via Cause of Action
9
)
● Oyster Farm Caught Up in Pipeline Politics
○ (New York Times)
● Strange Bedfellows Join Fight to Keep California Oyster Farm in Operation
○ (PBS)
● Go Away Oyster Man — Really
○ (East Bay Express)
● Tears, hugs, shucking at Drakes Bay Oyster Co.'s final day open to public
○ (San Francisco Chronicle)
● Drakes Bay oyster workers grapple with loss of jobs, homes
○ (The Point Reyes Light)
● How A Family-Run Oyster Business Caused A National Ruckus
○ (National Geographic
10
)

Here’s my short, simplified take on the conflict:

For a long time, there was an oyster farm in a beautiful lagoon owned by the US
government. The farmers’ permit to operate in the lagoon came up for renewal. Some of
the farmers’ neighbors joined forces with national environmental conservation groups to

9
Cause of Action did quite a bit of free legal work for the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. Keep reading,
and you’ll learn more about them.
10
This is an interview with Summer Brennan, former Point Reyes Light reporter and author of The Oyster
War, the first book published on the battle over Drakes Estero.
19
advocate against renewal. They wanted the lagoon to become what they consider a true
and proper and fully protected wilderness area, and they convinced the Secretary of the
Interior to let the permit expire.
11
The farmers, in an attempt to save the business,
started working with a jarringly politically diverse combination of allies. While that
coalition never comfortably gelled, they agreed on one important point: that the people
advocating for wilderness over oyster farming had lied and cheated to get the outcome
they wanted, and that’s a threat to our democracy.

This document is a story about a newspaper editor at a small town weekly who
considered worrying that the professional environmentalists in her community were
conspiring to kill her.

The document’s centerpiece is an interview with that editor: Tess Elliott of the Point
Reyes Light.

I was part of a small film crew that recorded that interview in The Light’s tiny, cluttered
headquarters in Inverness, California in September 2014. The paper shares a building
with a post office and an upscale seafood restaurant in Inverness’s five-maybe-six-
business “downtown.” One of the first things I asked Tess was whether she thought any
other publications have told the story of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company well.

“Most articles that have been done outside West Marin and mostly outside the Point
Reyes Light sort of skim the surface,” she told us. “It takes a lot of time to dig in and for
a reporter to grasp what the harbor seal study was saying. Where has the data come
from? What are the criticisms? What are the bases of the criticisms? It’s very
complex…”

While you will read more about the “harbor seal study” that Tess rightly notes as crucial
to understanding what happened in Drakes Estero between 2004 and 2014, this
document will not offer an unpacking of that research or the criticism it drew. Instead, it
will introduce you to a bunch of fascinating human Americans and try to show you two
things:

1. That even when you have a strong understanding of that “harbor seal study,”
12
the
investigations that followed it, and the published perspectives of all the warriors who
fought over Drakes Estero, it's hard to be confident that your understanding isn't

11
Another fascinating (though dated) attempt at “the whole story” is then-Secretary Ken Salazar’s memo
to the National Park Service announcing his decision to let the oyster company’s permit expire
(https://www.nps.gov/pore/getinvolved/upload/PORE_Nov-29-2012-Secretary-s-Memo.pdf).
12
“Evidence for Long-Term Spatial Displacement of Breeding and Pupping Harbour Seals by Shellfish
Aquaculture Over Three Decades” (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aqc.1181/abstract)
20
affected by the personalities, attractive and repellent, that populate the story.

2. That some of the people involved in this conflict felt terrorized by their opponents.
And whether or not anyone ever intended to threaten anyone else, the Point Reyes
community was—and likely still is—in a really unhealthy political state. It's a very small
battle in a very small place, but it heated up enough to feel physically dangerous. Not
only is that terrible for many people living in Inverness and Marshall and Millerton and
Nicasio and Point Reyes Station, but it’s also bad for everyone who wants to see the
people of this country (and planet) unite to address the big and scary environment- and
natural resource-related challenges we face.

21
3. HOW ONE OF THE LONGTIME OPPONENTS OF THE OYSTER COMPANY
ANNOUNCED HIS HARD-EARNED VICTORY

This is the opening paragraph of a blog post
13
published on October 7, 2014 on the
National Park Conservation Association’s website:

On October 6, just weeks after the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, park
lovers got a new reason to celebrate. After more than 40 years of waiting, the
National Park Service can now rid Drakes Estero, a picturesque inlet within Point
Reyes National Seashore in California, of an industrial oyster company that has
been damaging the seashore’s natural resources for years. Yesterday’s
settlement agreement between the Department of the Interior and the Drakes
Bay Oyster Company, following the recent Supreme Court decision
14
in support
of the seashore, will allow the Park Service to restore the ecological heart of the
seashore to its natural splendor and preserve the waters that Americans planned
years ago to become the West Coast’s first marine wilderness area.

A National Park Service Conservation employee named Neal Desai wrote the post.
Note his use of the word “industrial” to describe the oyster company. As you’ll learn later
in this document, Neal chooses his words carefully, and “industrial” was an intentional
misrepresentation.

13
“Wilderness Wins on the West Coast” (https://www.npca.org/articles/382-wilderness-wins-on-the-west-
coast)
14
From the blog post: “U.S. Supreme Court Denies Drakes Bay Oyster Company Petition for Review”
(https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/06/30/18758069.php)
22

4. WHODUNIT?

If I were writing a fiction version of The Battle of Drakes Estero, it’d be a detective story,
and I’d make Tess Elliot one of the murder victims.

Another victim, probably the one whose death scene I’d open with, would be an
elephant seal named Nibbles. Nobody knows who shot Nibbles. And, most people, Tess
included, don’t give it much thought. Nibbles was a murderer himself: solitary, battle-
scarred, mentally ill, weighing in at 2,500+ pounds.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about him in 2007.
15
They quoted a “former surfer”
who witnessed one of Nibbles’ dozen known homicides: "I saw him chase down a
female harbor seal, use chest blows to crush her, then bare his upper canine teeth and
drive them down onto her head and back." Harbor seals, are much smaller than
elephant seals, much cuter, and much more adept at sharing their coastal habitat with
humans.

Corey Goodman, the neuroscientist, venture capitalist, classical pianist, and cat owner
who would play the amateur investigator in this hypothetical novel, was the first to tell
me about Nibbles. Mischievous twinkle in his eye, he suggested I ask around and try to
tease out some of the rumors about the seal’s death.

I only found one such rumor, but I suspect it's the one Corey was referring to. Allegedly,
the National Park Service keeps close track of the bullets in its arsenals. Allegedly, a
bullet went missing from the Point Reyes National Seashore stash in the days before
Nibbles’ death. Allegedly, much beloved staff scientist Sarah Allen was the only Park
Service employee to have checked out a rifle that week. Allegedly, it was revenge.

--

I first heard about the battle over Drakes Estero from a “documentary film” called The
Framing of an Oyster Farm.
16
It’s a fun movie to watch. The production value is high but

15
“Aggressive Elephant Seal Menaces Sonoma Beaches”
(http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/AGGRESSIVE-ELEPHANT-SEAL-MENACES-SONOMA-BEACHES-
2563787.php)
16
One of my former thesis committee members recommended it. His brother is a conservative talk radio
host. I don't think that's necessarily relevant, but this is a story about politics, so you might. My
understanding is that the professor found out about Framing from people in the oyster cultivation
business. The professor works with “the industry," does research on shells and acidity and climate
change. I don’t think I’ll have room for him or his brother in the novel. (https://vimeo.com/52331881)
23
not quite professional. The writing is clear and simple. The characters are vivid and
obviously. In some ways, it’s the best story about the oyster battle that I ever found.

It starts with a quote from Kevin Lunny, who would be one of the prime suspects in my
novel: “What disturbs me the most of all the false science is the allegation that we're
disturbing harbor seals.”

Corey Goodman is the man who Kevin believes has proven the science “false.” Tess
feels strongly about its falseness as well. I have no reason to believe that she hasn’t
examined it thoroughly and independently, but I think it’s important to note that Tess
and Corey like and trust each other very much. In 2009, Corey founded the “low-profit”
Marin Media Institute, which subsequently bought the Point Reyes Light, the newspaper
Tess edits. Corey has since left the board of the paper, and he told me multiple times
that he’s not involved in the paper anymore—aside from the occasional op-ed
contribution—and he has never had any influence over its editorial decisions.

Park Service scientist Sarah Allen—she of the allegedly Nibbles-related rifle
borrowing—wrote the “false science” Kevin Lunny referred to in Framing. She would be
both a suspect and a victim in my novel.

Most other characters would be both suspects and victims as well. Very few of them
would behave very well or honestly, and much of that bad behavior would be driven by
paranoia. I’d make it clear in the novel, for example, that the Kevin Lunny character was
so worried about what his opponents might try to do to him that he might take
preemptive action.

Here’s what he said in Framing about a conversation between his original arch nemesis,
former Superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore, Don Neubacher:

“What the Superintendent told an elected official was that the harm to the harbor seals
is so severe—and they are federally protected marine mammals—we're gonna take
both civil and criminal action, and Kevin Lunny may spend some time in jail.”

And here’s what Corey Goodman said in Framing about Don Neubacher’s wilderness
advocate allies in the Point Reyes community:

“There's a group of people that are so intent on quote ‘wilderness’ that to them the ends
justify the means. And I would say to you look back through the entire history of our
species, of humans: any time anybody gets to be such a true believer that they believe
that the ends justify the means, I mean that has been the reason for most of the horrible
things that have gone on in human history.”
24

My novel would tell the story of a small, bloody religious crusade and the small, bloody,
vigilante effort to end it.

In real life, I don’t think anyone is actually going to get murdered, but I am concerned
about how little it might shock me if someone did. Maybe paranoia is more contagious
than I realized.

25

5. COREY GOODMAN AND THE FACTS

I think it’s important for me to admit to myself and to any reader that I have only a partial
grip on the facts of this story. I also think it’s important to recognize that my instinct to
write a novel about these characters relates to that partial grip. A lot of great observers
use fiction as a way to communicate truth, and I think there’s truth in this story that the
facts don’t show.

The story is layered with rules and science and multi-dimensional personalities.
Wilderness law is important to the story. The intent of the language with which last
generation’s leaders wrote that wilderness law is important. “Soundscape data” is
important. The mathematical structure of the decibel scale is important. Seals are
important—how they raise their young, how their populations fluctuate, how well
adapted they are to sharing space with humans. There are dozens of important
characters in the story. Some of are dead.
17
Others are long since gone from Point
Reyes.
18

The details fade in even the best human memory. You start telling the story and
inevitably veer away from the particulars and into the tone of the arguments, the juicy
rumors, the fact that people say they fear for their personal safety.
19

Corey Goodman, one of the detective characters in the novel, might have had—and
probably still does have—the closest thing to a total grip on the facts. But he's emotional
enough about the situation that I don’t think we should trust him on his own.

Corey lives in the hills overlooking the muddier, less environmentally prized Tomales
Bay, in Marshall, CA, about 30 minutes down the road from the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company.

He is a highly regarded human brain scientist, former UC Berkeley professor, and a
member of the National Academy of Sciences. He talks fast and persuasively, in great
detail. He does not like to be wrong. He is probably not often wrong. And I suspect that
he realizes he is wrong slightly less often than he is.

When I visited his house, he had a shaved cat living under his piano. The cat is old, and
when she started having hairball problems, Corey started getting her buzzed
periodically. She was less elegant than before but much happier.

17
Charlie Johnson, former owner/operator of the oyster farm, for example.
18
Don Neubacher, former Superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore.
19
This document, for example.
26

Outside his living room is a small, fenced-in pasture full of sheep and enormous, dirty,
shaggy, white dogs. They're called Great Pyrenees, and they protect Corey’s wife’s
cheese sheep from coyotes and mountain lions. They would protect the sheep from
strange humans, too, Corey warned me, if strange humans ever tried to come too close.

Corey told me a reporter once tried to feature Corey’s interpretation heavily in an oyster
battle story, ran into resistance from editors, felt terrible, and wrote a story about
Corey's dogs to try to make it up to him. Corey thought it was a strange gesture, and he
took it as evidence that he’s fighting the righteous fight, that he should continue to tell
his side of the story, in persuasive detail, to other reporters, like me.

Corey believes that wilderness-obsessed environmental zealots convinced the National
Park Service that they had no legal or moral choice but to allow the oyster farm's permit
to expire. He believes the zealots are well-connected enough that they were able to
pressure the Park Service into fighting dirty.

Corey told me he didn’t “want to be prone to lifting up rocks and looking for conspiracy,”
but he’s convinced that the National Park Service and their allies intentionally
manipulated and misused scientific data to smear the oyster company and run them out
of the Estero.

He’s also convinced that his opponents have a worrisome focus on him, personally:

My wife from time to time has gotten worried that someone is gonna shoot me.
And I get choked up when I tell you that because I'm not worried, and you ain’t
gonna scare me off of anything, but I have to tell you that I do worry about her
feelings, because she sees other people on the other side get so obsessed, and
she sees the venom, and she worries sometimes that someone's gonna take out
a gun and shoot me.

Corey told me that
20
on a walk we took together along the trail overlooking Drakes
Estero. Sean Lunny and longtime oyster farm foreman Jorge Mata were in one of the
company’s motorboats, coordinating with us by walkie talkie and demonstrating that we
couldn’t hear the boat from the trail. Corey’s decibel reader ran out of batteries before
we could take the readings Corey wanted to take. Two weeks later the Point Reyes

20
In an earlier recorded conversation, he phrased it this way: “There are times that my wife gets
concerned with my safety. There are people on the other side who are simply obsessed with me, and I
can’t let them affect my life, and I don’t. I don’t lose sleep over it. I don’t lose anything over it, because it’s
really hard to intimidate me.”
27
Light published Corey’s writeup of our adventure/experiment.
21
The publication of that
article ended what little access I had to Corey’s political opponents.

21
“Simple numbers with profound implications” (http://www.ptreyeslight.com/article/simple-numbers-
profound-implications)
28
6. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: THE ROLE OF THE POINT REYES LIGHT

“We provide too much credit to the people who return our phone calls.”
– Wesley Lowery, on journalists

--

Early in our filmed interview, Tess smiled and exhaustedly rolled her eyes when I
brought up the allegations that the Light is “a part of the story” and has been “divisive in
the community.”

Jake: That’s an accusation, right? They are saying you guys are responsible for people
hating each other?

Tess: Yeah. The fact is that we’ve published letters by people who are very angry
because at the heart of this story is the Lunny family, who many many people in the
community love and have experience with. They’re always volunteering their time and
their oysters at benefits.
22
They’re really a part of the fabric of West Marin. Many people
have decided to come to their defense, and they’ve had a lot of reasons given the Park
Service’s stance on the environmental harm and also on the question of whether or not
the Estero needs to be converted to wilderness now. There’s definitely legitimate
arguments on both sides.

J: How many stories have you guys written about this, how many op eds?

T: Hundreds of articles, editorials, letters, opinion pieces… There have been periods of
time where it’s on the cover every week, in the paper every week. And a lot of people
get really tired of it. We’ve had people cancel their subscriptions because of it, with a
note saying, “I’m sick and tired of the oyster farm. Why don’t you report on something
else.” And a lot of people also feel that we are biased. I have always stood behind our
news articles being unbiased to the extent that we can represent the other side. You
know it’s been difficult to adequately in the eyes of readers represent the other side
because people just won’t grant us interviews, so we have to just use whatever we can,
whatever we have. Whereas Kevin has always been really open—I mean remarkably
open—in the context of the Seashore. So it’s hard to equally represent both sides when
one side is really shut down. The EAC
23
just won’t return phone calls anymore, and it’s
not because we’ve misquoted them. They’re just boycotting us.

22
Plus they own a bunch of heavy machinery and run a grading and paving business, so they’ve fixed
driveways, for example, for lots of people in the community.
23
The West Marin Environmental Action Committee. Their tagline is “Keeping West Marin Wild.”
29
7. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: ON QUESTIONING NEIGHBORS’ INTEGRITY

T: It could have been I think a lot cleaner if [the Department of the Interior] had just said,
“We don’t have to issue a special use permit, and on the basis of the Wilderness Act,
we’re just deciding to now convert this to wilderness.” There still would have been a
fight, but they didn’t probably have to bring in all these other scientific issues or
environmental issues.

J: Do you think that fueled the anger and the intensity of the fight?

T: Absolutely. Those were major claims, and there wasn’t evidence there. And it really
took some investigating to find that out. And then the other side of that, why it was so
painful is that Sarah Allen, people really loved her and came to her defense, and she
happened to be the person who had authored the original study and who really was the
lead expert on seals in the Estero… So then anybody who was criticizing the Park’s
science was perceived as also attacking Sarah Allen, attacking her credibility, and that
was painful for people. And also Ben Becker and Dave Press.
24
Dave Press is from
here and has a family, and so those people as members of the community were then
implicated and that really made things much more difficult because you couldn’t criticize
their statements without really questioning their integrity as scientists.

J: So what’s that like for you guys? If you’re critical of that, and you know you’re about
to publish something that’s going to question integrity. What is that feeling like? What
does that mean for you guys?

T: It’s very difficult first of all to be sure that you have the whole story. But yeah it’s very
difficult mentally and emotionally to be coming out with an article that is going to upset
and really in a pretty fundamental way question certain people’s integrity.

Certain people became really upset with the Light. And luckily other newspapers quickly
picked up on some of the story and did their own reporting, so it wasn’t just us, but we
were and still are often targeted as being partisan. And people say that our articles are
just not accurate and some have stopped subscribing, stopped advertising.

24
Sarah Allen’s seal study co-authors.
30

8. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: “LIKE, SHOULD I WORRY ALSO ABOUT MY
SAFETY?”

J: How extreme is this? I’ve spent a bunch of time with Corey, and…

T: That’s easy to do. [laughs]
25

J: It’s very easy to do. And I really like Corey, and I thought it was extraordinarily fun to
talk to him about these things because he has this investigative mind, and he’s really
into it. And at the same time Corey has said some things to me that have given me
pause about how much I should trust what he says. His arguments seem very good,
especially when you dig into the documents he offers in support of them. But there are
all these things that Corey brings up that are off the record. There’s Brent Stewart, the
seal scientist in San Diego, who won’t talk to anyone unless they’re from a
Congressional Committee.
26
And that’s fine. But then there are all these National Park
Service employees that have apparently told him secretly that they support what he’s
doing but won’t talk to anyone but him. And then there’s the story, which he has told me
twice, about his wife telling him she’s worried he’s going to get shot by the wilderness
folks. And that’s of course another level of intense. Plus he has said to me that
someone overheard Amy Trainer
27
say that she won’t be happy until quote “Kevin
Lunny is panhandling on Fillmore Street in San Francisco.” Kevin told me yesterday that
Gordon Bennett
28
has been saying that, so obviously that is the kind of thing that’s been
passed around and whispered.

T: Did you hear that a deputy told Kevin that there were people trying to kill him? That
he should watch out? There was that too. That’s another thing. Kevin was warned by
the sheriff’s deputies to watch out. [laughs] Because there was money on his head.

J: Like a bounty?

25
Apologies for cluttering this up with notes about laughter. I think it’s important to note how giggly this
part of the interview was.
26
The Department of the Interior asked Stewart to review some of the Park Service’s controversial seal
data, and he concluded that there isn’t sufficient evidence to say that the oyster farm was a meaningful
disturbance to seals.
27
Amy Trainer was the Executive Director of the West Marin Environmental Action Committee from 2011
through 2015. Johanna Wald from the National Resources Defense Council called her "poor little Amy
Trainer from Kansas" when we first talked about her. Other NRDC employees told me Johanna was crazy
to side with Amy and the wilderness advocates over the oyster farm. It didn't surprise them that Johanna
supported Amy, though. Johanna, they said, has a history of really liking people and supporting their
causes without examining them in the lawyerly way with which one might expect a senior NRDC official to
examine a potential collaborator in advocacy.
28
More on Gordon very soon.
31

T: Yeah. [laughs] I mean you have to ask Kevin about it, but yeah I’ve heard that from
Corey, maybe from Kevin. So yeah there is that.

I personally have felt... I’ve wondered, like, should I worry [laughs] also about my
safety? Because of the hostility that is tangible from some people? I think it’s a fairly
limited group of people, but there’s kind of a dark vibe that I think has made a number of
people a little worried about their safety. But that’s just one level of what you’re talking
about. Are you also talking about the implication that there is a grander conspiracy in all
of this or that it was more orchestrated than it really was or?

J: I was talking about the intensity, the personal safety stuff. You just laughed, right? I
smile when I say these things, but they’re serious things. This is serious weird scary
stuff. Is it really happening?

T: Well [laughs]... Are people saying these things which are really threatening and really
kind of sick like, “I won’t be happy till he’s panhandling?” [laughs] I don’t know. Maybe. I
wouldn’t be surprised. I think the emotions run really, really deep. And my feeling has
been that that side, the side that’s really pro-wilderness, there’s really a dark streak of
energy in them and their arguments, that there is some hatred that’s been generated
and cultivated. It comes out in small ways, but those small gestures can make people
feel really unsafe. And I don’t think it’s reciprocated on the other end. I don’t think there
are people walking around with evil thoughts about Sarah Allen. People are really
frustrated, but there is a kind of very dramatic, hateful element on the wilderness side.
I’ve felt bits of it too, but I’m sure Kevin and Corey have felt the brunt of it. Would people
really act on that? I don’t know. But if it’s causing certain people in the community to
really feel uncomfortable going into town to check their mail, that’s a profound effect on
the community, and it has had that kind of effect. You’ve heard, and everybody’s written
that neighbors don’t talk to neighbors, that Kevin, who grew up with certain people on
the Point, and now they won’t shake his hand. There’s a lot of anger.

J: That’s scary. I was saying to these guys that I was feeling jittery being up here on this
trip. And who the hell am I? Most people don’t know who I am, but when Gordon says
I’m part of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company agitprop machine, it’s like, well… I don’t
know.

32

9. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: GORDON BENNETT, AMY TRAINER, AND NEAL
DESAI

T: Have you interviewed Gordon Bennett?

J: Oh yeah.

T: [smiling] You have…

J: He doesn’t want to talk to me anymore though.

T: [laughs]

J: Not since my name was in Corey’s piece in the Light.

T: [laughs] Right.

J: One of the things I think is fascinating about Gordon Bennett is that he talks about
wilderness as a church, the spiritual side of things, and I’m interested in that
conversation. I think that’s a fascinating conversation.

So I emailed Gordon when I knew we were coming up to film before the last day of retail
operation at the Oyster Shack. And I asked if he wanted to talk about wilderness some
more, why it’s important, what’s so great about it. I said I want to get some more of that,
get you on camera. I have you on tape. I’d love to have your face. He writes me this
email saying something like, “You contributed to these perjury claims [T laughs] that
Corey made! And you have injured me and my family!” And I was like, “Sorry Gordon.
Yes I was there. It was my job in that situation to let Corey Goodman be Corey
Goodman and be with him and hear what he was doing and do this thing. It was a stunt
to create a scene, but it was also an opportunity to spend a long period of time with
Corey and get to know him and hear him say things that I hadn’t heard him say before
and whatever.” And never another word.

T: Nothing, yeah.

J: And Amy Trainer has always rolled her eyes at me.

T: She won’t be interviewed?

33
J: I’ve talked to her on the phone a couple of times, but then she decided I hadn’t read
enough of her press releases, so...

T: [laughs] I mean they’re such... they’re such junk!

J: My experience with Amy is that she’s an eye roller.

T: Yeah.

J: And Neal
29
has yelled at me on the phone…

T: Right, so you have experienced what it’s like, that on the other side there is a total
lack of reasonability. There’s hostility. Lots of hostility and no middle ground. It’s just
completely black and white thinking and outright hostility toward journalists, and yet
they’re successful because—well, certainly there are other reasons why the oyster farm
is shutting down—but partly they’ve been successful because they’re been getting their
propaganda out to massive email lists and getting thousands of people to write in with
talking points that we all know are just totally misleading and taken out of context and
not seeing the whole picture. So yeah it’s very hard to feel any sympathy and to engage
them because they won’t engage you.

J: It’s frustrating to me that we have to do their job for them. We have to come up with
the argument for wilderness. They won’t help with that. I mean Gordon has helped with
that a little bit, but I’ve felt like saying, “Come on guys, I want your help here!” And
they’ve been like, “Read the press releases.”

Anyway that’s my personal experience. And it’s been frustrating. But I guess that’s just
the way it goes.
30
And that’s part of the personality issue for me too. That hostility is a
contrast with the personalities of the people who are very welcoming and who seem to
be very open and honest. I mean of course the oyster farm folks are influenced by
public relations. I mean Kevin Lunny says to me word for word things that Dave
Weiman
31
says to me. There are talking points.

T: We’ve talked with Dave Weiman too.

29
Neal Desai is the author of the victory announcement in Chapter 2.
30
I don’t actually know this because I have almost zero reporting experience, but that’s how I imagine the
world working.
31
Dave Weiman is a lobbyist. He has a “green stripe that runs from the top of my head to the crack of my
ass,” allegedly. You’ll learn more about him later if you keep reading.
34
J: There’s public relations on both sides. But there’s a window into the human side of
one side of this story.

T: Right. And there’s contempt for us on the other side. And I don’t think that hostile side
is hostile because they think that you’re going to side with the oyster farm. I think partly
it’s just that they don’t have arguments that hold water. They don’t really have anything
to say other than their talking points, which, if you were to challenge them, they would
not be able to talk about them.

35

10. INTERLUDE: THE LAST EMAIL GORDON BENNETT EVER SENT ME

As mentioned in the interview excerpt above:

Here's the (big) problem, Jake....the last time you contacted me on short notice,
the event turned out to be a trip on the Estero with Corey Goodman to listen to
oyster boat noise.

Subsequently, Goodman used your "independent" presence to validate his public
attack on me (and by extension, on my family) for claimed perjury regarding my
statement that I had heard the boat noise (I attach the email exchange below).

After this incident, you never contacted me to explain your involvement in
Goodman's effort to slander me or apologized for being (at a minimum) used to
facilitate his personal attack on me and my family.

Yet now you propose this un-named "filmmaker" again on short notice to capture
a small sliver of this conflict focused (as usual) on the closure of the oyster
company (rather than focused on the lifting of an oppression on a wilderness
area: http://coastodian.org/sustainable-oyster-farming-west-marin-style-part-3-
dboc-stewards-of-the-land/)

It is apparent that neither you nor the filmmaker understand vicious small town
conflicts, as exemplified by this recent email:

Date: Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 9:31 AM

Subject: Fake Environmentalists Destroying West Marin

You work for the back stabbing carpet baggers Amy Trainer and Gordon
Bennett. You should be run out of business and out of the state.
Quislings
32
is what you are.

DBOC's virtually unlimited profits from its free and unauthorized use of public
waters have funded an endless series of propaganda films, press releases and
misinformation that incite similar bullying and intimidation in order to create the
(false) impression that the local community wholeheartedly supports DBOC.

32
Quislings are traitors. The word is named for Norwegian politician Vidkun Quisling, who led Norway’s
Nazi collaborationist regime during WWII.
36

I deeply suspect, whether you understand it or not, that your "invitation" is yet
another DBOC agitprop effort and thus I respectfully decline to participate. Your
apparent "innocence" is too dangerous for me and my family to be associated
with.

Gordon

My initial reaction was to feel bad that I contributed to Gordon’s suffering.

Now that I’m confident that Gordon doesn’t think about me anymore, I can read that with
wider eyes and notice the way Gordon characterizes his victory as “the lifting of an
oppression on a wilderness area.”

What’s beautiful to me about wilderness advocacy is that in its purest, most humble
form it de-prioritizes human interests and considers them no more than equal to the
interests of any other community of living things. It’s a radical worldview, but it’s rooted
in a commitment to justice and equality.

My sense of Gordon, for all his paranoia and ill will toward me, is that he’s man of
authenticity and principle. He’s earnestly fighting to defend creatures and ecosystems
that most humans exploit or trample or ignore, and I respect that.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t put that string of thoughts together when I responded to Gordon’s
angry email.
33

33
If you’re curious, you can find the text of that response in Appendix V.
37

11. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: THE DEIFICATION OF DRAKES ESTERO

J: Do you think our worries about safety and violence connect to the whole spiritual or
religious piece of the wilderness advocacy?

T: Yeah. Yeah there’s an unconscious identification with the dream of Drakes Estero
and the vision of it as wilderness that I think strikes a very deep chord with these
people, so, yeah, they’re not coming from an entirely rational place. And that’s probably
where that level of hostility and inability to talk to the press and to engage in a normal
debate comes from. There’s a kind of identification with Drakes Estero I think. They call
it the “crown jewel of Point Reyes National Seashore” and “the first marine wilderness
the country.” And that’s not really true, but, yeah, there’s this deification and idolization
of it.

--

Here’s Gordon Bennett, in 2013, before he decided I was part of the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company’s agitprop machine, talking to me about wilderness:

“So I've said many times and people have laughed at me, but I'll say it again: For me it's
a kind of church. And I think for many people it's a kind of a church. And when you're
dealing with your day to day activities and day to day upsets, and maybe some are
significant upsets maybe with work or your family, it's very quieting to go out there in
that spot and just commune with nature. It's very calming, just a great experience. Very
hard to do, in my opinion, when Mr. Lunny's motorboats are running around in the
Estero. It makes it a different experience. I'm not saying it's a bad experience for
everyone. Some people don’t mind the motorboats. But Congress intended some spots
to not have the sound of motorboats and not have commercial activities and be places
of quiet and contemplation, and that's why I like it.”

38

12. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: COMPETING VALUES

J: What are the good reasons the Estero should be wilderness? What is compelling
about wilderness, and what is compelling about leaving something as potential
wilderness?
34

T: Those are two values, and they’re both legitimate values. The Estero is a place
where you can go and kayak or hike and just be in this magnificent space, with the
seals, with the birds, the sound of it,
35
whatever, and for many people I think it feels like
a spiritual practice to be in a place like that or feels like something that’s really essential
for the spirit. And then there’s the value of the oyster farm which is producing all of this
protein-rich food for the Bay Area and is doing it with very little damage. And those are
two values that I feel like most people usually prefer one over the other, and those who
strongly prefer one over the other just will never see eye to eye. And they are two
different things that require either the oyster farm being there or not. So they’re
incompatible.

However, then there’s moderate people like myself who feel that you can still go to
Drake’s Estero, and there can be an oyster shack and the people harvesting and
shucking and all of that and still have this experience of a place that’s rich in nature in a
participatory way,
36
which I think adds another value… So how do you reconcile those
things? They’ve just… they’ve split people, those competing values…

J: Has there been a conversation in the community on that values level? Is it a
conversation you guys have written about?

T: Yeah. I mean that’s kind of a… You have to sort of zoom out to talk about that level.
We’re often just reporting on the ground about developments, but yeah a lot of people
talk about that and think about that and have brought that into the conversation. It kind
of is the conversation. But there’s so much else at play: the wilderness law, the
legislation, what legislators wanted 40 years ago, and all of this confusion about “Is this

34
“Potential wilderness” was Drakes Estero’s official conservation status before the oyster farm shut
down. It will probably remain the Estero’s official conservation status as long as the state of California
continues to hold fishing and mining rights in the lagoon. A better and more qualified writer than me will
hopefully someday write a fascinating essay on the quirks of wilderness law.
35
One of the first things I noticed when I started learning about the oyster company and the Estero were
the sounds at the center of the story: sounds that may or may not scare seals. I thought that would make
good radio. The sounds are not very loud by human civilization standards, but they're definitely loud
enough to be disconcerting to species that don't build machines.
36
Stay tuned for more on this “moderate” angle from UC Berkeley professor and food production reporter
Michael Pollan.
39
farm really environmentally sound or not?” I think a lot of people are still confused about
that. Probably because there continues to be a lot of what I think is propaganda coming
from the EAC, mainly, and Gordon Bennett, even though there have been these studies
that have kind of debunked their claims.

40
13. INTERLUDE: ENDANGERED

In October 2011, Neal Desai, associate director of the Pacific Region for the National
Parks Conservation Association, sent a note
37
to the people who subscribe to NPCA's
email newsletter, urging them to tell the National Park Service that "national park
wilderness is for wildlife and public enjoyment, not private commercial use." Neal's
email reminded NPCA supporters why they should help him fight to remove the Drakes
Bay Oyster Company from Drakes Estero.

"Drakes Estero," wrote Neal, "is home to several endangered plants and animals,
including eelgrass, harbor seals, and birds including Black Brant and Great Egrets."

After asking a friend who works for a big and powerful environmental advocacy
nonprofit in Washington D.C. under what circumstances he would lie in defense of the
planet, I sent him a link to Neal's note. Here is the correspondence that ensued:

Friend: Fascinating, thanks for sending. Which of those aren't actually endangered?
Me: None of them are endangered.
Friend: NONE?!

The official conservation status of every species Neal mentioned is "Least Concern."
“Endangered” species are at high risk of extinction. Eelgrass, harbor seals, Black Brant
geese, and Great Egrets are all at the lowest measured risk of extinction.

When I asked Neal about the email, he told me he wasn't sure what I was talking about.
"I send lots of emails," he said.

When talking to Michael Ames for a Harper’s story published in January 2013,
38
Neal’s
memory was sharper. He stood by what he wrote. He chose the adjective
"endangered," he said, to communicate that those plants and animals "are at risk of
harm."

Neal is a professional environmental advocate. He’s a professional communicator. His
email went out to hundreds of thousands of conservationist donors. “Endangered” is a
big, scary word to those people, a word that motivates people to act. Action is what Neal
was hoping to stir up.

37
The letter salutes its recipients with “Dear Friend of the National Parks”
(http://my.npca.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=2241.0&pw_id=1621)
38
Michael Ames of Harper’s, for example (http://harpers.org/blog/2013/07/the-west-coast-oyster-war/)
41
In this case, I believe Neal behaved dishonestly. I believe he intentionally manipulated
the people whose membership dues paid his salary. And I think it’s worth noting that
conservationists around the country actually ended up taking the collective action Neal’s
email advocated. Neal asked them to contact the National Park Service and proclaim
outrage at the oyster company that “wants to make a fundamental change in wilderness
policy so that private commercial use is acceptable,” and, as the Point Reyes Light
noticed,
39
over the next few months, they did exactly that.

At first, my friend in Washington said he would lie if he had to, as a last resort, if he
thought it would forestall a major, irrevocable catastrophe. When we tried to think of a
situation that might call for such heroic dishonesty, however, he backed off,
remembering his organization’s pride in its spotless record. “We’re powerful primarily
because we’re honest,” he told me, “because we’re based in science. And I’d love to tell
you that’s a moral decision, but it’s a strategic decision.” To lie for a cause or campaign,
he told me, “was to risk your credibility for life.”

39
“NGO’s gush letters into Seashore” (http://www.ptreyeslight.com/article/ngos-gush-letters-seashore)
42

14. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: IN SADNESS ABOUT THE STATE OF
PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

J: All this makes me sad about professional environmentalism.

T: Yeah it’s particularly painful in West Marin because the Environmental Action
Committee really has this history of being a collaborative effort between more traditional
environmentalists and people who are agriculturalists, with a view that is more open,
more tolerant of integrated landscapes and sustainable agriculture. And that the
Environmental Action Committee has flipped and become so much of an extreme
voice.
40
That continues to be very hard for people here who historically have been
members and so their membership has really been damaged by this fight, especially
since Amy Trainer arrived.

J: So you guys have lost subscribers and the EAC has lost subscribers, too.

T: Yeah.

J: I guess it’s just part of the whole anger element, people getting in their camps. Well,
we’re at an hour. We have as much time as you want to give. You have your son, of
course. If you’ve gotta go, go. I’m sorry I got carried away there at the end. I just feel
like it’s the same thing. You guys have dealt with so much more of this than anyone
else, but I feel like I’ve shared in that experience a little bit.

T: It sounds like it.

J: And I feel conflicted about it for some of the same reasons you do.

T: Yeah.

40
There’s an Australian folk singer named Xavier Rudd whose work I greatly respect. His voice on
environmentalism is extreme as well. I think it’s fascinating to read his words in the context of this story:
Bow down to your god / But don’t forget about the earth / Place your hand on a tree / Who’s helping who
breathe?
43

15. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: OPENNESS, OBJECTIVITY, QUESTIONING,
AND SOMETIMES REGRET

J: Why do you think Kevin is so open?

T: I think it’s just his personality, really. He’s a very articulate person. I didn’t know Kevin
before this, but I think he has really fallen into this role of fighting or standing up for the
oyster farm in this very eloquent way, graceful way. He has always been advocating not
for something that’s entirely self-serving but for the benefits of aquaculture and the
absence of detrimental environmental effects. And the Seashore was set up to not just
preserve the natural environment but also the cultural and historical elements of the
area, so he’s been advocating for that. I think he feels like he’s part of a bigger fight not
just for the oyster farm but also for the ranches which are really struggling with much the
same problems and potential problems that the oyster farm has faced. So he’s been
willing to be out there in public, but he’s also just a great speaker and he has a kind of
ease, so from my point of view, he’s a very likable guy.

J: So this has been something that I have been wrestling with in a major way: feeling
very attracted to personalities on that side of the story and worrying about whether that
is clouding my judgement…

T: Your objectivity and fairness.

J: Is that something that’s in your mind?

T: Oh yeah. Absolutely. I mean I’m still not totally comfortable with any part of my role or
the paper’s role in it. I still question: Have we been fair? Have we been accurate? I feel
like basically we’ve been accurate, and can’t tell you any place where we haven’t been,
but the fairness… I mean I’m the one who has to decide whether or not to publish an
angry letter. On a daily basis, there’s a lot of questioning about our choices, our editorial
choices. And yeah the personalities are very compelling, not just Kevin and Nancy. I
have a lot of admiration for them. I’ve never felt misled by them. I haven’t felt used by
them at all. I have a positive feeling about any time I’ve voiced my support for their
continuation.

Corey Goodman is another character who is to me very sympathetic and trustworthy
and is somebody with whom I’ve developed a kind of friendship over the years. As well
as many other people who are advocates: the lawyers, the behind the scenes
44
consultants. All of these people, it’s kind of like they have a family, and there’s a lot of
love there.

So yeah, right, somebody could look at me and say, “Well you can’t possibly be
objective because you have emotional ties to these people,” but it’s something that’s
just kind of unavoidable in my position with this paper in a very small community. You
can’t not develop relationships.

I think that all reporters, all journalists deal with this on some level. You deal with being
human and having opinions. We all have opinions, and we have to I think just be aware
of them and be aware of how they’re influencing our reporting and our writing. But
there’s probably a higher degree of that for me than there is for somebody at you know
the Chronicle or the LA Times.

And yeah there’s a tremendous amount of questioning and sometimes regret. For
example, my own son goes to the same preschool as [controversial seal study co-
author] Dave Press’s kids, and I see him every other day, and I know that he has felt
personally affected in a pretty big way in being part of in the Seashore’s studies, and so
I have to face that in my personal life and my family life.

45

16. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: “YOU PLAY THE PART OF US”

Stephan:
41
Anything you want to say that we haven’t covered?

T: I’m sure I’ll think of a hundred things later.

J: If you have any thoughts, send them to us. If you think we ought to think about this or
that, the movie’s not done. Hopefully we’ll go through rounds of cuts, and we want to do
the best we can.

T: Yeah I can’t, being filmed, I can’t think of good examples that would be better than
just talking in the vague generalities that I talk in. Like, for example, I wrote an article for
The Nation back in 2008 or something
42
about, you know, all of it, and then Gordon
went to the editors and tried to get it taken down. Anyway, I don’t have to talk about
that. Whatever. There’s all kinds of small examples, but I’m sure you have a great film in
the works. I don’t know what part I play in it.

J: From our perspective, you play the part of us. You’ve experienced things that we’ve
experienced on a smaller scale. And I think it’s important to mention that in this whole
thing. We’re all being accused of representing one side and not representing the other.
But one side is willing to represent themselves, and the other side is not so willing to
represent themselves beyond the same boring “a deal is a deal a deal is a deal”
soundbyte.
43
And I’m sick of it.

T: Right.

J: So I really appreciate having you here. I personally feel better hearing that you’ve felt
some of the same worries that I’ve felt about fairness and objectivity.

T: And I don’t really think the things we are dealing with and the kinds of dilemmas I
face as an editor are ending. Even with the closure of the oyster farm, I think that all of
these things are going to continue in other forms with the other ranchers and their
problems and challenges continuing to do what they need to do to survive. And then the

41
Stephan McCormick and I worked on the documentary together. He spent most of his time behind the
camera, so I did most of the talking in interviews, but you’ll see his first initial pop up a few more times in
this document.
42
“Scientific Integrity Lost on America’s Parks” (https://www.thenation.com/article/scientific-integrity-lost-
americas-parks/)
43
The standard wilderness advocate argument usually includes the claim that the Park Service told the
Lunnys before they bought the oyster business that the government had every intention of letting the
permit expire in 2012.
46
same wilderness advocates and all of the other projects that they want to block. I think
it’s gonna come up again and again here. But, yeah, Drakes Estero has been a special
chapter.

47

17. INTERLUDE: IT’S COMFORTING THAT TESS IS NOT THE ONLY ONE
LEANING LUNNY

Michael Pollan
44
supported the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, too.

In a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein,
45
herself an old friend of the company, Pollan,
one of the world’s best respected food production journalists, explains why he was
supporting the oyster company’s efforts to stay open:

It is a farm that actually contributes to the health of its ecosystem, demonstrating
a crucial lesson for our times: That the relationship between humanity and the
land need not be a zero sum one, but rather that, when properly managed, the
two can nourish one another. What an inspiring story for the Park Service to tell!

Instead, the Park Service has willfully twisted both history and science to
promote a fantasy of wilderness restoration in what is actually a beautiful semi-
domesticated landscape. It is one thing to insist that agriculture on Point Reyes
meet the highest standards of stewardship - it should - but to suggest that this is
impossible [is] to consign the place to being a museum to an idea rather than a
model for rethinking the relationship between people and the land.

--

Laura Watt is another “moderate” voice on this issue that I greatly respect. She’s a
professor in the Environmental Studies Department at Sonoma State University. She
teaches land use and parks and how to manage the property government owns. She's
writing a book about it.

Laura supported the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. She knows the Lunnys, loves the
Lunnys, and wishes the National Park Service could have seen the good in them and
embraced them.

Laura, Pollan, and Tess share an appreciation for human participation in the natural
world. Here’s what Laura writes on her website about her photography:

I am more interested in a personal connection with the world around me,

44
Pollan played a significant role in turning me on to environmentalism by writing about Peter Singer in
the NY Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/an-animal-s-place.html).
45
The letter is dated October 5, 2012 (https://oysterzone.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/10-05-2012-
michael-pollen-letter-to-senator-feinstein.pdf)
48
uncovering an intimacy of experience, and breaking down (false) divisions
between natural and human -- attempting to see nature from the INSIDE,
imagining and interacting with it, rather than simply admiring from afar.

Of the people I met while learning about this story, Laura is one of the very most likable.
She treated me like a new friend, not a reporter,
46
and I appreciate that.

46
Or she was so good at treating me like a reporter that she tricked me into thinking she wasn’t treating
me like a reporter.
49

18. INTERLUDE: MY FIRST AND SECOND KEVIN LUNNY INTERVIEWS

The first time I met Kevin Lunny was in Nicasio, CA, at his business office, by the
quarry, about 18 winding miles inland of the oyster farm.

The building is square, with a flat roof and corrugated walls like a shipping container’s.
Through the heavy grey door, I found Kevin, his wife Nancy, their three dogs, and more
grey. Grey walls, grey counters, loose papers greying on dusty grey cubicle desks.
During the interview, the littlest dog destroyed a stuffed animal and spread its fake
cotton batting exactly evenly over the grey carpet.

The other dogs wanted attention, too. It was not the best environment for recording.

And Kevin was not the best interview subject. He had a long story he wanted to tell the
microphone, and I got the sense he was trying not to stop talking, hoping not to give me
space to ask questions.

His story was riveting, though. A particularly fun early chapter goes a little something
like this:

Kevin’s driving. A truck is approaching from the other direction. As the vehicles pass,
Kevin realizes it’s a friend’s truck, looks in the rearview mirror, sees the truck’s brake
lights then reverse lights, and then does the small community, low traffic road thing and
backs up to meet the friend, driver’s side window to driver’s side window.

The friend’s name is Ken Fox, and he says there’s been a meeting last night at Don
Neubacher’s.

I imagine a cabin in a clearing on a forested hill, soft yellow light leaking from a
downstairs window, wind and periodic rain outside, cigar smoke inside, long silences,
frowning, Patagonia sweaters, and an ultimatum for Don: Don’t get comfortable with the
oyster farm. We want it out.

The “we” were the local environmental heavies: representatives from the Sierra Club,
the National Parks Conservation Association, and other small but locally powerful
conservation organizations like the EAC. Don Neubacher was the superintendent of the
Point Reyes National Seashore, the highest ranking National Park Service official in the
county. Ken Fox was one of the heavies, but he hadn’t known the confrontation was
coming, and he had disagreed, so he had lost his heaviness.
50

Kevin went on to detail, battle by battle, the war the NPS and wilderness advocates
have waged against him over the eight years since that meeting. He made sure heard
about what a good environmentalist he was. And, in a rare moment in which he was
actually responding to a question I’d squeezed in, he told me he sympathizes with my
Aussie farmer uncle Kim
47
but that he doesn’t hate the government. In fact, he loves lots
of things about the government. His oyster farm and his cattle ranch work really well
with some branches of government. The problem with the government is that big
environmental organizations with big money backers and big email lists have too much
power over it.

The next time I saw Kevin was in Oakland, outside a courtroom. He had a suit on. And
he was nervous both before and after the proceedings. He was pretty poised, though. A
lot of people stuck cameras and microphones in his face, and he seemed pretty darn
genuine and pretty darn likable.

The next time I got to talk to him was back in his office. I was there to talk to him about
the Koch Brothers. He looked like shit.

Next to his computer was a paper plate with the remnants of a snack: wilted celery
leaves and a salt shaker. He hadn’t shaved for a while. His undershirt looked yellow
under his checked flannel shirt. I figured he’d probably spent last night at that desk.

I asked him how he was holding up.

“Nancy and I dream about normalcy again,” he said, “when a Sunday actually meant
something, like it could be a day off, or we could talk about something besides the
oyster farm battle, like each other.”

When the conversation turned to Cause of Action, the Koch-connected legal advocacy
group that had been helping him out, Kevin was diplomatic and impressively on script.
He said he was accepting help from anyone, as long as they seem honest and
competent, and they’re willing to help, for free.

When I talked to Corey Goodman, one of the main characters in this story, about Kevin
the next day, he said he’d seen Kevin looking pretty haggard lately, too. And that was a
bummer, I agreed, because Kevin Lunny is a nice guy. I might even say he’s a “good”
guy. He seems like exactly the kind of guy you want to hire if you need to re-pave your
driveway.

47
More on Kim later.
51

Whether you’d want to lease him a chunk of “potential wilderness” and have him run an
oyster farm there is another question.

My gut feeling is that he could have done it really well, if he had the right kind of support
and friendly oversight from estuarine ecologists and his landlords, the National Park
Service. The bummer is that that situation never existed.

52

19. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: LOVING THE LUNNYS

J: Obviously I have not been anywhere close to in your position, but I feel what you’re
saying. It’s really hard for me not to feel attracted to these people. And I think it’s for
legitimate reason. I said to Kevin Lunny when we were joking about this that I thought it
would be fun to get Kevin Lunny to take us fishing. It’d be a fun atmosphere for an
interview. It would show a rancher and oysterman interacting as a with his environment
as a low-appetite predator. And plus I just simply wanna go fishing with Kevin Lunny.

T: Yeah, I’ve wanted to go spend a week embedded in their home to understand who
they are and be able to write about them. I haven’t done it, but I’ve had thoughts like will
I write a bigger article or a book even? Now other people are writing books about it.
48

Yeah, they’re attractive. They’re extremely sympathetic people, and so it’s really easy to
feel compassionate toward their cause, but that’s from I think a very inside point of view.

I imagine you’re pretty educated on the story, and I think from outside, it might be also
easy to see him as somebody who’s just out to make a buck and does want to
undermine wilderness law so that he can keep his “multimillion dollar business” going or
whatever. And then he has his distant association but still an association at one time
with the Koch brothers, many steps removed.
49

I can understand how people who don’t know very much at all about it, how their
opinions are easily manipulated to really paint Kevin as self-serving and that it could be
just about profit. But then when you’re on the inside, I think it’s pretty obvious that’s not
what’s going on. But you have to really know the story well and understand that these
are fabricated claims, that there really is a legitimate argument to be made against
converting Drakes Estero to wilderness right now: that back when they passed the law,
there was a lot of discussion about keeping the oyster farm there as a nonconforming
use and that even environmental groups at the time supported that. But those kinds of
finer points really haven’t been reported much anywhere else outside of West Marin.

48
Tess was talking mostly about a book by a former employee called "The Oyster War." Here's what
savedrakesbay.com has to say about it: "In 2015, a book was published purporting to be the true story
about Drakes Bay Oyster Farm. Called The Oyster War, the book is in fact a perfect reflection of the false
narrative promulgated by the Park Service and its allies."
49
Daniel Z. Epstein is the important “step” in that association. He was the Executive Director of the legal
advocacy nonprofit Cause of Action when Cause took up the Drakes Bay Oyster Company cause. Two
jobs before Cause, Epstein spent his first nine months out of law school at the Charles G. Koch
Foundation. Epstein’s a fairly hard core small government conservative, but my somewhat educated
guess is that the Kochs have no idea who he is.
53

20. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: CHANGING TIMES, CHANGING VALUES

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the
landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life
are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
–1964 Wilderness Act

--

J: Why do you think the Park Service changed their attitude toward the farm? Was it
because the Johnson Oyster Company was declining and becoming a mess and people
realized that, whoa, the owners of an oyster farm are human and can go through hard
times and can become a problem?

T: I don’t think so. I think it has more to do with changing times and values and that in
2012 or in 2005 even there was a new interest in preserving the Estero as this pristine
wilderness area, that that wasn’t even something that I think in the ‘60s and ‘70s when
people were starting to look at Point Reyes and decide that this could be a Park or a
National Seashore, that there wasn’t that kind of idea or desire for that kind of
conservation.

What created the Seashore was really a desire to have a place where people from the
Bay Area could come and recreate, where the ranches, the working landscape would be
preserved and not developed. There was a completely different mentality I think in the
Park Service and in the legislators and even in the environmental groups because
people thought that the place was already valuable as this working landscape.

And now there’s this push for something that’s much more purist, and I think what’s kind
of ironic about all of that is that at the same time there’s this newer drive to have that
more purist vision of Drakes Estero as wilderness, there’s also this increase in visitors,
and there’s so much development just outside the Seashore that people can come here
and realize that it’s not really a wilderness. There’s roads all around. There’s 2.5 million
visitors a year. What are we really thinking to try to create something pristine here? I
think it has to do with a cultural shift that’s larger than just the Park Service and the farm
itself.

J: And that’s a recent cultural shift? Or a cultural shift that just arrived in this
community?

54
T: I am not an expert in the conservation movement, but I think overall it’s something
that’s pretty ongoing and organic… but I think in the Seashore, talking about Drakes
Estero as pure wilderness is a recent shift, and it came about partly from a handful of
individuals who live here. Other people who live here call them wilderness fanatics or
extremists. I think there were individuals here who were pretty close with Don
Neubacher and affected his decision not to renew Kevin’s permit.

J: So personal influences.

T: I think there are personal influences, yes.
55

21. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: POLITICAL MISTAKES

S: Do you have time for one or maybe two more questions?

T: Mm hmm.

S: Some people accuse the Lunnys of hiring these PR spin doctors and relying on other
advocates that had other agendas? Would it have been better for them to be more
independent, to stand alone?

T: I don’t know if the Lunnys, if they had done anything differently, if Ken Salazar’s
decision would have been different. A lot of what went on was outside the Lunnys’
control. But obviously the Koch Brothers connection has not served Kevin well [laughs].
I think he has supporters who are both liberals and conservatives, but being connected
to the Koch brothers is a huge strike against you, and Kevin could have decided at a
certain point that he didn’t want any help from that law firm in Washington.
50
I don’t
know if he had looked into that guy’s background and knew about the Koch connection,
but he did know that they were right wing. But I think at the time he was really hoping for
some kind of legislative or some kind of Congressional action would happen to protect
the farm, and I think he thought that that was actually strategically a really positive
choice to have some conservative backers. But obviously it was used against him for a
time.

Also, I think there have been a couple of people or maybe one woman in particular who
has been an advocate of Kevin’s who has been running this blog Oyster Zone, and I
think she has upset a number of people because of her really harsh language, sort of
like on the same level I’d say of what the EAC posts in their press releases and online.
And that kind of propaganda sort of advocacy, I don’t know that that has helped him at
all.
51

I don’t know what else he really could have done that would have had any kind of effect
on the fate that he is now facing. I think that he is currently struggling with, you know
he’s part of the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association, which is a group that until

50
Cause of Action provided more than half a million dollars worth of free legal legal services to the
Drakes Bay Oyster Company. And they’re very open about being more than just a legal advocacy group.
They say their cases and their clients are “secondary” to their educational mission, which is to highlight
what they call “job-killing federal regulations, waste, fraud, and cronyism.”
51
The blogger’s name is Jane Gyorgy, and she’s a crusader for sure. The very sparsely attended
candlelight vigil and hunger strike she organized in support of the oyster company was easily the most
bizarre moment I witnessed on any of my reporting trips to Point Reyes. Whether she broke her strike
with an oyster or a piece of cheese is my favorite disputed detail in the story.
56
just a few weeks ago, all the ranchers were members, and they were really trying to
advocate for their collective interests, mainly leases and also tule elk encroachment,
with the Park Service. And there were some decisions that the oyster farm over a period
of time and a style of communication with the press and with the Park that alienated
about a third of the members of the Ranchers Association, and those ranchers have
now resigned from it.

So they’ve kind of split that base, which I think is a pretty unfortunate thing. The
relations among the ranchers from what I know… they don’t talk too much amongst
themselves, and they all perceive themselves to be in a really fragile situation. Most of
the ranchers don’t even have valid leases. They are mostly operating on six month
extensions, so they’re extremely vulnerable to the Park Service deciding to change
something, deciding to cut back on their cattle or whatever. That’s maybe a bit of a
tangent, but that’s actually an important, at least from the newspaper’s point of view. It’s
another piece of the story. Besides just looking at wilderness vs. agriculture, we’re also
looking at the viability of the historic ranches in the Seashore, and the treatment that
they’re getting, the support they’re getting from the Park Service, and the ranchers feel
that they’re in fragile situations and that their concerns are not being heard.

--

Spencer Michels produced the PBS piece
52
that ended the Cause of Action experiment.
His story gave a lot of love to the wilderness advocates and didn’t get into the misuse of
science allegations. Cause of Action was furious. They dropped a FOIA request on
PBS, demanding to see all the footage they took and all their notes. Kevin Lunny,
Nancy Lunny, and Corey Goodman quickly wrote their own letter to PBS
53
announcing
that they’d ended their relationship with Cause of Action.

It’s a strange document: part apology, part accusation. Here’s a taste:

[W]e did not know about the Cause of Action letter and FOIA request prior to its
submission, and we do not approve of it. While we believe that the PBS
broadcast perpetuated biased reporting, we nevertheless steadfastly defend the
freedom of the press. A free press is just as critical to our society as is truth and
scientific integrity in our government.

52
“Strange Bedfellows Join Fight to Keep California Oyster Farm in Operation”
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/north_america-jan-june13-oyster_05-01/)
53
“Response to Cause of Action May 17, 2013 letter to PBS”
(http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/ca/Lunnyletter.pdf)
57
22. TESS ELLIOTT INTERVIEW: DAVE THE LOBBYIST

T: So you asked what they could have done differently. Were you trying to get at
anything else? At all? Dave Weiman?

S: Do you want to say anything about him?

T: The Lunnys have had a few different PR companies, but they’ve really done
negligible work for them over time. They have also had a consultant in Washington who
has been more or less involved over the years, and who has played a large role in
talking to press, talking to members of Congress, and also talking to members of
various federal agencies that have been involved. II think he did a lot of important
ground work for the oyster farm in developing their arguments, but who knows what
other consequences that advocacy might have had. He’s definitely... well, you know
Dave…

J: Yeah I know Dave. I actually like him.

T: I like him too. Dave is a person who is so soulful and so emotional and clearly just
loves the Lunnys and really just thrown himself into the job of helping them. There have
been falling outs and strong personalities that haven’t survived the battle on the oyster
farm side. Egos get involved.

J: Yeah. Dave Weiman is probably another story for another day. The man with the
green stripe.

--

Dave Weiman told me about the green stripe running down his back the first time I
talked to him.

The conversation was off the record, but I think I'm allowed to report the stripe because
I already knew about it. Kevin Lunny brought it up when he first told me he had a
"political advisor" in Washington.

The wilderness advocates always preferred to refer to Weiman as the oyster company’s
"lobbyist."

Weiman made sure I understood that lobbyists get paid, and he didn't.
58
23. OTHER CHARACTERS: JORGE

Jorge Mata is a small man with a big mustache.

I met him moments before the boat ride I took with Sean Lunny and his harvester
colleagues. As I stepped onto the deck, Jorge handed me a piece of cardboard from the
dock. I didn’t understand what he said to me, but I quickly realized that it was meant to
protect my blue jeans from the dewy seagull shit on the gunwale where I was about to
sit.

Jorge worked on the oyster farm in Drakes Estero for almost 30 years, first for the
Johnson Oyster Company and then for the Lunnys.

Nine years before the farm closed, Jorge moved into one of the buildings across the
parking lot from the production facility. On each of my early morning visits to the farm,
Jorge’s rooster was the first member of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company team to greet
me.

When the company moved out of Drakes Estero, Jorge not only lost his job, but he also
lose his home.

On the evening after the last day of retail operations, Stephan, our production assistant
Nick, and I turned a camera on and watched the local news with Jorge and his family.
It’s a pretty intense scene, and you’ll see it if you watch the rough cut of the movie.
54

Very few reporters ever spent much time with Jorge, unfortunately. The language
barrier, I assume, had a lot to do with that.

There was, however, an op-ed
55
published in 2013 in the Marin Independent Journal the
author of which claims to be Jorge himself. It reads like a press release and emphasizes
the fact that Jorge and his family were facing an uncertain and frightening future:

“It is highly unlikely that we will be able to find similar work anywhere in California. We
fear that we will be torn from our families, from our work and our children will be torn
from their schools.”

I don’t believe that those words were Jorge’s, but I do believe that the fears were real,

54
Appendix IV
55
“Point Reyes oyster farm decision hits home” (http://www.marinij.com/ci_23302949/marin-voice-point-
reyes-oyster-farm-decision-hits)
59
and I hope he landed on his feet.

60
24. OTHER CHARACTERS: THE JOHNSONS

When we were working on the movie, we felt enormous magnetic pull toward the story
of the Johnsons.

They’re an old Point Reyes family that’s now mostly gone from the area. Only Makiko,
whose Japanese family taught her late husband how to grow oysters, is still nearby.

We’re convinced that the Johnsons were more important to the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company story than anyone wants to acknowledge.

The Lunnys bought the oyster company from the Johnsons in early 2005. Old man
Johnson had died. His sons either weren't interested in oyster mariculture, weren't
competent farmers, or weren't sober. The place was a wreck. And the Lunnys, generally
regarded as upstanding citizens, swooped in to rescue the historical landmark—
someone has been running a commercial oyster farm in Drakes Estero since the
1930s—purchasing the business, which for a number of years produced more than a
million dollars worth of shellfish a year, for a cool $80,000.

Tess didn’t seem to share our interest in the Johnson angle, unfortunately.

--

Nick:
56
Did you notice any difference between the Park Service’s relationship with the
Johnson family and the Lunny family?

T: The Johnsons were before my time. I wasn’t here when the Johnsons had the lease.
I know that they were not considered good stewards of the land and the Estero, and
there were a lot of damages that I think Kevin worked to clean up, and there are
probably still remnants of that. I don’t really know what the extent of that is. The other
piece is that there have been different Superintendents over time, and they all have
their own style. But I don’t know if they had a better relationship with the Johnson’s or if
there was more open communication. I think that one thing that Kevin has really
complained about, especially at the beginning when it was kind of new for him, was the
lack of communication from the Park Service. He wouldn’t get responses to phone calls
or letters for long periods of time, and there was just nobody at the Park Service that
was meeting him halfway. There would be months and then a response which had
some kind of ultimatum or something. And Kevin was like, “Why didn’t you talk to me
months ago?” and that kind of thing. And I think probably that kind of failure of

56
Nick Cruz, production assistant
61
communication has increased in the last decade or whatever. I think communication
probably used to be better between ranchers and the Park.

62

25. OTHER CHARACTERS: SCOTT YANCY AND HIS NEW CONSERVATIVE
FRIENDS

Hanging out with conservatives was strange for Scott Yancy.

Scott’s a big man with a big beard. He considers “crusty old hippies” his people. One of
the first things he ever said to me was that he’s “been to more National Parks than your
average bear.”

It was my first day on the farm, and we were in his office, a trailer without wheels next
door to Jorge Mata’s house. On the wall was a poster-size twelve month paper
calendar. The only mark on it was a sad face—red dot eyes and a red frowny mouth—in
the square corresponding to March 15th, 2013. I’d just come off the boat looking for
someone to talk to about that date, the original day by which the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company had to vacate Drakes Estero.
57

“Dude this thing is totally bizarre,” said Scott. “Like no matter how you slice it, it’s
Obama that cost me my job, and I’m an Obama fan.”

Scott had been working in mariculture for 13 years. He set planting schedules for the
company, did the accounting, made sure the farm passed health inspections, taught
tourists about oysters: how they filter their nutrients out of the water, how they suck up
cow manure residue and digest it, how to maximize their deliciousness. He loved his
job: out on the Estero every day, birds everywhere, all the shellfish he could eat.

He wasn’t optimistic it’d last, though. It was clear to Scott that Ken Salazar, “Obama’s
guy,” had succumbed to pressures from big money environmental orgs, the Sierra Club
especially,
58
and a dinky little farm can’t win a battle against that kind of opponent.

In the middle of our conversation, Scott got a phone call.

“No you’re not bugging me. Your brother is bugging me…. I got the signature page. It’s
literally ready to send. Doing it as we speak.”

He hung up, and the printer sputtered to life. “Oh, these guys,” he said, “pain in my
fuckin’ ass.” He was printing legal documents for Kevin Lunny to sign.

57
Injunctions granted during the legal battle kept the business running for almost two extra years beyond
that date.
58
Corey Goodman has thoughts on this subject as well: “I believe the Sierra Club is to the Democrats
what the NRA is to the Republicans. They're afraid to cross it.”
63

Scott liked the lawyers he’d met and appreciated the work they were doing for the farm
and its employees, but he didn’t love the uptick and printing and paperwork.

His feelings were mixed on some of the company’s other new friends as well. He’d
heard impassioned climate change denial, ugly takes on Obama’s race and religion,
rage directed at alleged government conspiracies. The Tea Party people who had
recently started visiting the farm told him about U.N. Agenda 21, for example. It looked
innocent enough: a non-binding sustainable development resolution signed by George
H.W. Bush and lots of other world leaders in 1992. But conservative TV and talk radio
host Glenn Beck wrote a dystopian novel about it in 2012, and, to the Tea Party folks, it
was an attempt to rid the world of private property rights.

When the conversations got heavy, Scott would smile and listen and secretly roll his
eyes, but he told me he had developed “a softer feeling” toward the conspiracy
theorists.

“I have to interact with them,” he said, “so I’m polite and that sort of stuff, and then what
happens is you end up seeing, well, they’re real people too. They’re not evil doers.”

Scott had especially warm feelings about a little local Tea Party chapter from nearby
Vallejo, CA that had recently visited. He was especially impressed with their
adventurous eating: “They ate some oysters and actually ate some raw clams,” he said,
“and they took some of our postcards and that sort of stuff, because they’re gonna give
them out. And that’s an example where you have to let your own biases go by, and then
you learn something. You’re like, you know what these people aren’t so bad.”

64

26. THE BUILDER

At a ceremony marking the last day of retail operations at the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company, Nancy Lunny, who usually lets her husband and in-laws do the talking about
The Battle, gave a short speech thanking the audience for their support. She closed it
with this:

Our family would like to dedicate this poem to all the builders in the world, like all
of you:

I saw them tearing a building down
A team of men in my hometown
With a heave and a ho and a yes yes yell
They swung a beam and a side wall fell
And I said to the foreman, “Are these men skilled
“Like the kind that you’d use if you had to build?”
And he laughed, and he said, “Oh no indeed
“The most common labor is all I need,
“For I can destroy in a day or two
“What takes a builder ten years to do.”

65

27. NOTE TO KEVIN ASKING HIM ABOUT DONALD TRUMP

Here’s the note I sent to former oyster farmer Kevin Lunny on January 17, 2017:

Dear Kevin,

I'm about to turn in my master’s thesis. You might remember that the reason I got
interested in you guys was because I was in journalism school, had a big project to do,
and thought it would be fun to learn something about the seafood industry in California.

The story I heard from you and others up in Point Reyes certainly didn’t come out of me
in a way I intended, but it did finally come out. I’ve attached it to this email. I hope you'll
read it someday.

I feel enormous gratitude for all the time and thoughtfulness you gave me on my visits to
West Marin.

I think you were fundamentally honest with me. I don’t think everything you told me was
100% of the whole truth, but I presented myself to you as a reporter, not a friend, so I
understand that you were protecting yourself and your people. I can’t imagine I would
have told me 100% of the whole truth if I had been in your situation.

I have a couple more questions, off the record, if you feel like responding:

1. Is it still tense up in Point Reyes?

2. Do you think the battle you fought over the oyster farm changed you politically?
Who did you vote for in the presidential election? Any chance you could get the
farm back when Trump appoints a new Interior Secretary?

I hope you’re doing well. Please tell Nancy and the rest of the family I say hi.

Take care!

Jake

66

28. LOSING KEVIN, LOSING KIM

I care enough to send the note you just read because of this:

My mother’s oldest brother, Kim, left the United States in 1971 because he had no
interest in killing and dying to defend greedy Catholic phonies in South Vietnam. An
adventure involving an undercover drug dealer, a knuckleball, an American oil man, and
a van named Big Mama led he and some friends to a piece of inexpensive land just
west of Cairns, Queensland, Australia. They started a commune. They walked around
naked. They grew their own food. They grew their own dope. They harvested magic
mushrooms from local cow pies.

Kim has never trusted religion or war or capitalists, but, more and more, he doesn't trust
environmentalists either.

He has lived in the bush in Australia for more than 40 years now, 12 of them on the
commune, the rest on another remote property, this one his own. Kim calls it Wyalla
Gardens. It’s 100 miles north of Cairns, on the edge of the rainforest, up the hill from a
mangrove-armored river mouth that spits inland nutrients at the Great Barrier Reef. Kim
grows tropical fruit, mills local timber, and, when there's demand, takes tourists fishing
and snorkeling on the Reef.

A dozen or so years ago, he started getting hassled by government analysts on both
land and sea.

He feels like he and the rest of the backcountry economy are getting an unfair deal.
City-educated environmentalists in Canberra and Brisbane are making decisions about
his farm and his fishing spots. He has no say unless he calls and calls and waits on hold
for hours and puts his nicest jeans on and visits government offices and begs people to
come see the scrubby valley land they keep designating "old growth rainforest."

It's air raid conservation, he says, without regard for the faceless strangers on the
ground.

And, according to some of his newer, redder-necked friends, it's just like climate
change. It's environmental crisis dreamt up out of ignorance, paranoia, and unfair
application of the precautionary principle.

My point is that I'm related to, have great respect for, and increasingly argue over
67
greenhouse gases with an ex-hippie fisherman/farmer uncle who has grown to hate
environmentalists.

I wish Kim didn’t feel the way he does, and I hope the US National Park Service and its
allies haven’t pushed Kevin Lunny into the arms of conservatives who don’t want to take
meaningful steps to reduce human impact on the planet.

68
APPENDIX I: A Transcript of the Corey Goodman-Focused Radio Story
That I Drafted But Abandoned For Fear of Being Wrong

Here is my original attempt at the story, in radio script form:

CG: Jorge is leaving the dock. He’s backing up. We’re gonna let him. We know what 50
feet is out there. We’re gonna have him drive back and forth, and we’re gonna see how
noisy the boat is.

JD: Dr. Corey Goodman and I are slowly sinking into the dark grey tidal mud as we look
out across the northern tip of Drakes Estero.

CG: Ok Jorge’s out there. Now he’s gonna turn around and come back.

JD: Corey, a wiry sixty-one-year-old neurobiologist and biotech entrepreneur, has a
spiral ring notebook in his right hand, and he’s using it to keep the gusty wind off the
Radio Shack sound-meter in his left. It’s a $50 instrument, looks like a miniature bowling
pin, and Corey’s using it to measure the sound of one of the Drakes Bay Oyster
Company’s motorboats as it passes a point 50 feet from where we’re standing.

CG: Ok now he’s coming closer. We’re getting noisier here. I’m talking. [PAUSE] Ok I’m
gonna ask him to do it again. He was between the high 50s and low 60s...

JD: Drakes Estero is part of the Point Reyes National Seashore, which is managed by
the National Park Service. [ADD: physical description] In 2010, Ken Salazar, who was
then the US Secretary of the Interior, ordered Park Service scientists to prepare an
official document comparing the environmental impact of removing the oyster company
with the environmental impact of allowing it to stay.

Salazar had a decision to make. The company’s permit to operate in Drakes Estero was
expiring in November 2012, and it was up to him whether or not to accept the
company’s application to extend the permit.

After a highly-contested drafting and public commenting process - and just a few days
before Salazar’s decision deadline - those Park Service scientists released their Final
Environmental Impact Statement. And they concluded, among other things that infuriate
Corey Goodman, that the oyster company has a major adverse impact on the natural
soundscape of the Estero ecosystem.

Contributing to that conclusion is a bunch of data copied and pasted from sound
69
libraries rather than measured on the Estero.

And Corey wants to show me that this proxy data is an absurd overestimate of the
oyster company’s noisiness.

CG: Um those measurements... What direction? We were just going north again. Those
measurements the second time around were 56 to 59 decibels.

JD: The sound of an oyster boat at 50 feet, according the numbers the Park Service
chose, should often get up to 74 decibels. And, given the Park Service’s natural ambient
sound estimate - the sound of the wind and water and birds and insects - an estimate
that Corey and his noise meter tell me is quite low - a machine that makes 74 decibels
of noise at 50 feet is potentially disturbing to birds, harbor seals, and hikers more than a
mile and a half away.

Basically, according to Park Service numbers, Drakes Estero is an extremely quiet
place, and the oyster company’s boats are a lot louder than they sound.

JM: How bad’s the noise.
CG: Oh. It’s like a rock concert.

JD: Since 2007, when the Marin County Supervisors first asked Corey review some
Park Service data, Corey says he has dealt with bad science accusing the oyster farm
of polluting water bottom sediments, killing eelgrass, reducing fish diversity, and chasing
harbor seals off the sandbars where they lounge at low tide.

It’s serial misuse and manipulation of scientific data, says Corey. It’s people with a
policy agenda - the removal of the oyster farm - using false science to justify their point
of view.

[CONSIDER ADDING: CG: I believe the Sierra Club is to the Democrats what the NRA
is to the Republicans. They're afraid to cross it.]

Gordon Bennett, one of the most outspoken oyster company critics in the Point Reyes
community, says Corey is a distraction.

He disagrees with everything Corey says. He thinks Corey is a fast-talking conspiracy
theorist with a paranoid obsession with this issue. But Gordon says the science had
nothing to do with Salazar’s decision to let the company’s permit expire.

70
GB: The real issue is simply the Wilderness Act that was passed in 1976 for Point
Reyes, and that mandated that this area was ultimately going to be a wilderness area
without any commercial use of it. So that's the fundamental and really the only real
issue. Everything else is a sidelight.

JD: And that may be the case, as far as the legality of the Secretary’s decision is
concerned, but, even so, Corey’s sidelight has been shining bright in Washington, DC.

California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, got involved right around
the same time Corey did, and she’s been a constant critic of Park Service science ever
since.

More and more vocal however are small government conservatives.

Corey, a lifelong Democrat, has presented his case to Republican Senators and
Congresspeople, and he has been working closely with an education and legal
advocacy organization called Cause of Action, which has now donated more than half a
million dollars worth of legal help to the oyster company. Cause of Action’s primary
mission is to educate the public about government abuse and overreach, and its
founder used to work for one of the billionaire conservative activist Koch brothers, who
some consider to be the world’s most dangerous supporters of false science.

[CONSIDER ADDING: Glenn Greenwald, quoted in Politico, on the Kochs: “the Koch
Brothers now serve the same function for the Left as George Soros long served for the
Right: the bogeymen who motivate the loyalists and on whom everything bad, including
political losses, can be blamed.”]

PG: Ok so that’s ironic beyond measure...

JD: Here’s climate scientist Peter Gleick, a man who has had more than his fair share of
run ins with well-funded climate deniers.

PG: But it’s the fault of Democrats who could have taken this issue on from a scientific
integrity point of view and been on the right side of the issue.

JD: Peter is Corey’s most outspoken ally in the scientific community.

PG: Corey is an energizer bunny in this area. He takes every bit of science that’s been
presented, and he analyzes it from a scientific point of view, and he identifies what’s
valid and what isn’t valid, and he reports on it. He’s not alone. Other people have
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analyzed different pieces of it. He’s brought in statisticians. And he’s brought in seal
disruption experts. And he’s brought in eelgrass experts…

JD: These folks want to stay behind the scenes and off the record, says Corey, to
maintain their relationships with the federal government. But he says he’s had unofficial
help from at least ten other scientists, several of whom are National Park Service
employees.

[FOOTSTEPS]

JD: As Corey and I hike out along the Estero to do one more sound experiment, he tells
me he has mixed feelings about being at the center of the controversy.

It has been a long, painful battle for a lot of people in the Point Reyes community, and
emotions have run incredibly high.

CG: Do you know... my wife from time to time has gotten worried that someone is gonna
shoot me. And I get choked up when I tell you that because I'm not worried, and you
ain’t gonna scare me off of anything, but I have to tell you that I do worry about her
feelings.

[CONSIDER ADDING: This is the second time he has told me this on mic.]

JD: She supports him, though, says Corey. She understands that he’s fighting for truth
and transparency in science, something that to Corey and Peter Gleick and many other
scientists is sacred.

But wilderness advocate and Park Service supporter Gordon Bennett is fighting for
something sacred, too.

GB: I've said many times and people have laughed at me, but I'll say it again: for me it's
a kind of a church. And I think for many people it's a kind of a church.

JD: Wilderness, says Gordon, is a place for healing and learning. It’s a place where
humans go to pay their respects to the other creatures on this planet. It’s a place to find
wisdom, a place to find peace.

And one of the problems with the oyster farm is that it disturbs that peace. For the birds
that winter on the Estero. For the harbor seals that teach their pups to haul out on the
sandbars. And for visitors to the Point Reyes National Seashore, for people who come
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in search of a quiet, meditative wilderness experience.

[ADD AMY TRAINER STORY?]

CG: I’m gonna call him and ask him where he is. … Hey Sean, where are you?

JD: After a three-mile hike, Corey and I have arrived at our destination.

SL: Maybe half a mile out.
CG: Ok good. Keep comin.

Sean Lunny and Jorge Mata are on the motorboat in the Estero.

Months earlier, the first time I visited DBOC, Jorge handed me a piece of cardboard as
he wished me well on my ride-along with the oyster workers. He wanted me to protect
my pants from the seagull shit on the boat’s gunwale, where I was about to sit. Sean
was next to me on the boat that day, tired and grumpy at first but eventually excited to
show me how DBOC grows its oysters.

…

Jorge, who is the Company’s sort of foreman/sergeant has worked on the farm for 29
years and lived there for eight. He and his family probably have the most to win and
lose in the battle. And DBOC has tried to exploit that.

JD: Sean Lunny, whose father, Kevin, runs the oyster company, and Jorge Mata, who
has worked and lived on the farm for 29 years, are on the boat and heading for one of
the most controversial spots in the Estero, the point where the motorboats and farm
workers come closest to the harbor seals and their pups.

CG: This is the base of the controversy...

JD: We’re standing on a bluff in a cow pasture, leaning carefully against a barbed wire
fence, looking west across the seal-speckled sandbars of the Estero, and listening for
the motor.

JD: Ok so tell me when, like when do you think we’re supposed to hear it? …

JD: According Corey’s map, we’re about seven tenths of a mile from Jorge and Sean,
as they zip along at what they say is normal cruising speed.
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CG: … And it should actually be quite loud … considerably loud, louder than the ah
wind and the birds and everything, and yet what we’re mostly hearing in my ears right
now is wind. And this is not a particularly windy day. This is a low wind day. Um ah...
JD: Let’s listen for a sec.
[PAUSE]
JD: I mean to tell you the truth, I can’t tell if what we’re hearing is like a low rumble of a
machine, or if it’s a low rumble of wind or if it’s the surf coming up into the Estero.
CG: I can’t either. Let’s listen carefully, I can’t... I’m trying to hear what I...
[PAUSE]
CG: Everything sounds the same to me right now.
JD: You know what we should ask them to do. We should ask them to while we can see
them...
CG: Cut the engine?
JD: … to kill the engine. See if we can hear that.
CG: Hey guys. Could you do me a favor and just kill the engine for a second. Just stop.
[PAUSE]
CG: They just did and nothing changed. Look. Look. They killed the engine. I still hear
the same rumble.
SL: Ok engine is killed.
JD: Let’s listen for a sec, and then we can get them to re-start it up.
[PAUSE]
CG: At 12 after 3, we got them to kill the engine in the West Channel. Nothing changed.
I want to note that down in my notebook, and then we’re gonna ask them to start it up
again … What did I say? 3:12. 3:12 here in the West Channel. We see them. We ask
them to kill the engine. And nothing changed…

JD: It’s true. Nothing changed. We couldn’t hear the boat. The seals didn’t seem
disturbed. And Corey’s point felt valid.

The sound numbers the Park Service used in the Environmental Impact Statement did
not seem - on April 20th, 2013 - to match the reality we observed.

Maybe our equipment is faulty. Maybe we ran into unusual wind and water conditions.
Maybe Corey conspired with Sean and Jorge to trick me. Or maybe the Park Service
scientists made an honest mistake.

But, if Corey is right, and these funky sound numbers are just one in a series of
questionable data sets, then maybe the Park Service has been lying and cheating for
years, fighting for wilderness the same way climate deniers fight for the freedom to
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pollute.
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APPENDIX II: A Version of the Story I Wrote for a Friendly Writing Class
but Abandoned for Fear for Being Wrong

My classmates gave this the kinds of mixed reviews that suggested to me that I couldn’t
possibly fix it:

Nov 19, 2013

It’s April. It’s raining. I’ve been working on a radio story for three months. And no
one wants to tell me the whole truth.
The story’s about an oyster farm on federal government property in Marin
County, California. The Secretary of the Interior decided last year not to renew its permit
to operate. The farmers are fighting the decision in court, hoping to maintain access to a
property they’ve never owned.
It has been a contentious issue for eight plus years, and everybody has lots of
practice with people like me. They smile. They stay on script. Their logic sounds
flawless. And they go out of their way not tell new stories or make new metaphors or
think out loud.
And I’m especially susceptible to these tactics because I’m a rookie. I go into
interviews with brilliant plans and detailed notes, and I walk out with huge chunks of
crystal quality but totally unusable audio. Some subjects pretend to but don’t actually
answer my questions. Others explain why they’re not the right questions. Others talk
fast and constantly and breathlessly, and I’m convinced they’re intentionally making it
impossible for me to nudge them back on track.
Every time, in every interview, eventually, I switch to Plan B. I make sure the
subject knows that I want to hear everything he has to say and that I’ll give him as much
time as he wants to say it. So I learn a lot, and I transcribe a lot, but everything I gather
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is old. no new thoughts and no new scenes and not the slightest bit of story unfolding
before my microphone’s eyes.
It’s at the point where I’ve decided to manufacture some action, so I call up Dr.
Corey Goodman.
Corey lives on a grassy hilltop, surrounded by his wife’s sheep. He is a
neurobiologist, a biotech investor, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and
one of the loudest and most articulate allies of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the
controversial farm forty minutes down the road. “People say he's a big farm supporter,
and we're thrilled to have him around,” says Kevin Lunny, one of the the company’s
owners, "but that's not exactly what Corey is. He’s a scientific integrity-focused
individual.”
Kevin says this gracefully, if a little stiffly, in his business office in Nicasio, about
a forty five minute drive from the farm. The Lunnys were cattle ranchers and general
contractors long before they became oyster farmers, and Kevin divides his time
between the three businesses.
The Drakes Bay Oyster Company plants, harvests, packs, cans, and sells
shellfish in and on a cold, calm, stunningly beautiful lagoon called Drakes Estero, which
is also the big marine tourist attraction in the Point Reyes National Seashore. PRNS is
not exactly a National Park, as more than a third if its 110 square miles are zoned for
agricultural activity and leased to cattle ranchers, but the National Park Service
manages it as much like a nature preserve as they can.
Corey Goodman’s scientific integrity concerns, first and foremost, are with the
National Park Service’s measurement of environmental impact. He believes that the
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NPS has been misusing, misrepresenting, and tampering with scientific data in order to
manufacture evidence of the oyster farm’s adverse impact on the Drakes Estero
ecosystem.
I ask Corey if we might be able to illustrate any of his claims on microphone. I tell
him I’d like to actually do something with him, rather than just talk. So we come up with
a plan, and we agree to meet at the oyster farm on April 20th.
As soon as I hang up the phone, I call one of Corey’s arch nemeses, the retired
organic soy milk entrepreneur Gordon Bennett. Gordon lives in Point Reyes Station, the
closest real town to the oyster farm. He is the wilderness advocate who has been
friendliest with me, most generous with his time, and most forgiving of my ignorance. He
thinks it’s past time for the oyster company to respect its landlord’s decision and move
out of Drakes Estero.
The Estero is one of a handful of places in PRNS that Congress, in the Point
Reyes Wilderness Act of 1976, designated "potential wilderness.” And Gordon says
“that mandated that this area was ultimately going to be a wilderness area without any
commercial use of it.” If the oyster company wasn’t running their business out of the
Estero, according to Gordon, the lagoon would be wilderness proper already.
On the phone, I invite Gordon to go on a walk with me in another PRNS
wilderness area on April 19th or 20th and talk about why wilderness is important. He
says he’ll see what he can do, but a few days before I make my trip, he tells me he
won’t be available. Friends are coming to visit him, and he suggests that I ask Marin
Environmental Action Committee Executive Director Amy Trainer, another local
wilderness advocate, to walk with me instead.
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When I email Amy and and propose my wilderness interview, she sends me this
reply: "Sorry, Jake, I am booked for the next few weeks getting ready for our 2013
Birding & Nature Festival."
I’ve never prepared for a Birding and Nature Festival, so I can’t fairly comment on
the intensity of that work, but my suspicion is that Amy is simply not interested in talking
to me, and Festival prep is the best excuse she has at the moment.
When I first met Amy, we were standing in line outside a courtroom on a chilly
February morning in Oakland. The oyster company was challenging the Department of
the Interior’s decision not to renew its permit. I had visited the farm once at that point. I
had just begun to understand the battle and the ways the combatants fight. And I asked
Amy some questions that, in retrospect, I realize were the kinds of very basic questions
that a better and more prepared reporter wouldn’t have needed to ask.
Drakes Bay Oyster Company supporters and employees deal with clean-slate
rookie reporters by trying—sometimes awkwardly—to befriend them. Earlier that day,
for example, Kevin Lunny’s sister Ginny insisted that I accept a granola bar and called
me a “true believer.” Amy Trainer deals with ignorant rookies by rolling her eyes when
she finds out they haven’t read her press releases. I hadn’t read them that first time we
met, and I figure that has something to do with her email.
So I go into the wilderness by myself. I drive out to Estero de Limantour, which is
a proper legal wilderness and, depending who you ask, either a smaller lagoon that
neighbors Drakes Estero or the fifth and most isolated of Drakes Estero’s bays.
Limantour is spectacular. It's early enough in the day that I only see a couple of
other people, so I feel alone. Flowers are starting to bloom. Pelicans are cruising. And I
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can hear and smell the millions of tiny or still and silent lives around me, so I stop
feeling alone. Then I get sad thinking about how many places like this are gone forever,
how much living beauty humans have destroyed. Then I feel lucky that we still have a
few of these places, that I know about some of them, that I have the means to get to
them, and that I’ve learned to treasure them. Then I get sad again, but in a good way.
I’m happy, as I walk out of the wilderness, to be sad.
When I arrive at the farm to meet Corey, he’s raring to go. He’s got his blue
hoodie on. He’s bouncing in his hiking shoes. And he’s showing me the sound meter he
borrowed from John Hulls, a long-time Point Reyes journalist, who, like all the local
journalists I've talked to or read, is furious at the Park Service and the wilderness
advocates. Hulls is rooting hard for Corey Goodman, amateur investigator, to blow this
case open by exposing the Park Service’s scientific misconduct. The sound meter is a
$50 Radio Shack instrument, and it looks like a miniature grey bowling pin wearing a
fuzzy black hat.
Corey wants to measure the sound of the oyster company’s motorboat and show
that it doesn’t match up with what the Park Service wrote in the Environmental Impact
Statement. The EIS is a thousand-plus page document that compares the expected
environmental impact of renewing the oyster company’s permit with the expected
environmental impact of letting it expire. The NPS prepared it in 2012 for their boss,
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Its purpose was to help him decide whether or not to
extend the oyster company’s permit. In EIS, the Park Service claims that the oyster farm
has a “major adverse impact” on the Estero’s soundscape, disturbing seals, birds, and
hikers.
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Corey wants to show me that the Park Service arrived at their “major adverse
impact” conclusion because instead of measuring the actual sound the boat makes—
which he says is pretty easy to do—they used proxy data: the sound of a jet ski in New
Jersey
59
in the 1990s. Using that proxy data and some very low estimates for the
ambient soundscape created by of wind, water, birds, and insects, the Park Service
determined that the oyster company’s boats are audible and thus potentially disturbing
just about everywhere in the Estero. Corey thinks that claim is absolutely ridiculous and
easily refuted.
So he leads me down onto the slurpy grey mud at the edge of the water, tells me
to be silent, holds his little bowling pin out in front of him, watches the calculator
numbers change, writes the approximate ambient sound level in his notebook. Then he
signals to Jorge Mata, the farm’s long-time foreman, who’s standing on the splintery old
dock to our right, and begins his detailed narration.
"Jorge is leaving the dock,” says Corey. "He’s backing up. We’re gonna let him.
We know what fifty feet is out there. We’re gonna have him drive back and forth, and
we’re gonna see how noisy the boat is.”
We do that, and the meter tells us that the boat, from fifty feet away, is
significantly quieter than the jet ski. We measure the other sounds the onshore oyster
facility makes, and those readings are low too. And Corey is loving it. He’s joking with
Jorge and the other workers, discussing Gordon Bennett’s claim that he has heard
excessively loud music coming from boomboxes on the boat. He’s testing a pair of
yellow walkie talkies with Sean Lunny, Kevin’s son, who also works on the farm. The

59
I mention New Jersey here because oyster farm advocates always mention New Jersey, implying, it
seems to me, that New Jersey jet skis are especially loud.
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two of them are saying “Roger” and “10-4” a lot. Throughout, Corey's head is angled just
a bit down and to his right, to make sure the mic captures everything.
When it’s time to go for our hike on the trail from which Godon and the other
wilderness advocates have claimed to have been disturbed by boats and boomboxes, I
follow Corey over to a picnic table, where he poaches a cracker and a slice of cheese
from some friends. It’s not his wife’s sheep cheese, he complains, but it’ll have to do.
The friends get interested in the microphone, and one of them, slurring, tells me that the
loudest thing out here are the picnickers, amplified by fresh oysters and local wines.
Another asks if I’m making a documentary. “Trying,” I tell him.
It only takes a few minutes to drive from the farm to the Estero Trail trailhead,
and Corey keeps talking while he drives. He tells me what a fun thing it is that we’re
doing, what a great thing it is that we’re doing, and how crazy the wilderness advocates
are to be focused on such an ecologically insignificant issue.
“Why are we spending so much money on this pristine spot?” he wonders. “Why
not focus on real environmental issues in this world? What about the tar sands, the
Keystone Pipeline? I'm an environmentalist. I don't know how you can be a biologist and
not an environmentalist. And I think the environmental movement has lost its way. It
needs to get back to being data-driven.”
This is why I’m interested in this story. I’m fascinated by arguments among
environmentalists. We’re a highly and broadly educated, ethically-driven group of
people. We consider ourselves experts in an incredibly broad range of subjects. And
we’re snobs. We’re grumpy, elitist doomsday preachers, fun to take on a walk in the
woods, insufferable when interacting with the enemy or the brainless sheep. And we’re
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marginalized. Nobody listens. What we prescribe is either anti-technological or
unrealistically futuristic. We love whales better than fishermen, owls better than loggers,
desert toads and wildflowers better than progress. We’re a fucking mess. And we have
very little democratic sway anymore. Our economic sway is waning, for fortunes are
made through production,
60
not through advocacy for clean air and recycling. MORE...
Sound meter and walkie talkie safely cushioned in Corey’s backpack, we start
hiking, and, for about three miles, almost uninterrupted, Corey keeps talking.
He goes back through everything he has told me over the past couple of months.
He tells me how moving it was to be in the audience when Barack Obama
addressed the National Academy of Sciences and talked about scientific integrity. “He
was the first sitting President to address the Academy since Kennedy,” says Corey. “He
got a standing ovation. In 2009 and 2010, he put through new policies. Great goals.
Lofty goals, and I believe he meant every word of it. The problem is, over at the
Department of the Interior, no one gives a damn.”
He talks about our destination today, the spot where the Park Service set up
secret cameras to try to catch the oyster workers disturbing the seals.
He talks about the sound recordings the NPS took from another nearby location,
about their claims to be able to hear boats, their claims to be able to hear music playing
on boats. “You know I've listened to a lot of the recordings that the government has,”
says Corey, “and I did hear somebody singing once. It was someone in one of the
kayaks. The guy had a pretty good voice. and I recognized what he was singing: the
main aria from one of the rigolettos. It was pretty good.”
He tells me about Brent Stewart, the seal expert in San Diego, who examined the

60
And speculation, of course—buying low and selling high—but even Ayn Rand wouldn’t approve of that.
83
photos the Park Service cameras took, delivered a spreadsheet of data to the Park
Service, and then saw his spreadsheet included as an addendum to the Environmental
Impact Statement but altered just enough to justify an anti-oyster-company conclusion.
He tells me he thinks the big environmental nonprofits have way too much
political power. “I believe the Sierra Club is to the Democrats what the NRA is to the
Republicans,” he says.
He tells me for the fourth time, including previous interviews, that he’s not a
conspiracy theorist.
“Do you know,” he asks, pausing to compose himself, “that my wife from time to
time has gotten worried that someone is gonna shoot me? And I get choked up when I
tell you that because I'm not worried, and you ain’t gonna scare me off of anything, but I
have to tell you that I do worry about her feelings.”
At one point we pass two young hikers, and Corey’s feeling friendly, so he asks
how their experience has been, if they’ve been disturbed by any boats. “No, no, no,”
they say. “We like the oyster farm.” But they don’t have much more to say about it, so
they tell us about the red-legged frog in the puddle over there, and we all go over and
have a look. It’s unspectacular looking, just a quiet little brown-green frog. But we’re
amazed because it’s an endangered species, and it’s alive and maybe even thriving
here along the Estero Trail, and Point Reyes is proud of its red-legged frogs.
A few minutes later, Corey and I turn a corner, and we remember that the Point
Reyes National Seashore isn’t exactly a National Park. A big brown calf is standing in
the middle of the trail, staring at us, and chewing.
Corey cocks his head ever so slightly toward the mic and says to the calf, “I hope
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you're a lady and not a dude.”
We wait, and Corey asks, “Why are you staring at me, buddy? Are you gonna
walk away from us?” Eventually it does, we determine that if it is a dude, it’s a
surgically-altered dude, so our fears were overblown.
Then, after a short interlude about lambs and rubber bands and castration, we’re
almost to the spot, and the walkie talkie crackles, and Corey snaps back into research
mode. He tells Sean and Jorge, who are in the boat and on their way out to meet us, to
give us a few minutes, and we pick up the pace, and we get to the spot, and we look
down the bluff and out across the Estero, and it’s low tide, and the sandbars are poking
out of the water, and they’re covered with seals, and it’s clear and sunny and breezy,
and the Estero looks big and healthy and full of life, and it’s just about as beautiful as
anything I’ve ever seen.
And Corey pulls out the sound meter to take an ambient sound reading, and the
battery’s dead.
For a brief moment, Corey’s crushed.
But he recovers and reminds me that it doesn’t matter what the ambient sound is
out here. What matters is whether we can hear the boat, whether the boat will disturb
our wilderness experience, because that’s what the wilderness advoates and the Park
Service’s Environmental Impact Statement says the boat does: it disturbs seals and
birds and hikers on this very trail.
Corey walkie talkies to Sean and Jorge and asks where they are. Almost there,
they say, and then, immediately, we see them, and Corey smiles and says, "This is the
base of the controversy.”
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We lean carefully against the barbed wire fence, look west across the seal-
speckled sandbars of the Estero, and listen for the motor.
"When do you think we’re supposed to hear it?” I ask. According the map Corey’s
holding, we’re about seven tenths of a mile from the tiny boat we see zipping along at
what Sean and Jorge have told us is normal cruising speed.
“It should actually be quite loud,” says Corey, “considerably louder than the wind
and the birds and everything, and yet what we’re mostly hearing in my ears right now is
wind. And this is not a particularly windy day. This is a low wind day."
"Let’s listen for a sec,” I say.
We breathe as quietly as we can.
I speak first: "I mean, to tell you the truth, I can’t tell if what we’re hearing is like a
low rumble of a machine, or if it’s a low rumble of wind or if it’s the surf coming up into
the Estero."
"I can’t either,” says Corey. "Let’s listen carefully, I can’t... I’m trying to hear what
I…"
It’s silent again.
"You know what we should ask them to do?” I say. "We should ask them to while
we can see them—"
"Cut the engine?” Corey has already pulled out the walkie talkie by the time I
nod. “Hey, guys,” he says, “Could you do me a favor and just kill the engine for a
second. Just stop."
The boat’s tiny white wake disappears.
Corey’s eyes sparkle. "They just did and nothing changed. Look. Look. They
86
killed the engine. I still hear the same rumble."
The walkie talkie beeps, and Sean’s voice comes through: “Ok. Engine is killed."
We listen.
Five seconds later, Corey breaks the silence by digging in his backpack. He
looks at his watch. "At twelve after three, we got them to kill the engine in the West
Channel. Nothing changed. I want to note that down in my notebook.” He pulls a pen
out of his jeans pocket. "What did I say? Three-twelve?” He scribbles as he speaks.
“Three-twelve here in the West Channel. We see them. We ask them to kill the engine.
And nothing changed."
Corey smiles when I look at him. He has made his point. On April 20, 2013,
under normal ambient sound conditions, two sets of naked ears in the cow pasture
beside the Estero Trail can’t hear the bigger of Drakes Bay Oyster Company’s boats
while it cruises in the West Channel, on the far side of the Estero. According to the
sound numbers the Park Service used in its Environmental Impact Statement, the motor
would have been obvious. It seems extreme to say that the sounds of oyster farming
are having a “major adverse impact" on the Estero ecosystem. And, if Corey is right,
and these sound numbers are just one in a series of questionable data sets, then it feels
reasonable to wonder if the Park Service has been lying and cheating for years, fighting
for wilderness the same way climate deniers fight for the freedom to pollute.
The next morning, Corey sends me an email. He tells me he has written up
everything we did on the 20th, and he's excited to get it in the local weekly paper, the
Point Reyes Light. He wants to know if I’m going to write the story or he’s going to write
the story.
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Then I’m on the phone with the editor of the Light, and she wants me to write the
story. No one has heard from me yet, she reminds me, and everyone already knows
Corey, so when do I think I can get something done?
This freaks me out for three reasons:
(A) Corey is chairman of the Marin Media Institute, which owns the Point Reyes
Light.
(B) Corey’s allegations are far bigger than broader than our observations can
illustrate.
(C) Why are we in a hurry?
So I tell the editor I’m not comfortable writing anything yet. She says she
understands and she appreciates my desire to be patient. We thank each other and say
we’ll talk again soonish.
She prints Corey’s writeup the next week. Nobody seems to notice. And the
battle rages on, quietly and mostly locally, as it has been doing for years.
Nine months later, little has changed.
PBS ran a long, rambling story that seemed to agree with the wilderness
advocates. Harpers ran a short, snappy one that seemed to agree with the oyster
company.
The oyster company’s highly controversial hard core right wing legal advisors,
whose ties to the billionaire industrialist anti-government activist Koch brothers are
either old and weak or totally terrifying, depending on who you ask, have stepped down.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard the oyster company’s plea for a stay of
their execution in May, and the Court released its two to one decision against them in
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September. The dissenting judge is a superstar named Paul Watford, apparently one of
President Obama’s top choices should he get an opportunity to appoint a Supreme
Court Justice. And the most recent rumblings suggest that the Ninth Circuit will agree to
re-evaluate their decision.
Corey’s still investigating. Amy is still writing press releases.
And I still wish everyone would learn to get along.
The wilderness advocates want to do right by Drakes Estero. They want to do
right by the ecosystem, by PRNS visitors. They want to do right by environmentalists
past, by the people who fought to protect wilderness both nationwide and in Point
Reyes.
But it seems like a triumph of stubbornness that an oyster farm and a cow-
friendly National Park-like entity can’t do great things together.
In my opinion, wilderness is something we can and should all appreciate. But
why we should do that or what exactly it is about wilderness that we should love is
tough to articulate. I think I sound silly when I say things like we owe it to the earth or we
owe it to these other species as if they participate in our system of justice and value
exchange. I think I sounded silly a few pages ago when I wrote about visiting the
wilderness surrounding Estero de Limantour. And I think I sound downright crazy when I
insist it’s ethically important that we at least try preserve certain elements of the world
as it existed before massive human intervention. The reality is that there probably aren’t
any ecosystems on this planet that operate entirely outside the influence of humans.
So I struggle with the legal definition of wilderness. It feels fake. In an legally-
protected full-blown wilderness area, commercial activity that isn’t primarily tourist-
89
focused, like oyster farming, is not allowed. Commercial activity that is primarily tourist-
focused, however, like kayak rentals, is allowed. Why should we protect slivers of
already massively altered spaces by making rules that shield them from one subset of
human influence and not another?
Gordon Bennett’s understanding of wilderness feels more ideologically sound to
me than the law’s. He considers wilderness to be sacred space: "I've said many times,
and people have laughed at me, but I'll say it again: For me it's a kind of church. And I
think for many people it's a kind of a church. And when you're dealing with your day to
day activities and day to day upsets, and maybe some are significant upsets maybe
with work or your family, it's very quieting to go out there and just commune with
nature.”
One of Gordon’s problems with the oyster company is that they interrupt his
meditation. They remind him that humans and our economic activity dominate,
sometimes to devastating effect. And Gordon’s desire to protect his personal sacred
space is totally legitimate. But the problem is that sacred spaces can be used for lots of
things other than meditation. And shellfish aquaculture might be another good use. It is
one of the lightest touch, most ecologically sound ways humans produce protein. And
Drakes Estero, by luck of geography, is a really great place to do grow oysters.
That said, Kevin Lunny and his employees are not perfect. They haven’t had a
productive working relationship with either the Park Service or the California Coastal
Commission, the state agency in charge of coastal planning and protection. They’re not
as worried as they should be about the invasive Manila clams they grow. They don’t
spend as much time as they should collecting the bits of black plastic that break off the
90
steel rods they use to dangle growing oysters over their wooden growing racks. They
say they’re doing everything they can to be the cleanest, most innovative oyster farm in
the world, and they’re not.
But Kevin and colleagues are people who are excited to be running the farm, a
farm that can be run really well. If the problem is the people themselves, let’s push them
to be better, or let’s find different people. Drakes Estero is one of the few places in the
world where humans are producing food in a way that is not only economically but also
ecologically impressive. Let’s encourage them to keep doing that. Even if those places
are churches. Especially if those places are churches.

91
APPENDIX III: A Rough Cut of a Documentary That I’ll Probably Never
Make (For Fear of Being Wrong)

We did the Tess Elliott interview for this movie. We didn’t want to go in the advocacy
direction The Framing of an Oyster Farm went in. We wanted to be fair and balanced
and respected by everyone.

I don’t think we accomplished that, but we did make a rough assembly cut that I think
proves that there’s beauty and worthwhile provocation to be found. …

The Visitors by Jake de Grazia and Stephan McCormick
Link: https://vimeo.com/109650738
Password: noisynoise

Here are the words, if you’d rather read than watch:

The Visitors Rough Cut Transcript

92

APPENDIX IV: My First Attempt at a Novel Outline

The working title is Murder on the Seashore. The fact that the Johnsons aren’t involved
in any way yet is a big concern:

1. Nibbles the deranged elephant seal murdered. Dark. One shot. Seen/read from
the shooter’s perspective. Shooter is nervous, but her convictions are strong.

Young Point Reyes Light reporter visits crime scene with his uncle, a local
rancher. Local approves of the murder. Nibbles was dangerous. He likes the
harbor seals. He throws them leftover bait whenever they find him fishing.

2. The Wilderness Advocates watch young reporter walk away, hidden in tall grass,
sharing binoculars.

Neal: Nibs was a monster. [He’s emotional. He hates what Nibs did to the harbor
seals, but he’s also sad to see such a majestic creature lose his mind and die.
He blames Nibbles’s mental health problems on too much contact with humans,
figures Nibs spent too much time in the San Francisco Bay.]
Amy: [describes watching Nibbles murder harbor seals last week]
Gordon: Think the Light'll investigate?
Amy: Only if Scott brings it up with them.

3. Young reporter hits the bong with Scott Yancy. Yancy's eye is freshly replaced.
There’s a Steelers game coming up, though, and his buddy from the Lagunitas
brewery has brought over a couple of growlers of oyster flavored beer, so Scott’s
in a good mood.

Scott tells YR the crazy shit he saw last night…

He was walking on the beach with his special lady, finishing a joint, loving life,
when he heard a shot.

He ran toward it to see what was happening. He saw a silhouette get into a
pickup truck, quite possibly a Park truck. He snuck closer to try to get a better
look, couldn’t quite, but he saw the lights drive off into the distance. Then he saw
the lights stop, then another car's lights go on, pointing in the other direction. The
93
two vehicles are idling, driver’s side windows clearly talking distance from one
another. After a 30 second convo, the both cars drive away.

4. Young reporter knocks on Mark Dowie’s door. Dowie has heard the story
already. “Corey knows you're here. He's on his way.”

5. Park Service employee waits nervously outside his office. Corey and YR walk up
quietly. Employee sneaks them into the Park offices, shows them the gun closet,
pulls out the box of ammunition, sets it down next to the log book, counts the
bullets to show that one bullet is not accounted for, shows Corey and YR that
Sarah Allen was the last person to check the gun out, reads them her note about
what she claims to have done with it.

6. Sarah Allen takes her kid to school, bumps into Tess Elliot. They're friends. Big
mutual respect. Tess assumes Sarah has heard that Nibbles has been shot and
asks her who she thinks would have done that, whether she thinks the Light
should investigate or let it go.

Sarah cries. Tess assumes she's crying because she's so sad the situation got
so bad. Sarah has lost a lot of friends recently. And now their killer is dead. It
must be weird to balance grief and justice/peace-driven elation.

7. Kevin Lunny takes a break from fixing a tractor to leave another message for
Scott. Inspectors are coming this morning. Scott needs to be at the oyster farm.
Kevin, annoyed, decides to swing by Scott’s house “downtown” on his oyster
delivery. Kevin throws some styrofoam boxes in the flatbed and kicks up a cloud
of dust in the empty early morning oyster farm parking lot. He finds Scott dead on
his kitchen floor.

8. Tess and YR say hi to the local police chief and deputy at Scott’s. Tess tells cops
about Nibbles. Cops, distracted by the intensity of the human murder they’re
facing, thank Tess for the tip but clearly don’t think it’s actually relevant.

9. Sarah walks into Amy’s conference room, which has clearly been built with some
very generous donor money. Amy, Neal, Gordon, and Sarah discuss Nibbles
strategy. Sarah asks if they’ve heard about Scott.

ND: Fuck that guy.
AT: Sarah, you might be about to get accused of murdering the elephant seal.
You replaced the bullet, right?
94

10. Corey is sad and angry. YR is there. Tess is there. Kevin, too? Dowie?

CG: They did this. I know they did this.
TE: How do you know?
CG: They helped Sarah kill the seal. They were there. They know Scott saw
something.

11. Cops ask Amy about Scott. She’s his neighbor. Her house is much nicer than
Scott’s. She tells them he’s a stoner, maybe a dealer too. Sean Lunny is his
supplier.

12. Gordon is sitting on a mossy boulder looking out over the Estero. Corey comes
powerwalking down the trail. YR is with Corey, has his mic on. Corey is talking to
the mic as he walks up and starts confronting Gordon. After a few short, relaxed
responses to Corey’s rage, Gordon rips the mic out of YR’s hand and possibly
throws it into the Estero.

13. Tess calls Dowie, asks if he thinks Corey is on to something or over-emotional.
She has just been to see him, and he’s paranoid. He can’t believe she’s not
writing about the advocates and implicating them. Dowie suggests that Tess talk
to Gordon.

14. Sarah and Gordon walk out the Estero Trail and talk about the seals, who has
adopted which orphaned pup, who is grieving, who is sharing fish with depressed
comrades and leading the colony back to post-Nibbles normalcy.

15. Cops walk up to a crime scene at the Light office and find Tess dead at her desk.

16. Corey has totally lost his mind. He’s under his piano with his shaved cat. YR says
he has to go, fiddles with his phone as he walks out, gets in car, gets Corey’s
wife on the phone while driving down Corey’s winding driveway, tells her to get
back to Corey ASAP.

Neal has been hiding in the back seat of YR’s car. He threatens YR. He knows
what YR thinks he knows. YR had better be careful not to get it wrong. Neal tells
YR to drop him off in town.

Neal gets out of the car, goes into a coffee shop, hugs a sad friend.

95
YR drives around the block, parks, sneaks back toward the coffee shop, sees
Neal leave with coffee, follows Neal, sees him walk into Amy’s office.

17. Sean and Kiko and others harvest oysters. Montage feel. Lots of description.

18. Sean, wet and grumpy after harvest, finds cops waiting for him at the dock. Sean
yells at the cops.

Kevin calls everyone into his office/trailer. They chat about the accusation. Kevin
asks if they have any other suspects. Cops mention Tess’s Nibbles tip. Kevin
explains why they should chase it down. He doesn’t explain well enough.

19. Corey kills Neal. It’s awkward. Corey clearly doesn’t really know how to use a
gun. YR watches from a distance.

20. Sarah goes to the oyster farm to get some papers signed (official Park Service
business, related to the Park’s decision not to renew the farm’s lease). Kevin
takes her aside into the oyster nursery / breeding lab and tells her the cops have
Sean and what he has heard from Corey. Sarah tells him she shot Nibbles. Kevin
said he assumed as much, figures it was a good move, good for the harbor
seals. Kevin asks if Sarah knows anything about Scott. There’s sexual tension
throughout the convo.

21. Cops question Sean at the station, recapping all the crimes from their
perspective.

Interruption: Amy is at the station, has evidence that Kevin killed both Neal and
Nibbles and probably Tess and Scott, too.

22. YR knocks on Mark’s door. Mark comes to the door in a towel. YR tells him what
he has seen. Mark tells TY to wait and runs in to put clothes on. YR hears Mark
talking quietly but intensely through the translucent bathroom window. YR sees
another person in there, hears her cry. A cat in the garden startles YR. Mark
comes back, dressed and stressed and clearly not handling the situation well.
Mark and YR get in Mark’s car and start driving toward the police station. They
drive up to a smoldering car.

Kevin is there, watching. Maybe he had just slept with Sarah.

Gordon drives up.
96

Mark, YR, and Gordon look into the car and see Sarah, dead.

Gordon turns to Kevin and accuses him, convincingly. YR seems convinced, at
least.

Mark pokes holes in Gordon’s theory and casts suspicions, by way of the seal
murder theory, on Gordon.

YR says he wants to go to the cops. Mark says he’ll stay with Gordon to make
sure he doesn’t run away. Gordon says he’ll stay with Kevin to make sure he
doesn’t run away.

23. [Add small scene: What is Amy doing right now? Calling Gordon?]

24. YR tells cops it’s either Gordon or Kevin. The cops reckon probably Kevin. They
figure Kevin would do anything to protect his son. They respect that, but they set
off to bring Kevin in.

25. Corey calls Mark. Corey is coming out of his breakdown. He’s remorseful, but he
knows he did the right thing. He wants to know the latest. Mark tells him the cops
just took both Kevin and Gordon in for questioning.

26. YR knocks on Mark’s door. Mark and Amy murder him. Mark calls Corey and
invites him over.

END
97
APPENDIX V: My Response to the Gordon Bennett Email in Which He
Asked Me to Apologize for “Being at a Minimum Used to Facilitate” Corey
Goodman’s Perjury Accusation

Hi Gordon.

First of all, I do apologize that my walk with Corey ended up causing you and your
family stress. That was not at all my intention.

My goal last year was to tell a slice of the bigger Drakes Estero story by capturing Corey
Goodman being Corey Goodman. Part of that included his accusation that you perjured
yourself by claiming to hear a boat and a boombox from the trail. I thought that was an
old accusation, something you would have heard many times before and shrugged off.

The reality, of course, is that Corey and I, on that particular day, could not hear the boat
on one particular trajectory. As I expected and captured on mic, Corey was far more
excited about this single observation than any clear-thinking person should have been.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the airspace and/or writing/editing skills to turn that Estero
Trail hike and listen scene into the centerpiece of a coherent story. KQED's interest
evaporated, as it ultimately should have.

I don't doubt that you've heard activity on the Estero from the bluffs. I don't doubt that
your reasons for fighting for wilderness are honest and legitimate. And I have always
been genuinely interested in hearing more about why you think wilderness is important;
I think it's important too.

At the same time, however, I'm a long-time fan of low-impact food production, and I'm
interested in untangling the mess of motives that has galvanized a fascinatingly diverse
group of people in favor of the oyster company. I have a lot of respect for Michael Pollan
and Peter Gleick, for example, not to mention the friends I have at Nature Conservancy
and Oceana who think you guys are crazy to be fighting this fight.

All that said, you're absolutely right to accuse me of not understanding vicious small
town conflicts. I have never been a part of one myself, and most of what I have learned
about the one in Point Reyes has been from deeply and understandably biased
participants.

98
My particular respect for your voice is due to the calm you were able to bring to previous
conversations we've had.

Again, I'm sorry that I contributed to your pain around this issue. And I'm sad that you
don't trust that my innocence is honest and not just ignorant. As a rookie moonlighting
journalist, I'm clearly not yet good enough at proving that my mind is open to everyone.

Maybe this email will help that cause. Maybe it won't. If it does, and you decide you do
want to have a conversation on camera about wilderness, Stephan (the filmmaker,
CCed) and I will probably be in Marin in a few days.

Take care,

Jake

99
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53

Abstract (if available)

Abstract For almost 100 years, there was an oyster farm in a stunningly beautiful lagoon owned by the US government. The farmers’ permit to operate in the lagoon came up for renewal in 2012. Some of the farmers’ neighbors joined forces with national environmental conservation groups to advocate against renewal. They wanted the lagoon to become what they consider a true and proper and fully protected wilderness area, and they convinced the Secretary of the Interior to let the permit expire. The farmers, in an attempt to save the business, started working with a jarringly politically diverse collection of allies. While that coalition never comfortably gelled, they agreed on one important point: that the people advocating for wilderness over oyster farming had lied and cheated to get the outcome they wanted, and that’s a threat to our democracy.

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Asset Metadata

Creator de Grazia, James Alexander (author)

Core Title The battle of Drakes Estero

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Degree Conferral Date 2017-05

Publication Date 03/07/2017

Defense Date 01/17/2017

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aquaculture,Drakes Estero,environmentalism,Journalism,mariculture,National parks,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oysters,paranoia,Point Reyes Light,Point Reyes National Seashore,Politics,Wilderness

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tolan, Sandy (committee chair), Kahn, Gabriel (committee member), Turan, Kenneth (committee member)

Creator Email jake.degrazia@gmail.com,jdegrazia@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC11257657

Unique identifier UC11257657

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Rights de Grazia, James Alexander

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