Editor's note: This updates with comments from Drakes Bay Oyster Co. owner Kevin Lunny.
An adverse ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, while disappointing, does not automatically signal the end of oyster farming at Point Reyes National Seashore, according to the owner of Drakes Bay Oyster Co.
Kevin Lunny said Monday afternoon that he planned to sit down with his attorneys to review the decision by the Supreme Court not to take up his fight against the Interior Department to remain in business at the national seashore's Drakes Estero. One option, he said, would be to return to a lower court to pursue the gist of his lawsuit against the Interior Department; the lower court rulings that have gone against Drakes Bay so far focused around Mr. Lunny's request for a temporary restraining order to allow him to continue farming oysters while pursuing that lawsuit.
“While we had hoped the Supreme Court would grant our cert petition requesting a review of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, our federal case against the government now returns to the District Court, where we will be making decisions over the next few weeks about how to proceed," he said in a prepared statement.
"We do plan to continue to fight for what's right here. To fight for our employees, to try to protect a third of the state's shellfish production that comes form Drakes Bay. We believe we're correct and we believe we're fighting for all the right reasons," he said later at a press conference. "We see this fight is not really just for the oyster farm. If we see this kind of treatment be allowed, and not stopped, we fear that there could be consequences" for other agricultural operations on public lands.
While last year there had been an effort in Congress to legislate a 10-year extension of the oyster company's lease, on Monday the Drakes Bay owner didn't know if that remained a possibility.
The Supreme Court on Monday didn't comment when it rejected the petition from Drakes Bay Oyster Co. to review its case. In its petition to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, the company's lawyers had raised three questions:
* Whether federal courts lack jurisdiction under the Administrative Procedure Act to review an agency action that is arbitrary and capricious or an abuse of discretion when the statute authorizing the action does not impose specific requirements governing the exercise of discretion.
* Whether federal agencies can evade review of their actions under the National Environmental Policy Act by designating their actions as "conservation efforts" when the records shows that the action will cause significant adverse environmental effects.
* Whether an agency commits prejudicial error when it makes false statements in an environmental impact statement, and then asserts that it would have made the same decision even if the false statements had been corrected.
In January the judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider a ruling by a three-judge panel of that court. In that ruling in September 2013, the 2-1 majority ruling held that, "Drakes Bay’s disagreement with the value judgments made by the Secretary is not a legitimate basis on which to set aside the decision. Once we determine, as we have, that the Secretary did not violate any statutory mandate, it is not our province to intercede in his discretionary decision."
When Drakes Bay bought out the farm's previous owners in 2005, the existing lease for the operation ran through November 2012. While Mr. Lunny had been optimistic he could obtain a lease renewal from the National Park Service, then-Interior Secretary Salazar declined that request in November 2012, saying Congress long had intended for Drakes Estero where the oyster farm was based to become part of the Philip Burton Wilderness.
As soon as Mr. Salazar rendered his decision, the National Park Service officially designated the estero as wilderness, something envisioned when the Point Reyes National Seashore Wilderness Act was passed in 1976. The wilderness legislation that set aside 25,370 acres of the national seashore as wilderness cited another 8,003 acres encompassing the estero that would be "essentially managed as wilderness, to the extent possible, with efforts to steadily continue to remove all obstacles to the eventual conversion of these lands and waters to wilderness status" -- and the oyster operation was seen as being incompatible with such a designation.
Drakes Bay's lawyers sued over Mr. Salazar's decision, arguing that it was arbitrary and capricious and violated both the federal government's Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Whether Monday's decision marks the end of Drakes Bay Oyster Co. remains to be seen, as there have been efforts in Congress to legislate an extension to the company's lease at Point Reyes.
Mr. Lunny said it was also unclear Monday how soon the National Park Service might move to shut down his oyster farm.
Comments
I think we've discussed this essay a couple of times. (I'd add that one of the pretexts of deconstruction is the need to secure an opposition against which to read its other. Cronon can historicize a purist perspective of wilderness, but as for the currency of his argument . . .)
You're right; I'd forgotten. And, by the way, and as I think I've mentioned before, I don't endorse every paragraph in Cronon's essay. Overall, though, I find it to be revolutionary, in the positive sense.
It definitely has us talking about wilderness and the parks--never a bad thing.
It was only a matter of time until someone with motives of blazing through a legislated wilderness with a mountain bike busted out the mantra of William Cronon. Wonder if the seals and countless other sea life that will surely thrive in this area will care about Cronon's subjective view that "this is not a church, just a place to harvest for the human profit machine so that we can feel closer to nature".
Legislating for protecting wilderness is more about legislating human endevors of profiteering from a place so that wildlife also has the chance to thrive and have thier own space. Anyone that has the means, can turn their own property into their own slice of wilderness, but to preserve vast landscapes is important. Amazingly, isn't it interesting that this article even states this is the ONLY wilderness of it's kind outside of Alaska on the pacific coast. Hence, it's RARE to even have a wilderness of this type along the pacific, and of course, enter in the "well, it's obviously WRONG to have a place like this. It needs humans cultivating and changing it's environment in order to make it natural". Well, next time I travel to NY, i'll pretend i'm in the wilderness, because I read Cronon's mantra, even if it feels and is nothing like any true natural place that has been set aside to protect it from the wall street profiteers. I'll try not to think of the wilderness in places like Yosemite as a cathedral, ok?
Now you done it imntbike. Kurt will surely be shutting down this thread very soon.
Anyway, leaving aside the debate over the validity of the philosophical underpinnings of wilderness, on a political level wilderness purism is going to doom wilderness. It may already have passed the point of political no return, but we wouldn't know that; a dock resting on rotten pilings doesn't collapse overnight and can still look in fine shape to an observer. It needs a strong wave or a storm for the slowly accumulating deterioration to manifest itself. The Drake's Bay outcome simply bores more wormholes in the rotting pilings. And that is unfortunate, because we should preserve some places as roadless and in a largely natural state, free of big human improvements, i.e., obtrusive infrastructure.
Oh, Kurt, please don't shut down the thread! I promise I'm not offended by anything Gary has written (so far)! :-)
Gary, it might surprise you, but I would think everyone who blogs on NPT agrees with you on 99% of everything. I.e., we all treasure wild places, we all derive a lot of life meaning from the outdoors, and probably many of us find consumer society, with its accumulation of stuff in a probably unavailing effort to bring meaning to one's existence, depressing.
Indeed, most cross-country mountain bikers I know, including me, love mountain biking because it allows us to see more wildlife, more majestic scenery, and more unanticipated delights alongside a trail than do hiking or backpacking, which to our minds are slow and tedious. Mountain biking allows one to see much more than does day-hiking, and it has less impact on the environment than backpacking, to say nothing of trampling everything in one of those dreadful commercial pack outfitter operations.
So if your mental image of us is one of tearing up roots and rocks for a thrill, it's inaccurate for 99% of us—although I couldn't blame you for having that image, when one looks at the woeful advertising campaigns that the mountain bike industry foolishly runs, shooting itself in the proverbial foot with each rip-dominate-thrash print ad it runs.
"Legislating for protecting wilderness is more about legislating human endevors of profiteering from a place so that wildlife also has the chance to thrive and have thier own space."
Profiteering: make or seek to make an excessive or unfair profit, especially illegally or in a black market.
This is what happens in every debate about Wilderness. Wilderness lovers of all stripes feel an irrepressible need to exxaggerate their point. Why is that?
Why does Zebulon feel an irrepressible need to exaggerate about wilderness lovers?
(I'm a wilderness lover and don't feel any need to exaggerate my point(s).)