Three environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against 20 private dairy and beef farms in Northern California’s Point Reyes National Seashore, claiming they are destroying wildflowers, “eroding coastal bluffs and polluting creeks while the park stands littered with muddy feedlots, waste pits and trailers for ranch hands,” reports The San Francisco Chronicle.
The Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Western Watersheds Project claim that the National Park Service is breaking the law by renewing farm leases without first assessing their environmental impact. The suit calls on the government to halt lease renewals and cancel any recent lease extensions until more is known about the ecological effects of ranching and dairy farming in the area.
Ranchers, though, argue that their animals perform important ecological services like eradicating exotic thistle. Ranching itself, they say, has buffered the region from the kind of development seen in the nearby Bay Area.
When Point Reyes was designated a National Seashore in 1962, the federal government promised residents that they could continue to ranch, a vow that was repeated four years ago by former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. But the lawsuit’s plaintiffs argue that the government’s support for ranchers is akin to a subsidy.
“Historically, there’s been a lot of deference from land managers for ranchers,” Peter Galvin, program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told the Chronicle. A 2015 study by the center found that federal grazing fees are on average 90-percent less than those on private lands, amounting to a $120-million loss for the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service.