Big Shift

Changes In Point Reyes, and a New Feature Out

Maybe it’s just me projecting anxiety about the new presidency, or the fact that it didn’t rain for what felt like over a month (luckily it started this morning), but it feels as though everything, in a very tangible way, is up in the air. Anything could shift in any possible direction. You can find examples of this anywhere you choose to look—either because it's true, or because the internet, where we go to look into all these questions, just wants to validate whatever it may guess is our main concern.

Usually, when that sort of incessant anxiety hits me I turn off my devices and go for a hike. It’s a simple and corny rule for myself, but it works. It reminds me that things change, and that’s always been the case. The world of our human making is a terrifying one, but also one where so many amazing things occur. Being in the woods, or any open space that feels so unmoveable, away but not removed from that human world, reminds me of this.

This false sense of stability, that things are in a constant state of change with the land itself remaining the same, isn’t really true. Things shift, houses are destroyed, burnt, rebuilt much in the same way as trees or the trajectory of streams. Ranches are sold, new infrastructure is made and remade. The land where we live, like much of everything, has never stayed put as it is. And it likely never will. This tragedy of change, people in California, especially in Los Angeles, are experiencing heavily today. And while I do have a lot of thoughts about those fires, it’s not why I’m writing this newsletter.

I’m posting this little newsletter to share an article I wrote this week for the Pacific Sun and North Bay Bohemian, which talks directly about these sorts of shifts that the West Marin community is grappling with today. After over 150 years, six dairy and six beef ranches will be ending their lease agreements in the Point Reyes National Seashore in the next 15 months. It’s the proper beginning of the end of ranching in West Marin.

Ranching along with fire suppression has, since the colonization of this land by the Spanish, been integral to the landscapes we see today. Large swaths of gold rolling hills would not exist without this exploitation of land and people. The golden hills people even refer to is a kind of oat native to Europe, Avena sativa, or milky oats. Now, after hundreds of years, and innumerable other human tragedies, many of the ranchers, who in no uncertain terms called these lands their home for the past 150 years, must leave in a little over a year. It was a voluntary agreement where some, it seems to be implied, felt obligated to take the settlement money, the amount of which is unknown. While the climate crisis makes ranching these lands all the more difficult, possibly even unsustainable, it is the ending of a key component of the culture of West Marin. While it may mean a true rebirth of tule elk on the seashore, it comes at a great loss for the people who live there, a transformation of their livelihood turned to history.

There are so many questions I still have about this new land agreement, such as the specifics of how they will go about management of the land to protect it from larger wildfires occurring (cattle, in their force on the land, are fantastic fire suppressors), to how the employees of the ranches who live there will make due with their families forced to leave the land where they worked. For now though, this is what happened. This is the change coming to Point Reyes National Seashore. I’m not sure what my opinions are on it. I just know that with this settlement, Point Reyes is set for a reshaping that no one can be certain of its outcome.

If you live in Sonoma or Marin County, pick up a weekly anywhere you can find the Bohemian or Pacific Sun!

Read the article here: “Given, Then Taken: Point Reyes Plan Ends Most Ranching at National Seashore”

REQUEST: Trying to write something about the Los Angeles fires—does anyone know anyone directly impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires? Let me know.