Sea battle
In her lyrical recounting of the legal battle between an oyster farm and the Point Reyes National Seashore in West Marin, author Summer Brennan confesses, “I need to be frank about something, and I think anyone who has spent much time out at Point Reyes will have a hard time disagreeing with it. Point Reyes is a little bit magic. I don’t just mean that it’s lovely, although it is, but that there is some strange power to be felt, which I am not alone in noticing.”
The eponymous oyster war at the heart of Brennan’s new book lasted the better part of a decade, when cattle rancher Kevin Lunny bought his neighbor’s oyster farm roughly seven years before the lease was set to expire. The Drakes Bay Oyster Co., as it was renamed, sat within the waters of the Point Reyes National Seashore and more specifically, within Drakes Estero, an area designated in 1976 as “potential wilderness.” If these were the tinder upon which the oyster war burned (private company, public commons), then the beauty of the landscape and the threats to wild nature raised the stakes like breezes fanning a brushfire.
Brennan returned to her native Point Reyes Peninsula rather late in the controversy, in 2012, when the local rancor was at its height. Relocating from New York, where she’d been working at the United Nations, Brennan returned for a stint at the Point Reyes Light, the local paper famous for its Pulitzer in the 1970s and the lighthouse that crowns its front page.
One of Brennan’s first stories was a battle over data. If you believed one camp, the data showed that the oyster farm harmed the estero. And if you believed the other, it showed little more than that the park’s scientists were fronting their science. She walked into such a pitched battle that townspeople she attempted to interview for her first piece berated her for associating with the newspaper, told her to go back to New York and called her boss, the Light’s editor, “the devil.”
On its face, it was a tug of war between two conservationrelated approaches valued in the community — that of locally grown, sustainable agriculture versus national park-style conservation that sought to preserve native species and maintain biodiversity. But the rancor got so vile that both sides were comparing the players in the controversy to the worst political operators on the national stage. When one scientist enlisted on behalf of the oyster farm believed that park data being used to evict Lunny were cooked, he likened the claim to “Bush’s weapons of mass destruction.” Karma seemed to swing back when it became clear that Lunny’s lobbying group, Cause of Action, was revealed to be a Koch brothers front that also wrote a rider granting the oyster company an extension. It was tucked into the tail of an energy bill that also sought to fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline.
It was a remarkable story on its face, which Brennan encapsulates in its shifting perspectives: “Depending on who was doing the looking, it was a story about ‘big’ government, or about sloppy science, or about the vanishing nature of smallscale farms, or the struggle of the ‘little guy’ against corrupt and unseen forces beyond his control. It was about how we have largely become separated from how our food is grown, to the detriment of both ourselves and the environment. It was a story about how stories can be twisted and histories changed, simply by repeating selective or erroneous information, whether on purpose or by accident.”
But in Brennan’s hands, it’s also a pleasure to vicariously relive the oyster war. Brennan’s narrative skills are marked by a relaxed pace, diligent reporting and a scrupulous but fun dive into backstory with ample historical and scientific pigmentation. Her characters, both historical and living, are often larger than life while still resembling themselves in the prosaic ways of ordinary people. There are oyster pirates. Jack London makes an appearance, alongside the playful oyster worker who flirts with Brennan while delineating some of the racist exclusion in West Marin. (Lunny’s allies have disputed the book’s claim that this worker was fired for talking to the author.) There’s the hard-drinking congressman who throws wilderness designations onto maps like he’s playing Monopoly, and the local environmentalist who was radicalized by his tree-sits in the 1990s, and who — in the tradition of Deep Ecology — thinks nature does much better with humans kept out, as if that’s possible. And in the middle of the book, we find ourselves in a casino only to learn that Greg Sarris, the casino’s owner and a Miwok leader, writer and storyteller, is angry about “how Native Americans in general are so often erased from the conventional wilderness history of [ John] Muir and [Henry David] Thoreau.”
Brennan is a natural storyteller who makes a tough tale — that many locals and visitors winced through and tiptoed around — into a narrative celebration of the striking landscape of the Point Reyes Peninsula, and the spirit behind the oyster war itself. It’s a spirit that ultimately decided to remove the commercial enterprise from the public commons, but which was defined, at its best and on both sides, by an attempt to balance interests in the name of the broadest constituency possible.