Many reasons to ban ranching in Pt. Reyes

In his recently published Marin Voice commentary (“Is a plant-based diet really better for Marin and the planet?” March 14), Brian Casey is not satisfied to just selectively cite from a small margin of publications echoing his own view. That is run-of-the-mill obfuscation, such as tempts the common climate-denier. No, Casey goes further and hand selects that which serves him from inside the one named paper itself.

“The vegan industrial complex: the political ecology of not eating animals,” by Professor Amy Trauger, appeared in the Journal of Political Ecology last year and alleges that eating some local meat is environmentally better than being vegan. Casey is happy to enlist this claim, precarious and forlorn as it is, contradicted by studies from the United Nations, Stanford University and others, to defend ranching in Point Reyes National Seashore.

However, Casey somehow omits the author's main point, a culminating demand for a “wholesale policy shift in agriculture that is Indigenous led.” Considering the National Park Service's blundering, tone-deaf elevation of European-Colonial, post-genocidal, extractive land practices over Coast Miwok history in Point Reyes, the hypocrisy is abject and embarrassing.

More to the point, it is disingenuous of Casey to pretend that the overwhelming public opposition to continued ranching in the park is predicated solely on concerns over methane-accelerated climate change. This is what he implies, and it's not true. Opponents have been exceedingly clear that objections are numerous, including rampant, documented water pollution, habitat displacement, soil depletion and erosion, invasive species, starvation and shooting of native elk, impaired public access of publicly owned land, inappropriate public subsidy of for-private-profit pollution of public land and, last but not least, the aforementioned disregard for Indigenous history.

— Ken Bouley, Inverness