The Oyster War
The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
It all began simply enough. In 1976 the Point Reyes Wilderness Act granted the highest protection in America to more than 33,000 acres of California forest, grassland and shoreline – including Drakes Estero, an estuary of stunning beauty. Inside was a small, family–run oyster farm first established in the 1930s. A local rancher bought the business in 2005, renaming it The Drakes Bay Oyster Company. When the National Park Service informed him that the 40–year lease would not be renewed past 2012, he vowed to keep the farm in business even if it meant taking his fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
Environmentalists, national politicians, scientists, and the Department of the Interior all joined a protracted battle for the estuary that had the power to influence the future of wilderness for decades to come. Were the oyster farmers environmental criminals, or victims of government fraud? Fought against a backdrop of fear of government corruption and the looming specter of climate change, the battle struck a national nerve, pitting nature against agriculture and science against politics, as it sought to determine who belonged and who didn't belong, and what it means to be wild.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brennan ably documents and contextualizes decades of history behind the drama surrounding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company's fight with the National Park Service a battle that garnered national attention and split the local community of Point Reyes, Calif. The aquaculture business had leased a seashore area designated as potential wilderness, and wanted to continue operations beyond the lease's 2012 expiration date. Unafraid to share her experience as an unwelcome reporter and recently returned native, Brennan presents not a personal memoir but a convoluted investigative report on ill-managed public relations, biased science, escalating politics, business-funded spin, and old-fashioned individual stubbornness. She highlights the huge questions that divided a "largely liberal" community in such a way that "lifelong neighbors stopped speaking": does environmentalism call us to preserve the land through organic, sustainable, low-impact farming, or through curated, recreational wilderness? Moreover, what does it even mean for a place to be returned to an " original' wild state"? Brennan demonstrates an awkward truth through the battle that Drakes Bay's Kevin Lunny waged against the enforcement of 1970s government land use policy: when evidence becomes overwhelmingly complex, big decisions are often made on the basis of who yells the loudest.
