U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
told a popular oyster farm at Drakes Bay on Thursday to pack up and
leave, effectively ending more than a century of shellfish harvesting on
the picturesque inlet where Europeans first set foot in California. Salazar's decision ends a long-running dispute between the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. and the National Park Service over the estuary at Point Reyes National Seashore where Sir Francis Drake landed more than 400 years ago. The
National Park Service intends to turn the 2,700-acre area into the
first federally designated marine wilderness area on the West Coast,
giving the estuary special protected status as an unaltered ecological
region. To do that, Salazar rejected the oyster company's proposal to
extend its 40-year lease to harvest shellfish on 1,100 acres of
the property. Salazar gave the farm 90 days to move out, issuing
his decision a day before the lease was set to expire and one week after
visiting the Point Reyes National Seashore for a tour...more
We have land wilderness, now we'll have water wilderness. That just leaves air. We'll probably see that before this administration is done.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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