It's all here: cattle, oysters, wilderness, national parks and a supposed deal with Congress.
A year after an oyster farm was forced to shut down at Point Reyes
National Seashore, sparking a bitter controversy over the role of
farming in national parks, a coalition of environmentalists on Wednesday
filed a lawsuit over a bigger and more explosive target: thousands of
dairy and beef cattle in the park. Many of the cattle ranches in
the iconic park have been operated by the same families since the 1860s.
And park service officials say they have no plans to remove them. The
suit against the National Park Service, filed by three groups in U.S.
District Court in San Francisco, claims that the cattle are causing
erosion, polluting waterways with manure, harming endangered salmon and
other species and blocking public access. The groups say park service officials are violating federal law
because they are moving forward with a plan to renew 20-year leases to
the ranchers without conducting adequate environmental studies on how
the thousands of cows are affecting the seashore’s scenic resources,
including its tule elk. Nor have officials updated their 36-year-old
park management plan to consider other options, like reducing the number
of ranches in the park or the size of the cattle herds, the lawsuit
contends...more
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