Epilogue

This epilogue tracks the more recent developments in the land use versus land preservation debate, including further controversies surrounding Point Reyes. A new lawsuit was filed against the NPS in Point Reyes, with demands that the ongoing ranch management planning process be suspended until the thirty-six-year-old PRNS General Management Plan can finally be updated with studies of the environmental impacts of grazing. Elsewhere in the United States, the chapter covers the aftermath of an armed standoff at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. However, the chapter goes on to outline more hopeful changes across the country, such as the fact that more and more people are beginning to compromise on “what a park is for.”

Public Parks from Private Lands

This chapter explores the history of making parks from privately owned lands, a process that at first relied on donations from states or wealthy individuals, but gradually involved the direct purchase of land. Parks are often celebrated as “belonging to the American public,” but in many cases, they belonged to someone else first. The chapter thus considers the implications of making parks from private lands. After all, these places come with their own history, and often with residents and their own uses for and meanings of the land, which do not generally fit well with the simplified “empty scenic nature” model of park management.

Point Reyes as a Leopoldian Park

This concluding chapter shows that, elsewhere in the world, the notion of “what a park is for” is indeed changing—from the inclusion of residents in many European parks and of indigenous peoples in parks in developing countries (that is, where they hadn't already been kicked out), to world heritage sites that recognize the importance of community connections and local landscape meanings, and even to the NPS, at particular park units where the management staff is supportive of change. It recommends specific policy modifications at Point Reyes, as well as more broadly within the NPS, that could improve the long-term prospects of collaborative management of working landscapes and better reconcile their coexistence with wilderness.

Reassertion of the Park Ideal

This chapter chronicles how the PRNS has continued to steer management toward the national park ideal of scenic wild-yet-managed nature, despite giving more attention to cultural resources, as well as making official statements about the value of the area's ranching history. This can particularly be seen playing out in the Seashore's natural resource projects and plans since 1995. Moreover, these efforts to create a more wild and natural landscape have often come at the expense of the working ranches. This trend is most clearly reflected in the reintroduction of tule elk to Point Reyes, which have spread onto the pastoral zone and are now threatening the long-term viability of several historic ranches. The NPS's lack of action to counter the effects of free-ranging elk on ranch operations seems based in idealizations of both wilderness and wild animals as requiring hands-off management.

Parks as (Potential) Wilderness

This chapter recounts the application of wilderness ideals to the Point Reyes landscape in the 1970s, which further defined the landscape and exacerbated the tension between preservation and use at the Seashore. The first is an August 1976 resolution identifying Point Reyes as a possible location for reintroduction of tule elk. It was then followed by the designation of a wilderness area across roughly one-third of the peninsula. These two pieces of legislation emphasizing the wild characteristics of Point Reyes were soon followed by a third congressional act, in 1978, creating a leasing mechanism for the working ranches to continue operating past the original terms of their reservations of use. Together, these three laws framed PRNS as a landscape where Congress had given deliberate sanction to both its wilder aspects and the continuity of agriculture.

A Management Controversy at Point Reyes

This introductory chapter presents the case study of the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS), which was embroiled in a controversy in 2012. The issue was not the usual industry-versus-nature debate: on the one hand, national environmental organizations sought official designation of a marine wilderness; on the other, oyster farm operators and local foods advocates insisted that their historic operation was doing no harm and should be allowed to continue. This case example reveals a great deal about parks management in the United States. As the chapter shows, such controversies highlight much larger questions about what parks are for, what they are meant to protect and provide to the public, and how to make choices between competing uses or management priorities for park resources.

Remaking the Landscape

This chapter shows how, in the early years of the seashore, the NPS failed to recognize, let alone maintain, many historic buildings and culturally important sites, reflecting broader national trends at the time concerning what “counts” as worth preserving. Since the Seashore's beginnings, roughly half of its built landscape has been demolished by the NPS, and even as a wider array of structures and categories of significance gradually gained importance with the preservation movement, the continuity of historic uses of the land is still often overlooked or downplayed. Through policy decisions, management choices, and the slow but steady attrition of ranchers, the working landscape has diminished over time, from twenty-five operating ranches on the Point at the time of park's establishment, to only eleven now—and, perhaps most importantly, with decreasing local input into management.

Acquisition and Its Alternatives

This chapter details the specific establishment process at Point Reyes, from its first proposal as a park in the late 1950s, through its authorization in 1962 as a national seashore intended to provide beach access and recreation opportunities to the nearby metropolitan public of the Bay Area, and up to additional legislation and funding passed in 1970. Point Reyes was one of a series of parks, mostly national seashores, lakeshores, and recreation areas, created during the 1960s and 1970s by acquiring large areas of private land. As part of this experimental period of direct purchase of property, Point Reyes began as an explicit attempt to retain some private ownership within the seashore as a “pastoral zone” where agriculture could remain. However, the establishment of the park set in place the conditions that essentially forced the sale of the pastoral zone to the federal government within ten years.

Landscapes, Preservation, and the National Park Ideal

This chapter addresses the question of how our ideas of what parks are for have changed over time at the national level. It considers why it seems surprising to find farms in parks, and why certain uses of parks are considered “appropriate” or otherwise. These expectations make more sense in the context of understanding the impulse to preserve, its influence on landscapes, and the particular ways that landscape preservation developed in national parks starting in the mid-nineteenth century in places like Yosemite and Yellowstone. The National Park Service (NPS) as a government agency was created nearly fifty years after these first parks, and so it inherited many of the ideals that these iconic landscapes represented.

The Politics of Preservation

This chapter puts the oyster controversy in the context of the larger story of PRNS, noting parallels between the present conflict and earlier park management dynamics. The use of formal planning processes (or lack thereof) has moreover been applied inconsistently in ways that seem to privilege natural resources and pressure the working landscape. The Seashore's long-awaited update of its general management plan, which is intended to provide an overall sense of management direction and goals for the park, remains stalled. An increasingly selective use of planning, science, and history seems to consistently downplay and erode the working landscape, even while publicly the NPS staff profess to support the ranches.