People who work with their hands on land that their families have known for generations tend to develop a certain kind of stubbornness. That was the stubbornness of Kevin Lunny. As he stood outside his operation on Drakes Estero in the fall of 2012, surrounded by miles of submerged wooden racks containing Pacific oysters, he appeared less like a man facing eviction from federal waters and more like someone who had just not been informed that the story was about to come to an end.
Since the 1950s, Point Reyes has been home to the Drakes Bay Oyster Company. When Lunny and his wife Nancy purchased it in 2004, they inherited what was left of a 40-year federal lease. However, it turned out that they also inherited a dispute that had been simmering away long before they signed any paperwork. A 1976 congressional act designated the estero, a small area of tidal water northwest of San Francisco, as a potential marine wilderness. Commercial activity was only permitted until the lease expired. When he paid the purchase price, Lunny claims that no one made that ceiling feel quite so permanent.
One of the most peculiar and significant regulatory conflicts in contemporary American environmental law ensued. It was a war over data at its core, not just a property dispute. In particular, Lunny’s team contended that data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was falsified to support a decision already made by the Park Service. Contrary to the federal narrative, a National Academy of Sciences report evaluated the relationship between the oyster operation and the estero environment. For the most part, Salazar ignored it. Even now, it’s difficult not to find that decision a little dubious.
Lunny was given ninety days to remove his racks and equipment and depart after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar refused to renew the farm’s permit in November 2012. Wilderness incompatibility, or the notion that commercial mariculture just didn’t belong in an area Congress had designated for nature, was the stated justification. However, Lunny filed a lawsuit, claiming that agency workers who wanted the farm removed regardless of the results of the science had tainted the environmental review process from the beginning.
The ensuing legal battle was protracted and ultimately unsuccessful. The federal ruling was upheld by the district court, the Ninth Circuit, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to even consider the appeal in June 2014. Thirty workers lost their jobs. According to some estimates, California lost about one-third of its cultivated oyster supply in addition to its sole oyster cannery.
However, something changed. The claims of falsified NOAA data did not go away. For years, scholars, journalists, and legal observers scrutinized the agency’s methodology, questioning how federal science is used—and sometimes molded—to support preset regulatory outcomes. In retrospect, it seems that the Drakes Bay case opened a dialogue that the agency would have rather avoided.
Long after the equipment emerged from the water, Lunny himself continued to act defiantly. His claim that small farmers on federal lands are susceptible to a type of regulatory pressure that has little to do with objective science is still relevant in discussions from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf, even though the settlement in October 2014 officially ended the chapter. The oysters may be permanently gone from Drake’s Estero. However, the case they left behind continues to slowly filter through the system, much like oysters do. That portion is not complete.
