Last Herd on Earth

by Lauren Markham

In our new issue, Lauren Markham reports on the legal battle between ranchers, conservationists, and the National Park Service that shaped the future—and ecology—of Marin County.

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

IT WAS THE TULE ELK, of all things—those velvet-pelted, doe-eyed creatures once thought extinct—that ultimately drove the organic ranchers, an imperiled species themselves, out of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes is a place whose beauty is heightened by contrast: a foggy peninsula where, just a thirty-mile drive north of San Francisco, coastal prairie meets virgin forest, rugged tide pools meet wetland esteros and sprawling lagoons, and, at least until very recently, domesticated livestock graze on oceanfront pastures within mooing distance of the fabled elk—the oafish cows and majestic tule the town’s unofficial odd-couple mascots.

In October, I took a drive through this landscape with David Evans, a rancher who grew up inside the Point Reyes National Seashore, the federally protected wilderness area that stretches along eighty miles of undeveloped coast. Evans’s family has been running cattle on the peninsula since before California was even a state, but despite his beef bona fides, he isn’t your stereotypical meat-and-potatoes cattleman: in addition to riding his ATV, he likes to forage for mushrooms and make jam. In 1999, he launched Marin Sun Farms, an organic, pasture-raised meat and egg company he now runs with his wife, Claire—a former vegetarian—that supplies some of the Bay Area’s highest-quality organic meat to its most upscale markets and restaurants.

Since the Point Reyes National Seashore was established in 1972, ranches like the Evanses’ have been a part of a Bay Area sustainable-food revolution that helped reconfigure our nation’s understanding of what we should eat, how we should eat it, and the ethics of its production. Bill Niman, of Niman Ranch fame—now the largest source of humanely raised, sustainably produced meat in the entire country, sold everywhere from Whole Foods to Michelin-starred restaurants—began ranching in what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore in the early seventies. Until last year, Albert Straus, of the beloved Straus Family Creamery, sourced nearly 15 percent of his organic milk from dairies inside the park. Evans’s Marin Sun Farms created a one-stop shop where the region’s organic ranches—some of them his neighbors on the Seashore—have their meat slaughtered, butchered, and sold at market, cutting out a number of middlemen and thus reducing costs and waste. Encouraged by their geography, the high quality of land, and the environmental regulations that govern the hundreds of people and some 1,500 species of plants and animals that live within the boundaries of the Seashore, many Point Reyes ranchers have joined influential Bay Area locavores like restaurateur Alice Waters and food writers Michael Pollan and Samin Nosrat in advocating for local food systems that support regional economies, reduce carbon and the use of toxic chemicals, improve human health, and restore soil quality. Ranches like Evans’s were presented as proof that these grand designs were possible.

“The story of how and why exactly the tule elk and their defenders led to the ranchers being kicked off their land has more twists and turns than the road on whose shoulder Evans and I were presently parked.”

So successful (and rare) is this regional model that, when then-Prince Charles visited the United States in 2005 on an official tour of promising organic agricultural practices, he made a point to visit the farmers market in the eponymous town of Point Reyes—situated just a few miles outside the park boundary, with a population of 485—where he chatted up vendors, celebrating the region as one of the most successful examples of a pastoral landscape that still actually fed people rather than just attracted tourists and looked quaint in social media posts.

At the same time, since 1978, the Seashore has provided crucial habitat to dozens of threatened, rare, or endangered species, including the tule elk, which had nearly gone extinct until finding sanctuary in Point Reyes. In fact, the Point Reyes National Seashore has proved to be one of the only places on Earth that this imperiled subspecies has been able to thrive, flourishing alongside the cattle. If elsewhere in the United States people with an investment in the country’s natural landscapes have too often fallen into a set of antagonistic binaries—tree huggers versus loggers, conservationists versus hunters, vegetarians versus ranchers—the beef and dairy farmers and the wilderness lovers of Point Reyes achieved a rare peace. Their conviviality proved that ecosystem conservation and sustainable food production could, in fact, coexist, even on a warming planet teeming with evermore hungry humans.

But that accord collapsed a few months before my ride-along with Evans, and now he suddenly pulled his truck over to the road’s shoulder so that he could point out to me a sign of the changing times. A tule elk buck, rack of horns and all, marched unimpeded through its new empire: a former cow pasture whose tenants had been moved out months ago. The animal was just a tawny speck trudging through a field of browning grass, overgrown because cows no longer grazed there, but even from the car I was impressed by the tule’s stature, its silhouette bringing to mind the dramatic and rare presence of a moose.

“Look at that beautiful buck,” Evans said tenderly. So tenderly, in fact, that I wondered if he’d momentarily forgotten that the elk—or their champions, in any case—had been the cause of the doom that had befallen the ranchers of Point Reyes.

The story of how and why exactly the tule elk and their defenders led to the ranchers being kicked off their land has more twists and turns than the road on whose shoulder Evans and I were presently parked, but the most important part to understand is that, one day in the summer of 2012, the tule elk had suddenly and mysteriously started turning up dead.

Continue reading “Last Herd on Earth” on our site.

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