Wading into Shallow Waters: The Oyster Farm, Evironment and Community

The Sonoma City Council’s backing of the Drake’s Bay Oyster Co. in its effort to extend its lease has fostered indignation from a number of environmental organizations, at least one of which said the resolution was “a work of fiction” and holds the mariculture operation is being backed by a number of conservative organizations and individuals whose true goal is to “open our most protected and treasured public lands to commercial exploitation."

These comments, from Amy Trainer of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, were published yesterday in Sonoma Valley Patch. Today, the Press Democrat reports that one of the legislators specifically asked to support the “bi-partisan” investigation into the “questionable science that informed Secretary [of the Interior Ken] Salazar’s decision, Rep. Jared Huffman, has already rejected the inquiry as a “political witch-hunt.”

Huffman also has said the allegations of faulty science - promoted at the City Council meeting by testimony from Dr. Corey Goodman among others – was not the reason for the Secretary’s decision. Instead, Salazar’s decision was one of law, policy and precedent pertaining to private use of public lands.

Dr. Goodman’s online resume points to his considerable involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, including a long association with Pfizer and his founding of three biotech companies — Exelixis, Renovis, and Second Genome. He is currently head of his own venBio, a new life sciences strategic capital company. Their relationship to oyster farming is unclear; he is a West Marin resident.

The scientific evidence may be “disputed” but that’s different than “questionable,” the term used in the resolution (attached). The resolution also includes such judgmental terms as backing the DBOC’s “heroic efforts” to retain its lease.

The individual who requested the resolution was Sonoma resident Yannick Phillips, a member of California Democrats and the Sonoma Valley Grange. She told Patch she only became involved in the issue late year, following Sec. Salazar’s decision, and met with DBOC owner Kevin Lunny as well as Amy Trainer of Marin’s Environmental Action Committee to get both sides of the issue.

She concluded, “There was a great injustice being done to the oyster farm and the immediate community, and the community at large,” referring to the Bay Area. “I thought we should look for a creative solution to solve the controversy.”

Her resolution with supporting documents was presented to the Council by Mayor Ken Brown and Mayor Pro Tem David Rouse, and the staff recommendation was to pass the measure. It’s unclear why the staff of the City of Sonoma would take any stand whatsoever on the clearly non-civic issue. Assistant City Manager Gay Johann told Patch, “In retrospect, the more appropriate Staff Recommendation should have been:  Council discretion.”

Phillips said she has encountered wide-spread support in Sonoma for the oyster farmers in her information table at the Farmers Market and elsewhere. “It’s families, it’s mothers with a bunch of their children, it’s farmers – it’s everybody,” she said.

Other prominent Democrats have weighed in on the issue in favor of continued oyster farming, including Pete McCloskey, John Burton and Sen. Diane Feinstein. Slow food proponents Alice Waters and Michael Pollan also supports the oyster farm.

Politics aside, the Drake’s Bay Oyster Company’s claims to City Council of “sustainability” and “environmental stewardship” might be compromised somewhat by charges of multiple environmental abuses. The California Coastal Commission has cited Lunny several times for environmental violations. The company was fined $61,500 for illegal activities in 2009 alone, and has been operating without the required state permits since 2007, according to an investigative report in the East Bay Express.

The Save Point Reyes Wilderness organization has also published an online map of plastic debris found in the immediate region of Drake’s Estuary, whose distribution pattern suggests they originate from the oyster farm, along with other evidence of pollution.

In a sense, though, all the arguments about pollution, sustainability, right-wing manipulation and the tradition of family farming have little to do with the decision that Sec. Salazar reached late last year. Instead, he was implementing the law that established in 1976  the nation's first marine wilderness in the West, which included the proviso that oyster cultivation could continue to operate for 40 years, then must be discontinued to allow the estuary to return to a natural state.

As SF Weekly wrote in their lengthy article about the issue,

In the end, Salazar's decision didn't have to do with whether Drakes Bay Oyster Company was a good steward of the land or not. The farm was in a potential wilderness, and had to get out. In his decision memo, he acknowledged that "there is a level of debate with respect to the scientific analyses of the impacts of DBOC's commercial mariculture operations on the natural environment within Drakes Estero," but says that regardless of it, Congress specifically designated this land "potential wilderness" and thus it would become one. Drakes Bay Oyster Company was to cease operations by Nov. 20, 2012, following which it had 90 days to vacate the premises.

Drake’s Bay Oyster Company was established in 2005 when Lunny bought the remaining seven years on the operating permit from the original owner, the Johnson Oyster Company. Lunny is a third-generation Marin rancher who runs an organic, grass-fed beef business that his family has owned since 1940. He purchased the oyster operation – not the land itself, which the National Parks Service purchased in 1972 (hence the 40-year lease expired in November 2012) – in apparent full knowledge that the lease was to term out in just a few years, according to the SF Weekly article.

Phillips, who asked the City Council to pass the resolution, disagrees with Rep. Huffman and Assemblyman Levine, specifically targeted in the resolution to back efforts to keep the oyster farm open, over their quick rejection of the resolution as reported in the Press Democrat.. “As legislators they can motivate the Department of the Interior, the Obama administration – we’re dealing with people, yes, but we’re also dealing with the law, and both of them can have an influence on that.”

Though there have been some on both sides of the political spectrum who have advocated more relaxed permission for commercial use of federal land, if the decision to approve or deny the extension of the lease was Sec. Salazar’s to make, as according to many legal scholars it is, then it’s unlikely to be overruled - not by Congress, not by the Coastal Commission, not the Ninth Circuit Court – and not any civic body, for that matter. Including the City of Sonoma.

For her part, Yannick Phillips thinks the effort to garner community support is not over. One city in Marin - she declined to say which one - refused to bring the resolution to the agenda. She plans however to approach other community bodies for their support, in the interest she says of "transparency." She already received the support of the Sonoma Valley Grange, an organization of which she is also a member, and plans on introducing it to other city councils.

"The community [at large] needs to know who is with the oyster farmers and who is not," she said.