The Battle of Point Reyes
Kicking old-school ranchers off their land to make Silicon Valley vegans happy
Injecting elk with birth control by helicopter
How do you tell the good cows from the bad cows?
Point Reyes is a 70,000-acre protrusion that sticks out of California into the Pacific Ocean, about an hour north of San Francisco. The Point Reyes National Seashore comprises 65,000 acres of that piece of land, as a unit of the National Park Service that currently makes no sense to anyone. To my eye, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. It calls to me. Archaeological evidence suggests that Point Reyes was a kind of Miwok Santa Monica for thousands of years, a pleasant and densely populated oceanfront neighborhood. Then came the Franciscans, who brought the first few cows. In the 1830s, Mexican land grants turned the Point into ranchland. In the 1850s, litigation over those grants delivered most of the Point into the hands of a San Francisco law firm — Shafter, Shafter, Park, and Heydenfeldt. Shafter and Shafter then created a dairy district in which ranches were designated by letters of the alphabet. More than a century …
