End Of Ranching In Iconic California Community Signals Bigger War On Land Use In West
Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times Wednesday, May 14, 2025 - 09:45 PM
POINT REYES STATION, Calif.—The buffalo milk soft serve here is an open secret, found near the butcher’s counter at the back of the local market. Like everything else in this tiny farm town, nestled in the coastal grasslands about an hour north of San Francisco, it’s made with milk from a nearby dairy.
California’s Marin County is a pioneer in organic ranching, known for its gourmet cheeses, multi-generational dairies and pasture-raised beef. The legacy of more than 150 years of agricultural production is baked into its contemporary rural charms, which, along with the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore, make it a popular tourist destination.
It’s also a corner of the country where locals tend to see ranching and environmentalism as symbiotic pursuits.
But after years of conflict among preservationists, ranchers, and the federal government, a recent deal to end most ranching—all of it organic—on the Seashore has incensed locals and revealed a deep chasm between competing visions of environmental stewardship.
The agreement between three environmental groups—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Western Watersheds Project—the National Park Service, and the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association saw 12 of 14 ranches on Point Reyes agree to cease ranching within 15 months.
On one side, preservationists say cattle and dairy ranching at Point Reyes has led to environmental degradation that threatens the future of the park and biodiversity in the state; on the other, family ranchers see themselves as stewards of the land, their practices as the future of conservation—and as a bulwark against the ravages of Big Ag.
As the Trump administration moves to roll back Biden-era reforms, the high-profile case has become a flashpoint in the broader fight over land use in the West—where the federal government owns nearly half of all public land, and where ranching is considered a living legacy, part of the cultural heritage that built the West itself.
Now, a congressional investigation and two new lawsuits against the park are giving hope to critics of the Point Reyes deal that a policy shift could again be on the table, making the future of the park anything but settled.
What’s at stake, insiders say, is more than the dozen family ranches set to leave the park by next year. The questions Point Reyes raises will determine more than the fate of the National Seashore.
Multiple Use Mandate
While national forests and lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management have long been governed by a multiple-use mandate, which includes grazing, timber, resource extraction, and recreation, national parks are typically more focused on preservation.
Point Reyes, a spectacularly beautiful coastal peninsula where ranching predates the park itself by a century, is an unusual case—and one bound to attract scrutiny from activists who oppose ranching on public lands.
“I’ve never seen a private grazing lease on public lands that wasn’t doing environmental damage, whether it’s to salmon or to sage grouse, it doesn’t matter what ecosystem you’re in,” said Jeff Miller, a senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations that sued the National Park Service over its ranching leases in 2014 and 2022, resulting in the current agreement.
In the West, damage from private cattle grazing leases is “immense,” Miller said, second only to logging. Preservationists cite water pollution, soil erosion, and habitat loss, among other concerns.
The organization has focused on the issue since its founding in 1989, routinely intervening with National Forest and Bureau of Land Management plans and suing over grazing leases in cases where there is explicit and documented environmental damage, Miller said.
Over the past several years, the Biden administration advanced an agenda broadly favorable to conservationists, with national monument expansions and an initiative to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by 2030, as well as the 2024 Public Lands rule that allows prioritizing conservation above established multiple uses.
The Trump White House has indicated its intent to rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, a move lambasted by environmental groups, who argue the administration is ushering in an era of unrestrained exploitation.
Congressional Republicans contend Biden’s upending of the multiple use doctrine has been a disaster both for rural communities and the country, driving up housing prices in Western cities surrounded by federal land and gutting local economies.
“President Biden left America’s public lands and natural resources in a sorry state,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told the House Natural Resources Committee during a February hearing on restoring multiple use.
“For four long years President Biden and his federal land managers have abandoned the longstanding and previously uncontroversial principle of multiple use. Instead, they adopted top-down, preservationist schemes designed to placate extreme environmentalists.”
In the same hearing, Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, an organization representing cattle and sheep producers who hold 22,000 grazing permits across the West, highlighted challenges for ranchers, and urged Congress and federal agencies to recognize public lands ranching as an essential part of the multi-use framework.
“I manage these lands and waters, and the wildlife and multiple uses they sustain, as if they were my own,” Canterbury said. He said the infrastructure, ecological stewardship and investments that ranchers provide benefit the public and environment, not just privately owned livestock.
“My family has managed the lands we utilize since 1879. Our commitment to these lands is baked into our way of life,” Canterbury said of his Colorado ranch operation, adding that “deep historical and ecological knowledge of the working landscape” are handed down through generations.
Ivan London, a senior attorney with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which frequently intervenes pro-bono on behalf of ranchers facing challenges to their grazing permits, said regulatory interpretations may shift with the balance of power in Washington, but the law governing grazing rights hasn’t changed.
“Congress actually said, ‘Here are some priority uses of public land—grazing, timber, harvesting, mineral production.’ And that law hasn’t changed. But from administration to administration the various regulators find ways to read it differently,” London said, pointing to President Bill Clinton’s attempts to increase grazing fees in the 1990s, and President Joe Biden’s embrace of conservation easements.
“According to the Taylor Grazing Act—an actual law, unlike the conservation leases—grazing and ranching are the highest use of public lands,” London said. That regulations allowing conservation leases to “lock up land away from ranchers” might be ending under the Trump administration is “huge,” he said.
The Mountain States Legal Foundation in 2023 successfully intervened on behalf of Wyoming ranchers when the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Watersheds Project, and other groups alleged that one of the oldest cattle drives in the country threatened grizzly bear populations in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Recognized as a Traditional Cultural Property on the National Register of Historic Places, the Green River Drift cattle drive is still operated by descendants of families that homesteaded the area in the 19th century.
It’s a familiar narrative, often reduced in court to a zero-sum game between preserving either vulnerable animal or plant species, or prized human cultural practices with histories that pre-date the authority managing the lands.
The families in question, their lawyers argued, cared for the land longer and better than any agency or activist, their continued existence providing “124 years of evidence that ranchers are the real conservationists.”
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