When Science Doesn't Matter

Read it and weep: The Oyster Shell Game

Two weeks before Christmas, in a serene Pacific inlet north of San Francisco, a small mountain of fresh oysters sat rotting in the rain. Kevin Lunny, the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, watched a yellow mini-dozer chug back from the waterfront, tip its shovel and, in a great clattering of shells, dump hundreds more onto the heap.

After seven years of political and legal battles that have grown into one of the ugliest environmental fights in the country, this was the end of the line for Lunny’s oyster farm. "It's been a terrible time," said Lunny, who still lives on the nearby cattle ranch where he grew up and where his grandfather started a dairy farm in 1947. The forced closure of the oyster company marks the end, after almost 80 years, of modern shellfish farming in Drakes Estero, the tidal estuary that lies at the center of the dispute.

In 1935, an oyster farm was established in the estuary’s innermost harbor, run for a few decades by a rotating crop of shellfish farmers, and from 1961 on it was called the Johnson Oyster Company. The estero was a generous sea garden, eventually becoming a source of about 500,000 pounds of oyster meat a year, all grown with nothing more than seawater and sunshine. “It was a resource for a lot of people," Lunny said. . .

A story where the environmentalists in government have conspired to hide the science that shows no significant environmental effect for this oyster aquaculture operation. The environmentalists in question, in concert with the Department of Interior have decided they want that land; they want the whole estuary for themselves regardless of evidence. And they have the power to dictate it.

I have to give DiFi props for her position on this.