with the PRNS’s enabling legislation and contrary to the NPS’s founding mandate. The litigants hired a private mediator, Bradley O’Brien of Conflict Resolution LLC, but no easy solution was in sight. Meanwhile, the National Park Service asked The Nature Conservancy—one of the largest nonprofit environmental organizations in the U.S.—to conduct negotiations with the ranchers. The Western Resources Legal Center at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, who are experts in environmental law, represented the ranchers pro bono. The outcome was an announcement on Jan. 8, 2025, that 11 leaseholders who operate 12 ranches—six dairy and six beef— would cease operations and leave PRNS in 15 months, with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) raising the funds to buy the leases from the ranches and retire them. Although the negotiations were confidential and the financial terms were not released, the Point Reyes Light reported that the amount required was an estimated $40 million. (Public funds cannot be used, because Congress previously appropriated funds to buy the properties in the 1960s and ’70s.) The NPS will negotiate new 20-year leases with an additional two ranches that were not part of the negotiations, as well as another seven in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which the NPS manages but does not own. ‘Lose-lose situation’ for all parties Michael Bell, protection strategy director of The Nature Conservancy in California, explains that the land-use conflict had been going on for a considerable amount of time, and the NPS and plaintiffs had moved to mediation but weren’t making progress. Thus, the NPS reached out to TNC in 2022 and asked if they’d be willing to meet with all the parties and try to find alternatives that could lead to a settlement. TNC staff did some research and concluded that the existing situation was bad for the environment, the culture and the ranchers. “It was evolving into a lose-lose situation,” says Bell, explaining that they decided to become involved, but it was a decision they did not take lightly. The Nature Conservancy has extensive experience in protecting resources, including family agricultural lands. “[And] there is a time and place where transactions can help develop a solution in an intractable situation,” Bell says. The different players were stuck in a model that wasn’t working, and so TNC needed to find a way to move them in a more positive direction and create a better land-use model. Bell emphasizes that TNC is an independent actor, not a litigant or an advocate, and it didn’t have an interest in one particular outcome. Instead, “It required us to meet with families one by one and build some trust,” he says. And they framed an alternative for each family and worked with them to refine it and determine if it was acceptable. “These are big personal decisions,” he says, and so TNC left it to them to assess whether it would work for them or not. Any solution also had to satisfy the environmentalists, but TNC did not have any discussions with them. Instead, they took the suggested solutions to their attorneys, who in turn presented them to their clients. In addition, the final agreement had to accommodate the planning process of PRNS, and so the National Park Service, which wasn’t involved in the confidential negotiations and didn’t meet with any of the parties, had to agree to the terms. In the end, with give and take on all sides, TNC brokered a settlement agreement that all key players could
History of ranching at Point Reyes The first ranches at Point Reyes were part of extensive land grants that the Mexican government gave to individuals between 1822 and 1846 to encourage settlement in its northern territory. Large- scale commercial operations began in 1869 and 1870, after California became part of the United States, and San Francisco law firm Shafter, Shafter, Park and Heydenfeldt acquired more than 50,000 acres of property on the Point Reyes peninsula following a legal dispute over who had title to the land. They sold the area that is now called Tomales Point to Solomon Pierce, who built Pierce Point Ranch, which is a historic site today. Oscar Shafter and his son-in- law Charles Howard Webb divided the remaining land into 32 tenant parcels that became known as the Alphabet Ranches to create a dairy district, and several of those properties are included in the current settlement agreement.The dairies that will vacate Point Reyes National Seashore by the spring of 2026 are A Ranch, B Ranch, C Ranch, I Ranch, L Ranch and J/K Ranch. The beef ranches that will cease operations are E Ranch, F Ranch, G Ranch, H Ranch, M Ranch and Home/N Ranches. 170,000 acres will transition from ranching to other purposes, and ranchers will have to decide what to do with cattle that numbered 4,729 in a recent count.
— Judith Wilson
live with, even if it didn’t give them everything they wanted. Bell observes that if mediation had not been successful, a judge could have made a decision that allowed the conflict to continue, or the dispute might have come to an abrupt end without support to help people through the transition. “It was better to do it with a plan and resources and create a pathway for PRNS,” he says, although the local controversy made the process difficult. He points out that local concerns about agriculture are valid and important, but PRNS is a national seashore that belongs to the people of the United States, and so stakeholders across the country have a vested interest and opinions that count. “That’s frequently forgotten,” he says. “What’s appropriate for a national park doesn’t necessarily benefit the local community.” He adds that the depth and duration of the problem was also a challenge. “We didn’t have a blank canvas to create a solution,” he says, but instead had a narrow window to find one and reach an agreement while dealing with a challenging set of conditions and restraints. Winds of change The Lunny family has lived on the G Ranch in Point Reyes for more than 75 years, and it’s the only address third-generation rancher Kevin Lunny, 67, has ever known. His grandfather
March 2025
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