Today I am looking at the reporting of an environmental story starting with three headlines published within one day of each other. They are all reporting the same event—the release of a report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding complaints raised by the Drakes Bay Oyster Company (DBOC) against the National Park Service (NPS).

1. Park Service cleared in probe of oyster farm fight
   —Associated Press published in Mercury News

2. Park Service skewed data on oyster farm
   —San Francisco Chronicle (via sfgate.com by Kelly Zito, Chronicle Staff Writer)

3. Marin County's Drakes Bay Oyster Co. Abused by Government Agency, According to U.S. Department of Interior Inspector General Report Report Shows National Park Service Used False Information, Bureaucratic Red Tape in Attempt to Ruin Marin County Business
   —Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch (Business Newswire)

Is it any wonder it is difficult to know where to stand on a particular issue, or that the environment, something we all have a vested interest in, always seems to polarize us. None of the articles, all available online, even provide a link to the actual OIG report that the headline a purportedly referencing. It's available as a PDF here.

Pt. Reyes Background

At issue is the Drakes Bay Oyster Company who runs an oyster farm within Point Reyes National Seashore. Point Reyes was established in 1962 and signed into law by President Kennedy. Soon after the establishment of Point Reyes, the Park Service began the job of acquiring private inholdings. One method the NPS used in acquiring land was to buy title to the land while deeding a Reservation of Use and Occupancy (RUO) to allow farmers to continue to use the land for agriculture for a limited time. This is what happened with the Johnson Oyster Company when in 1972 Charles Johnson agreed to sell five acres to the NPS. The original RUO was for 40 years and is set to expire in 2012. In 1976 Congress passed the PRNS Wilderness Act designating much of the Point Reyes area as wilderness. Some areas in PRNS, including the estuary where Johnson Oyster Company was located, were identified as "potential wilderness," areas that, because of temporary incompatibilities (like a temporarily deeded oyster farm), do not qualify for wilderness at the moment, but will in the future. These areas were to be managed essentially as wilderness with the goal of eventually removing the impediments to wilderness designation. In 2005 Charles Johnson transfered his RUO rights to Kevin Lunny, whose family has operated a cattle operation in the area since 1947. Lunny renamed the farm to Drakes Bay Oyster Company. In April of last year Kevin Lunny and his wife requested an investigation into various alleged misdeeds by the NPS including acting in bad faith scientifically, planning to close their farm down before the 2012 expiration of the RUO, and various smaller charges. The OIG report in the above headlines is the result of the investigation instigated by Lunny's request.

Contradictory Headlines?

One possible cause for the media outlets' confusion is that the OIG report is dealing with two separate but related issues: scientific misconduct and disparate treatment of DBOC. This level of complexity seems to be something that the national media is incapable of dealing with. Although the Inspector General's report very clear, it is long, a little dry, and does not lend itself to a one-sided interpretation. The report arrives at two conclusions:

1. There was some significant scientific misrepresentation by scientists at the Park Service
2. The Park Service is not conspiring to ruin DBOC's business or showing disparate treatment toward its owner.

This explains the San Francisco Chronicle and Mercury News headlines; each found that one aspect of the report was worthy of the headline and relegated the other fact to the body of the story. But where did the Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch headline come from? It is flatly wrong; the report shows no such attempt to ruin Lunny's business.

Also, consider this from the Marketwatch article:

The report details how the Inspector General's Computer Crimes Unit recovered an email apparently deleted by the National Park Service's lead scientist that showed the government agency was knowingly misrepresenting environmental data.
Park Service officials are accused of engaging in a campaign of intimidation and disinformation to damage the operation of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

Question based on above quote:
Did the OIG report find that NPS officials are "engaging in a campaign of intimidation and disinformation to damage the operation of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company?"

Answer:
No they didn't. They found the opposite.

Mixed into the reporting of what the Inspectors General did find is a sentence talking about what Lunny has accused the NPS of despite the simple fact that this report explicitly clears the Park Service officials of exactly those charges.

How does this happen? The answer is found by scrolling down to the bottom of the Marketwatch piece:

SOURCE: Drakes Bay Oyster Company
for Drakes Bay Oyster Company
Sam Singer, 415-227-9700

The phone number is for Singer Associates, Inc a communication agency. This appears to be a press release by one of the interested parties that was run by a news outlet. The headline was picked up by Google News and run with the abbreviated headline, Marin County's Drakes Bay Oyster Co. Abused by Government Agency... There is some thick irony in Kevin Lunny's cries of scientific misconduct and dishonest treatment by the Park Service while at the same time manipulating the media with false information in such savvy fashion. Digging a little deeper into the story one finds that the impetus of much of the Park Service's scientific investigation was an attempt to disprove claims made by Lunny that oyster farming is not just non-harmful to the the environment, but actually good for it. After viewing the Drakes Bay website one comes away with the impression they are trying very hard to get the environmental movement behind their efforts to keep the oyster farm open beyond the 2012 expiration of the RUO. This intention is brought to light in the OIG report when Lunny tried to convince the Park Service to include the following language into a special use permit he was refusing to sign:

Permittee and Permitter acknowledge and recognize that…the Reservation of Use and Occupancy…does allow for issuance of a special use permit for the continued occupancy of the property…beyond the 2012 term, at the discretion of the Permitter.

This seems unlikely to happen without an act of Congress. Again from the OIG report:

According to the retired Field Solicitor, “potential” wilderness areas such as the DBOC site required NPS to manage them as wilderness once any “non conforming use,” such as the mariculture operation, expired. In his opinion, no one had the authority to circumvent the Wilderness Act by allowing Lunny to operate DBOC in the estero past the expiration date of the Reservation of Use and Occupancy, and the only way Lunny could prolong DBOC’s departure from PRNS would be through the passage of new legislation by Congress.

The picture that emerges is a flaccid news media running sloppy stories while a commercial enterprise, showing animosity toward the Park Service's mandated oversight of their operation, and in a situation of literally losing the farm in a few years, cynically manipulates the media and segments of the conservation community with the help of a professional communication company.

The issues at hand goes far beyond Point Reyes or the oyster farm. It appears that Drakes Bay Oyster Company is fighting to remain in business on public land beyond the expiration of the RUO which would require a precedent-setting reversal of wilderness legislation. An editorial by Amy Meyers in the Marin Independent Journal summarizes the importance of the real issues: It's about legacy, not oysters. Lunny is insisting that the Park Service is trying to shut him down, but the fact is that oyster farming had a limited lifespan when he purchased the ROU and it will require a giant leap backwards in the conservation efforts of this country to change this.