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A review by owlette
The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America by Summer Brennan
4.0
I was pleasantly impressed by Brennan's craft in storytelling. If you go into this book without prior knowledge, you will find the book getting slower towards the middle. Next, you might worry about missing something because, with less than a hundred pages left, you're still trying to figure out exactly the controversial elements that elevated this case to national public opinion. Actually, there was no controversy, at least not in the sense the plaintiffs claimed it.
The story of the San Francisco Bay oystery case as it was campaigned nationally by the plaintiffs was this: in 2004, Kevin Lunny, the plaintiff and the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company (DBOC), had inherited from the previous oystery company a government land permit to operate an oystery within Point Reyes National Seashore. Lunny believed that the permit would be renewed so that the oystery could stay in business beyond its expiration year of 2012. However, the National Park Service refused, thereby breaking whatever implicit or explicit promise it had given him. This would have been a typical American tale of a small business owner versus the Government had this juicy narrative been true: it wasn't. Brennan's research could not find any evidence that such a deception had happened: to put it simply, Kevin didn't get what he wanted.
When the last two chapters finally revealed this version of the story, the book's composition made more sense to me. I wasn't even mad for Brennan's making me feel stupid; the subversive storytelling is effective.
Brennan foregoes the nail-biting legal untangling or fact-tracing of whether oyster operation hurt the local seal population, basically all the things that Corey Goodman, the unofficial spokesperson for DBOC does. Instead, what fills the pages are vignettes of 80's green anarchism, Portuguese immigrant family running a ranch, attempts to cull beach grasses and tule elks because they are not native, legacy-driven politicians unscrupulously demarcating bodies of water and patches of land into "potential wilderness." To borrow from this book review: "Shaped like a spiral, the book begins at the outer edges of the narrative and circles slowly inward, tracing as it goes the many contexts that are indispensable to understanding the oyster farm controversy."
The intended effects are twofold: 1) to show the landscape that could be lost but also 2) to question whether the landscape that would be lost was really "wilderness" or some politically convenient conception dated back to some arbitrary point in history. This book is not a romantic call to protect the land and preserve the wilderness. It stares into its elusiveness, and ultimately Brennan sides with the Park out of pragmatic concern that DBOC's victory would set a pro-business precedent. Brennan puts it more directly in this interview: "I think when it comes to thinking about wilderness, I think I am more of a realist, or at least a functionalist rather than a romantic, in that I think what matters--it matters less the technicality of native or non-native or how long something has been there or not. That's why I think I write that one of the central issues of this story across the board was one of belonging--of what belongs where and who and why and who decides."
See also:
- Banu Subramaniam's [b:Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity|21944510|Ghost Stories for Darwin The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity|Banu Subramaniam|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410229718l/21944510._SX50_.jpg|41248637] (2014) on the political implication inherent to categorizing species as native vs. invasive.
- Eva Holland, "Born to be Eaten" (2019) raises a far more complex case where the protection of wilderness, which implies the total removal of human activity, is pitted against an indigenous people's culture that is embedded in the land.
The story of the San Francisco Bay oystery case as it was campaigned nationally by the plaintiffs was this: in 2004, Kevin Lunny, the plaintiff and the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company (DBOC), had inherited from the previous oystery company a government land permit to operate an oystery within Point Reyes National Seashore. Lunny believed that the permit would be renewed so that the oystery could stay in business beyond its expiration year of 2012. However, the National Park Service refused, thereby breaking whatever implicit or explicit promise it had given him. This would have been a typical American tale of a small business owner versus the Government had this juicy narrative been true: it wasn't. Brennan's research could not find any evidence that such a deception had happened: to put it simply, Kevin didn't get what he wanted.
When the last two chapters finally revealed this version of the story, the book's composition made more sense to me. I wasn't even mad for Brennan's making me feel stupid; the subversive storytelling is effective.
Brennan foregoes the nail-biting legal untangling or fact-tracing of whether oyster operation hurt the local seal population, basically all the things that Corey Goodman, the unofficial spokesperson for DBOC does. Instead, what fills the pages are vignettes of 80's green anarchism, Portuguese immigrant family running a ranch, attempts to cull beach grasses and tule elks because they are not native, legacy-driven politicians unscrupulously demarcating bodies of water and patches of land into "potential wilderness." To borrow from this book review: "Shaped like a spiral, the book begins at the outer edges of the narrative and circles slowly inward, tracing as it goes the many contexts that are indispensable to understanding the oyster farm controversy."
The intended effects are twofold: 1) to show the landscape that could be lost but also 2) to question whether the landscape that would be lost was really "wilderness" or some politically convenient conception dated back to some arbitrary point in history. This book is not a romantic call to protect the land and preserve the wilderness. It stares into its elusiveness, and ultimately Brennan sides with the Park out of pragmatic concern that DBOC's victory would set a pro-business precedent. Brennan puts it more directly in this interview: "I think when it comes to thinking about wilderness, I think I am more of a realist, or at least a functionalist rather than a romantic, in that I think what matters--it matters less the technicality of native or non-native or how long something has been there or not. That's why I think I write that one of the central issues of this story across the board was one of belonging--of what belongs where and who and why and who decides."
See also:
- Banu Subramaniam's [b:Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity|21944510|Ghost Stories for Darwin The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity|Banu Subramaniam|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410229718l/21944510._SX50_.jpg|41248637] (2014) on the political implication inherent to categorizing species as native vs. invasive.
- Eva Holland, "Born to be Eaten" (2019) raises a far more complex case where the protection of wilderness, which implies the total removal of human activity, is pitted against an indigenous people's culture that is embedded in the land.