Photo: Associated Press. Workers from Drakes Bay Oyster Company bring in a load of freshly harvested oysters at Point Reyes National Seashore. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced last week that the operation would have to shut down.

Thanks to our oft-linked to favorite writer on such topics — Felicity Barringer — for the follow up on this story from a few days ago:

In the end, after all the money spent on the science — on cameras whose images were not carefully examined, on reports that misrepresented scientific studies, and on repeated investigations of flawed scientific work — the Interior Department’s decision not to renew an oyster company’s lease to operate within Point Reyes National Seashore largely sidestepped any scientific issues.

In the final memorandum supporting his action, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar relied mainly on real estate contracts signed 40 years ago. He said that studies on the oyster farm’s impact on the environmental (all riddled with controversy) were helpful but “not material to the legal and policy factors which provide the central basis for my decision.”

His reasoning: commercial operations are incompatible with wilderness, and Congress wanted this to be a wilderness.

The legal and legislative arguments on which he relied had always been at his disposal, and Mr. Salazar apparently did not find the scientific conclusions robust enough to be the main argument for his decision to close the farm.

So what was all the science, good or bad, for?

The federal government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on studies aimed at making a clear scientific case against the farm’s continued operation and on various critiques of the self-same science.
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