People think the controversy raging at Point Reyes National Seashore, even after the negotiated lawsuit settlement, is about elk versus cows, or environmentalists versus ranchers. But the trouble runs deeper.

Painful, inconvenient truths are challenging centuries-old eating habits and farming customs.

What people were taught to believe about beef and dairy products is being challenged. Billion-dollar cattle industry public relations and advertising firms are pushing back to keep cheeseburgers selling.

All this is the semi-hidden “software” of our culture. Meat and dairy makers both giant and small — like at Point Reyes — profit from institutionalized norms and industry myths.

The status quo only functions if a few key truths are denied, most notably that meat and dairy consumption in the 21st century, with almost 8 billion humans on Earth, is both resource depleting and a major driver of the climate crisis.

Numerous scientific studies document this ecological reality, including an exhaustive one by Oxford University.

The world’s population can’t eat — and survive — as we did a century or more earlier (not without heating the atmosphere and fouling both land and oceans). This is ignored and denied by most because it would necessitate breaking an old, self-destructive habit: eating meat and dairy products.

Change is usually difficult and unpleasant. And humans are social creatures, so reading or hearing the truth about eating animal products is easier to ignore than believe.

Even many vegetarians who stopped eating meat decades ago, because they decided to stop killing animals unnecessarily, still eat dairy products, which inflict even more suffering on cows than beef products. Most dairy cows have their babies taken from them and most mothers and calves are killed young.

Since this information is disturbing, most would prefer the easier-to-swallow discussion of Point Reyes ranchers and environmentalists — but it’s all the same subject.

Dairy and beef ranches exist at Point Reyes (and everywhere) because of our cultural habits, myths and traditions. We’ve eaten and used animals for thousands of years, before we humans grew so numerous, and now affect the planet’s ecosystem.

Our swollen population makes eating beef and dairy unsustainable. Yet the overwhelming majority of humans want to keep eating large animals like we always have. Hence, the appeal of the so-called “paleo diet,” despite the average American today being less active and eating more meat than hunter-gatherers.

Meat and dairy mythologies flowed like spilled milk at Rep. Jared Huffman’s Jan. 11 Town Hall in Point Reyes Station. Some tried to say ranchers helped create the park, even though documentation and a lawsuit prove ranchers fought its creation bitterly.

The pro-ranching crowd was silent about the many millions paid in the 1960s and 1970s to rancher families who initially agreed to leave the park by 1987.

One ranch supporter made the oft-repeated, “stewards of the land” claim — despite anyone being able to see that pastoral grounds are bare dirt compared to the green, cow-free elk reserve.

The Nature Conservancy nonprofit organization was vilified repeatedly, even though it reportedly raised between $30 million and $40 million to pay ranch families.

Poor ranch workers are like coal miners being forced out of a climate-killing industry. While ranchers express concern, it is the environmental group, the Nature Conservancy, that appears to be spearheading the primary effort to raise aid (reportedly as much as $2.5 million) to help relocate workers and their families.

Another ranch fan voiced the latest, desperate claim: that so-called “regenerative ranching” will solve the climate crisis — which beef and dairy businesses helped create.

This “clean coal” of the cattle industry insists that moving cows around over more land significantly reduces methane emissions or offsets millions of pounds of manure.

The most inconvenient, ecological truth at the meeting went unspoken: Raising bovines weighing between 900 and 1,400 pounds for meat and milk is a stunningly costly, polluting and inefficient way to feed people.

Little Point Reyes is the Bay Area’s nexus for all these painful truths. It’s a test case for whether we humans can adapt and evolve, and break our addiction to eating cows and cow’s milk. The settlement is one big step in the direction of our survival.

Jack Gescheidt, of San Rafael, is founder of the TreeSpirit Project and tule elk consultant for In Defense of Animals.