Saving Lake Tahoe: An Environmental History of a National Treasure

Introduction

1 Influential Americans from Mark Twain in the nineteenth century to Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton in the twentieth have acclaimed Lake Tahoe a national treasure. Executive orders, congressional bills, and Supreme Court decisions have dealt with the lake. Poets and artists have sought to capture its essence, and twice we nearly destroyed it. In the nineteenth century, when virgin lands were thought to be going to waste, entrepreneurs clear-cut the area’s forests. The loss of vegetation caused erosion on the surrounding mountains, carrying silt into the lake that reduced its clarity more than sevenfold. A hundred years later, with the forests regrown and the water’s purity restored, Tahoe’s scenic values and recreational activities attracted annual visitors by the millions. The resultant urbanization again caused immense environmental damage, most apparent in a dramatic escalation of building, traffic congestion, air pollution, and the deterioration of lake clarity—this time more than 30 percent. It is only because its waters began with unmatched purity that Lake Tahoe maintains its unique, scenic grandeur.1 Saving Lake Tahoe argues that the lake’s heritage must take precedence over the unrestricted use of private and commercial properties. To what extent property owners and business interests should be allowed to develop their lands at the expense of the lake’s ecological health has been disputed for more than fifty years. To substantiate the thesis that the Lake Basin, 75 percent of which is publicly owned land, can be effectively protected only by overarching governance and regional environmental standards, this book looks at the interaction through the years between human activities and Tahoe’s natural ecosystems. It recounts ecodisasters and near disasters and political successes and failures. It tells why and how a new type of government entity, a bistate regional agency, was formed and the innumerable problems it has incurred. Much has been done in the modern era in attempting to mitigate human damage at Lake Tahoe. Both the Environmental Protection Agency (epa) introduction 2 s a v i n g l a k e t a h o e and the State of California have designated the lake an Outstanding National Resource Water, giving it special protections. California and Nevada passed bonds, and the federal government sold public southern Nevada properties to raise money to buy environmentally sensitive lands at Tahoe. In the recent past, $1.55 billion has been expended, and some of America’s most astute scientific and political minds have been employed, in attempting to renew Lake Tahoe’s health and protect its picturesque splendor. Americans’ discovery of the area and the impact it had on the Native people have aspects that are familiar. For thousands of years, in the snowless months, the Washoe Indians lived at the lake. When the Americans arrived, the Washoe were a small tribe of perhaps two thousand members, utilizing systems developed through the millennia. The Indians selectively harvested, burned, pruned, and thinned plants and fished and hunted, sustaining the region’s bounty. Protected by the massive Sierra Nevada to the west and the desert of the Great Basin to the east, 150 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition and nearly 100 years after missions were established in California, the Washoes continued to pursue their traditional lives undisturbed. Americans, arriving in the late 1850s, found a pristine lake, seventy-two miles in circumference and more than sixteen hundred feet deep, surrounded by ancient pine forests on basin-forming mountains. Within three decades, the newcomers had removed the forests, fenced out the Washoes, and overfished the lake—leading to the ultimate extinction of the once abundant native trout. Owing to the manner in which it was done, the clear-cutting of the forests was not fatal to the lake. The number of roads built, none with impervious surfaces, was limited. Log skids were built that prevented cuts from digging deeply into the mountainsides. Flumes and trains used in transporting the timber utilized trestles that protected canyons and drainages. After the cutting, limbs, needles, and other forest debris were left and served as ground cover, limiting soil loss. Most important, once the timber magnates had taken the trees, they abandoned the region, and the populace largely ignored it.2 In the first half of the twentieth century, human neglect allowed the forests to grow back and the lake’s transparency to return. In the 1960s, the lake’s i n t r...