“Keep Tahoe Red”: The Politics of Environmentalism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Lake Tahoe Basin

• In Event: Fighting the Green Tyrants: Anti-Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth-Century American West

Abstract

In the 1980s and 1990s, Lake Tahoe functioned as an epicenter of environmental politics in Nevada and California between environmentalists and anti-environmentalists. Diverse stakeholders comprised of Nevada’s legalized gaming industry, real-estate developers, environmental organizations, the U.S. Forest Service, the Washoe Tribe, wealthy residents, tourists, and working-class service workers struggled to collaboratively manage the Lake Tahoe Basin. During these two decades, opponents of environmental regulations utilized Sagebrush Rebellion styled rhetoric to vociferously resist efforts to protect Lake Tahoe’s clarity. Dissidents of the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency protested federal oversight of the Lake and claimed that efforts to limit construction were obstructing their personal liberties and economic viability. Meanwhile, environmentalists utilized scientific knowledge and marketing to argue for more protective oversight and control of the Basin’s built environment. The grassroots campaigns conducted by both anti-environmentalists and environmentalists offer a poignant example of the ways environmental battles unfolded in western landscapes and elucidates the ways that both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists used rhetoric, imagery, and marketing to shape perceptions of the necessity to protect the Lake or resist the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s “tyranny.”

Author

• Christian Filbrun, University of Nevada, Reno