Tahoe's Top Trends
Story by Kim Wyatt
Photos by Joy Strotz
There's something happening here, to quote the Buffalo Springfield activism-era tune. Artists are forming critique groups and cooperatives. Individuals are creating organizations that reflect deeply held beliefs, with businesses following suit and, in some cases, taking the lead. Communities are seeking alternatives to traditional learning: eco-friendly schools that provide green education and graduate students who understand all aspects of sustainability. Buildings are being restored rather than demolished; museums and committed groups are finding ways to preserve our heritage. Locals are looking across The Lake for connection; authenticity and mountain culture are valued and promoted.
Tough times, including last summer's Angora fire, and continuing development squabbles have taken a toll on Tahoe's collective psyche. Yet as we forge ahead together, themes of building an economy based on principles of sustainability and local pride keep bubbling to the surface, trends that should give us all reason to believe that Tahoe is and will continue to be a terrific place to live.
TAKING SUSTAINABILITY PERSONALLY
Depending on whom you ask, Tahoe has been a leader or a laggard in promoting sustainable living. Agencies have traditionally shouldered the bulk of the environmental load, while municipalities tackled the economic end. But it's the average Joe who shows up to meetings, picks up litter or makes a fence out of reclaimed wood that is raising the bar. In the past few years, Tahoe has seen a groundswell at individual and collective levels, sending out a message loud and clear: If one person can make a difference, a community united creates an irresistible force.
Former Truckee resident Kimberly Danek Pinkson found her inspiration at a Donner Lake picnic table in 2006. Participating in a discussion about recycling, it dawned on her that mothers were not only great role models, but a huge market force. Thus, the EcoMom Alliance was born. Focused on fighting climate change and working for sustainability through education, outreach and campaigns such as the EcoMom Challenge, which calls for women to take ten first steps toward a sustainable future, Pinkson's group took off.
Now 11,000 members strong worldwide, the organization also has 120 community leaders who take the EcoMom message to schools, to PTAs, "to anyone who will listen," says Pinkson, who has since moved north of San Francisco to San Anselmo but retains strong ties to the Tahoe-Truckee community. Current EcoMom Alliance leaders include Truckee local Sherry McConkey, EcoMom's community outreach director, and Tahoe City physician Stephenie Riley, who serves as the group's environmental medical expert.
"We are certainly seeing the effects of global warming in the snowpack, and the impact on the economy if we keep going in this direction," says Pinkson. "It's a gift to live in such a beautiful place. Your action impacts the economy, society and the waste stream on many levels, literally."
For those who feel that the issues are too big for one person to make a difference, Pinkson says it's critical to fend off the deer in the headlights sensation. "It took individual steps to get where we are now," she says, "and it will take individual steps to get out."
Former Truckee mayor Beth Ingalls oversaw the completion of the town's general plan update near the end of her term in November 2006, as Truckee Donner Public Utility District was looking at a 50-year coal contract. "I was one of the many people that spoke out against this," says Ingalls. "After my term, I wanted a way to shift my focus to climate issues, so I founded the Truckee Climate Action Network (TCAN)."
TCAN's primary goal is to reduce Truckee's carbon footprint, in part through encouraging greater use of renewable energy. The group recently received a grant to publish a low-carbon emission guide, a tool kit that will not only teach the community how to live sustainably but that will also launch a fundraising campaign for TCAN's goal to outfit 1,000 Truckee rooftops with solar panels by 2015.
Sarah Curtis, former League to Save Lake Tahoe Upper Truckee River Watershed Stewardship group coordinator, has seen an increased awareness of personal responsibility with regard to the environment. "The Angora fire was precipitous in making people aware of their personal roles in defensible space and BMPs (best management practices)," says Curtis. "People now have an emotional connection, and we've seen a lot of interest in the watershed group."
The stewardship group started last summer as the League recognized the need for greater education about Tahoe's largest watershed, the Upper Truckee River, which delivers over half the fine sediment entering Lake Tahoe. This summer, the group is leading tours around stream zones targeted for restoration, such as the controversial Lake Tahoe Golf Course reconfiguration in South Shore.
"Something else we're seeing is tourists and second homeowners coming to watershed events," Curtis says. "This is extremely important. In the watershed alone, these demographics have a huge impact."
At the business level, Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce's Environment & Green Business Task Force chair Cheryl Murakami says the chamber is rolling out a program to educate commercial entities how to go green. "We want to communicate to businesses that you can start small and that your efforts can make a difference."
The task force is not a green business certification program, says Murakami, but aims to help businesses function more efficiently. "Forty percent of all electricity in buildings is consumed while power-draining devices are turned off," she says. In addition, the Chamber has created a set of eight environmental initiatives called Green South Shore, which includes programs and campaigns for green building, eco-tourism and alternative transportation, among others, that all address the economy and environment together.
Murakami believes businesses are making strides towards sustainability, but slowly. "It's going to come from large businesses first," says Murakami. "They can afford to do it. Small businesses are struggling to make ends meet.
"The ski resorts are in a position to drive things forward," she adds, citing Project: Green Sierra at Sierra-at-Tahoe, Heavenly's organic cuisine and use of ceramic and flatware instead of paper and Styrofoam, and Northstar-at-Tahoe's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)– certified development.
EDUCATING ALTERNATIVELY
Long part of Tahoe education, teaching sustainability is now spreading beyond the science classroom into the general curriculum. Two years ago, Meyers Elementary School, closed due to declining enrollment and budgetary constraints, gained new life as the Lake Tahoe Environmental Science Magnet School with a student body of more than 300. This past June, the Lake Tahoe Unified School District (LTUSD) floated a bond measure to build a "Green Academy"—the first of its kind in the Basin—at the high school with an emphasis on eco-friendly automotive technology and construction techniques. Although voters initially turned it down, the district will fine tune the measure and add it to November's ballot.
"We did an informal survey of industry sectors in the Tahoe Basin, and saw how much of it was tied to restoration, BMPs, LEED-certified building and sustainability issues," says LTUSD board member and parent Angela Swanson, who facilitated a district grant that brought the high school matching funds to build the new facility. "People aren't looking for kids knowing how to wield a hammer; they want them to understand sustainability. The students need to be exposed to it because that's where the market is going, that's where Tahoe is going."
Ideally, says Swanson, there will be a link from the Environmental Magnet School to the Green Academy to Lake Tahoe Community College and ultimately to the workplace.
"The agencies are interested in having partners," says Swanson. "They want to work with us and prepare kids for internships so they stay in environmental sciences."
Higher education is also on board. South Shore's Lake Tahoe Community College (LTCC) offered sustainability classes for the first time this past spring. Rosie Hackett, director of the Wilderness Education Program who is also proposing a Green Sustainable Education Program, says the college is testing the waters before pursuing the option of offering a certificate or associate degree in sustainability.
The first class, Introduction to Green Building and Living, was completed by 30 students. "A lot of people confuse green and sustainability with environmental studies, which is an old dichotomy that means 'protect the environment,' and 'big business is bad,'" says Hackett. "Sustainability is three-fold: the environment, first and foremost, but also social equity and economic prosperity. It's not sustainability if you're not looking at all three pieces."
Additional classes, including residential and small business energy auditing and introduction to solar energy, could provide the community with well-trained green collar workers.
"Tahoe is the perfect place for this kind of program," says Hackett. "It's not political; it's the survival of our species." On the North Shore, the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences (TCES) at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village and Alder Creek Middle School in Truckee are both LEED-certified. TCES received a platinum rating, the highest designation offered.
Sierra College's Institute of Sustainability at the Tahoe- Truckee campus, scheduled to open in early 2009, aims to be the first institute at a community college oriented toward a sustainable future in all aspects, including curriculum and campus operations, with stringent criteria for energy efficiency, waste processing and food service.
"All colleges have the obligation to create positive change in their community, and we have an opportunity to coalesce community around principles of sustainability," says Frank DeCourten, earth science professor at Sierra College's Grass Valley campus and former dean of the Tahoe-Truckee campus.
DeCourten believes the Tahoe-Truckee campus is the ideal location to pilot the Institute, as residents are already working toward sustainability. "We are desperately in need of a far-reaching vision," he says, "and the Institute can help direct the future of sustainability in the region."
SAVING OUR STORY
While regional redevelopment plans and their accompanying controversies make headlines, many Tahoe residents are quietly toiling to preserve the area's rich past amid shifting demographics and changing economics.
"Those of us who are left feel the need to pull together," says Peggy Bourland-Madison, volunteer at South Shore's Lake Tahoe Historical Society. The group celebrated its 40th anniversary by hosting descendants from some of The Lake's pioneering families: Bliss, Barton, Celio and Richardson representatives, among others, attended.
Incline Village resident Chuck Greene, son of actor Lorne Greene, whose television series Bonanza drew attention to Tahoe, wanted to preserve his North Shore community's past while long-timers were still able to tell their stories. So he formed the Incline Village and Crystal Bay Historical Society. Widespread enthusiasm from the community, along with financial support from the Harold and Ann Tiller Fund, helped get the group off the ground over the past year and a half.
"There is a real desire to access the history and to be connected to it," Greene says. Along with collecting and showcasing regional documents and memorabilia, Greene plans to digitally archive 75 individuals' oral histories. Century 21 McGregor Realty in Incline Village is hosting the society's first exhibit.
The beloved winter sports collection at Boreal's Western SkiSport Museum has outgrown its digs and, with the help of the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society, North Lake Tahoe Resort Association and other preservation groups and community members, hopes to relocate into a new Olympic Valley building along with Squaw Valley's Olympic Museum. "We are all working together to make our collections more visible," says North Lake Tahoe Historical Society museum coordinator Natalie Davenport.
Tahoe's past isn't just relegated to area museums, however. Consider Truckee's Brickelltown, a restoration project that breathed new life into an old section of Donner Pass Road over the last few years. It now features smart shops helmed by local artists and entrepreneurs—among them, artists' collective Riverside Studios and fair-trade retailer Fair & Green—lending a distinctive, fresh vibe to Old Truckee.
Tahoe City's historic Fish Hatchery, base of operations for the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, also got a recent facelift: A $2.1 million restoration and remodel was completed this spring.
The latest jewel in Tahoe's historic preservation efforts is the 5,800 square foot, two-story Tahoe Maritime Museum in Homewood, a far cry from the museum's first home at Sugar Pine Point. Built with the love of a committed, decades-old volunteer base (and $4 million), it has received hundreds of visitors since its grand opening in May.
EMBRACING CULTURE
Tahoe's visual and performing art scene throws open its doors and embraces summer with open studio tours, art shows, crafts fairs, the Lake Tahoe Music Festival and Valhalla and Sand Harbor performances. Collaboration has been key in this cultural renaissance: cooperation between artists, among disciplines and across The Lake, a search for excellence driven by a deep connection to authenticity and community.
In South Lake Tahoe, artists show work at Lake Tahoe Writing Club events. In Truckee, Brickelltown's artisans welcome visitors and encourage them to peek in on neighboring purveyors, creating a feel-good flow. Establishments like Dragonfly display local art; Truckee Book & Bean hosts open-mic nights. No fewer than four local literary journals have emerged in the past few years, and literary conferences are in the works in Incline Village and South Lake Tahoe for 2009—not to mention Squaw Valley's Community of Writers workshops, which have inspired writing greats like Amy Tan over the past 39 years.
Area artists and writers are even considering the possibility of culture as an economic hub. And statistics show that consumers agree: According to Strategic Marketing Group's 2007 California Traveler survey, 88 percent surveyed tend to seek out locally owned shops and restaurants over national brands, and 52 percent said they were likely to pay more for locally produced and grown products.
If return to authenticity and community can be called trends, then the poster girl is South Lake Tahoe's Becky Bell, a longtime local who worked in tourism marketing for 18 years before launching her own website last summer, Tahoe Arts and Mountain Culture (TAMC), www.tahoeculture.com.
Bell says the idea incubated for three years while she sought to answer the question: What is Tahoe's essence? "We're drawn here for the beauty, but we stay for the communities around The Lake, and what we do and who we are," she says. "Our essence is that we are not just a beautiful place, but that we have a unique mountain culture."
Her website offers evidence of what makes Tahoe special: loads of art and cultural offerings, green businesses, locally made goods, and health and outdoor sections. "There are so many subcultures around The Lake; they all have their own personalities," says Bell. "I feel like I'm cross-pollinating… trying to share all the good."
In addition to celebrating what is culturally unique about Tahoe, another of Bell's goals is to reach visitors looking for a local experience, one that reaches beyond traditional draws like nightlife and gaming, recreation and boating. "Every visitor wants to be a local," says Bell. "If we really want our mountain culture to thrive and our local, small business to stay, we do need to promote local events and businesses."
One convergence of culture and commerce was inspired when Meyers resident Melissa Lanitis Gregory (of South Shore art group Underground Artists) heard the moving story of John Mauriello, who had lost a favorite pizza recipe in the Angora fire that took his home. Seeking to capture what was lost in the fire, as well as what was found, Underground Artists and TAMC will present a juried art show, Tahoe: Lost & Found, on September 19 (Tahoe Quarterly is a sponsor). Throughout the summer, businesses around The Lake and Truckee created Lost & Found fundraising events—to pay for, among other things, the replacement of the community's landmark Christmas tree and library books that were lost in the fire.
Gregory and Underground Artists, which also includes illustrator Kristen Schwartz and potter Barbara Wesson, were partly inspired by longtime Truckee artist Carole Sesko, another advocate of creative community collaboration. In 2006, Sesko formed a critique group with two other area artists— Sara Zimmerman and Eve Werner—which meets regularly and has grown to include seven regular participants, including a poet, as well as the occasional South Shore visiting artist like Gregory or Shelley Hocknell Zentner.
"We have similar visions for our communities," says Sesko of her South Shore counterparts. "We stay in touch, encourage each other and have come to understand that we are mirroring each other.
"There are artists in both areas who would like to see an even more vibrant art community, one which more strongly contributes to the overall vitality of our regional economy," she adds. "I think the similar way we are pursuing this is to up the level of art that we create: to not just create a lot of same-looking products, but to explore conceptual art, public art and art that belongs to the identity of our areas. This is a constantly evolving process, and this is why communication and encouragement shared between North and South shore artists is helping with our mutual development.
"Wouldn't it be cool," asks Sesko, "if we were all one community?"
Originally published in TQ Best of Tahoe 2008