Some of the history on the Lake Tahoe basin. Back in the 19th Century, the entire area was clear-cut, to provide timbers used for shoring up the enormous mining enterprises in Virginia City, to the east and on the other side of the Washoe Valley. These original trees were cut and sent to sawmills in Carson City, from where the timbers were hauled, first by wagons drawn by teams of horses or mules, then later by the Virginia & Truckee railroad. The trees were sent down to Carson City on flumes constructed with slabs from the sawmills, and with water pumped up from the Tahoe Basin. The logs were sent down the flumes with the flow of water behind them, and got up a great deal of speed in the nearly 3,000 feet of drop in the seven miles or so to the base of Eagle valley.
By 1880, about the time the Comstock Lode was about played out, not an original tree was standing in the basin. There was considerable second growth, but mostly, small in size, and not nearly as valuable for mining timbers. About this time, a great wave of remorse came over the "reformers" about the original exploitation of the Tahoe basin, and further development was slowed down. While some tree harvest continued, and some small amount of growth was still going on, by the time the "environmentalist" movement got under way, almost all activity concerning forest management had come to a dead halt. Trees died, and the tree beetles chewed away on them until they fell, making a huge hodgepodge of decaying matter on the forest floor. It was the washing into the lake of this decaying organic matter that was causing the turbidity of the water. Outdoor privies and poorly maintained septic disposal systerms were NOT the problem they were made out to be.
With controlled burns (removing the dead understory in the forest), the amount of decaying organic matter washing into the lake (with the spring melt of the snow cover) was greatly reduced, with the resultant effect of the water becoming more clear.
Given time, and with intelligent application of known techniques of forest management, wilderness areas can continue to produce and still be a valuable preserve.
IMO that's the problem! You, and far too many others, don't understand it!!!
The multi-millions being spent by the counties in the "Bi-State Compact" (read Federal GovernMental EnvironMental Colony governed by the Tahoe Regional Planning Association of crazed activists) for rock-lined "catch basins," etc., ad nauseum cannot be proved to be doing a thing except adding membership the the local GovernMental Employees Unions!!!
The infernal eternal demonization of development and capitalistic profits for individuals and corporations as a "knee-jerk" assumption of evil has now gone far beyond the point of "diminishing returns" for all the "group thinkers" into the land of abject absurdity!!!
The stupid sanctification of "Non-Profit" Non-GovernMental Organizations as well as GovernMental EnvironMental CONservancies like the California Tahoe Conservancy (now totally enveloped by Schwartzenegger's Sierra-Nevada CONservancy with additiona state payroll) is acheiving compound abject absurdity!!!
None of the procloptions of these sactified as the only "honest and trustworthy" GovernMental and Non-GovernMental EnvironMental organizations holds water under rational and intense scruitiny!!! Get over it! Get used to it!! Learn it on your own if you're interested in truth over pure emotionalism being hyped and parroted by the lazy MSM!!!
Because of fire suppression, that forest is now overstocked and decadent, now releasing far more nitrate into the lake than do anthropogenic sources. Unless that forest is thinned, the cycle will repeat. In many places it's too late: beetle kill and water competition has produced rotting vegetation that releases into watersheds as detritus loaded with nitrates.