Competing Cascadias: Imagining a Region over Four Decades

In the mid-twentieth century, the Pacific Northwest of the had a distinct identity as a place of natural abundance and economic opportunity. Columbia River dams were “turning darkness to dawn” while Northwest forests supplied the 2x4s that built suburbia. In the words of journalist Richard Neuberger, the region was “Our Promised Land.” Since the 1970s, however, the identity of a bi-national Northwest reaching from northern California through British Columbia has been up for grabs, the subject of competing metaphors and definitions that suggest different regional understandings and policy responses. This paper traces and compares three regional imaginaries in order to explore the competing goals of transnational regionalism.

Ecotopia: Environmentalism as Social Utopia: “Ecotopia” comes from the 1975 novel in which Ernest Callenbach imagined an environmentally conscious breakaway nation in the Northwest. Drawing practical clout from grassroots work on sustainable agricultural and communal living, the central interest of the ecotopian vision was to shape alternative social and economic institutions. The actual place—the north Pacific coast—was simply a convenient and plausible locale for utopian speculation.

Cascadia: The : The contrasting idea of Cascadia, developing from the 1980s, places ecosystems front and center. From maps of Pacific slope drainage systems to the concept of “Salmon Nation,” natural systems that take precedence—with the message that people need to live for the benefit of fish just as much as fish live for the benefit of people.

Cascadian Corridor: The as Megaregion: A third regional vision centers attention on the three metropolitan regions of,, and, arguing that they can function as a distributed city-state. This approach draws on a long history of economic boosterism with its attention to Pacific markets as well as more recent analysis of the economic independence of global city-regions.