A land named for its falling waters
Cascadia takes its name from the cascading rivers of the Cascade Range — a bioregion drawn not by national borders but by where the water flows.
The bioregional movement defines Cascadia through the watersheds of the Columbia, Fraser, Snake, and Klamath rivers and the volcanic spine of the Cascade Range, as Wikipedia summarises. The name was first applied to the geology by Bates McKee in 1972, then adopted by sociologist David McCloskey of Seattle University, who mapped it as the Land of Falling Waters.
The whole region sits within One Earth's Pacific Northwest Coastal Forests bioregion (NA15), and is shaped by the Cascadia subduction zone, which builds the volcanoes and threatens great earthquakes.
Salmon, cedar, and the sea
Cascadia is the homeland of hundreds of First Nations and Native American peoples. Along the coast live the Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Coast Salish, Makah, and Chinookan peoples, and to the south the Yurok, Karuk, and Hupa — a roster the Cascadia Department of Bioregion catalogues.
For the Coast Salish, salmon and red cedar are sacred relatives, not commodities. A trade tongue, Chinook Jargon, once linked as many as 300,000 people, and wealth and status were redistributed through the potlatch ceremony.
Field note · a border drawn through a homeland
The greatest temperate rainforest on Earth
A mild, soaking climate grows the largest Pacific temperate rainforest in the world: towering Douglas fir, western red cedar, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and, in the south, the planet's tallest trees, the coast redwood. These old-growth forests store more carbon per hectare than almost any ecosystem alive.
What ties the rainforest to the sea is the salmon. Watch the cycle that defines the bioregion:
The salmon–forest cycle
Field note · why the trees need the fish
Orcas, wolves, and a white bear
Cascadia shelters an estimated 350 bird and mammal species. Five species of Pacific salmon — sockeye, pink, chum, coho, and Chinook — are the keystone of its rivers. Orcas, including the endangered Southern Residents, hunt the Salish Sea. And in the forests roam gray wolves, Roosevelt elk, northern spotted owls, banana slugs, and the rare spirit bear of the central British Columbia coast.
The Doug flag and the bioregion idea
Cascadia is also a living cultural movement. The grassroots Cascadia movement flies the Doug flag — a lone Douglas fir on bands of blue sky, white snow, and green forest — and gathers around Cascadia Day, the cross-border Cascadia Cup, and the idea of bioregionalism: organising life around natural regions rather than political lines.
Most Cascadians live in the Vancouver–Seattle–Portland corridor — about 80% of the population on 17% of the land. The work is coordinated by the Cascadia Department of Bioregion and gatherings like the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress.
One organic community
The bioregional vision is that a place can know and govern itself as a single living community — salmon runs restored to rivers freed of obsolete dams, ancient forests protected, Indigenous nations returned to stewardship, and cities modelling regenerative life.
A land defined by connectivity: of sea and forest, of human and animal, of watershed and myth. — Cascadia Department of Bioregion
Over a twenty-year horizon, this node imagines Cascadia living as one organic community of sea, forest, and falling waters — guided by bioregionalism and the Cascadia movement.
The many nodes within the node
A bioregion this size is held by a web of nations, projects, and people — each a doorway to go deeper.