The emerald gleam of the Northwest has always enchanted me, and many hours were spent during my childhood inventing fantastical worlds amongst the majestic evergreens that populated my back yard. As I was born just a little north of Seattle I was introduced to some of the cultural mainstays of Washington early on; the Pacific Science Center, Seattle Art museum, Pike Place Market, and the Woodland Park Zoo convinced me that this relatively young metropolis was the pinnacle of intellectual exploration. My maternal grandparents lived on a farm in rural Sedro-Woolley while my paternal grandparents had a house in Ocean shores, so I received the best of both worlds, spending half of my summers riding horses up to the creek and catching tadpoles, and the the other half making sand castles and collecting sea shells.

My appreciation for where I grew up was doubled after my first long distance trip out of the Northwest, during which I visited family in Arizona. The heat was unbearable! And there wasn’t a single healthy tree to provide protection from the vicious sun.(When’s the last time you read under the peaceful shade of a cactus?) The super market was limited in it’s choice of produce, and infact, the only local fruit I tasted while there was prickly pear(warning:gloves don’t work as well as tongs for picking these). Everything was brown, and the dust that sprang up into mini twisters never failed to fill my nose with sand. And worse yet, brace yourselves my fellow Washingtonians, there wasn’t a single coffee shop to be found.
Okay, okay, I know what you’re going to say, “You’re just biased Tasia, you can’t give Arizona a fair shake after only one visit!” And to that I say: “YEP! Darn tootin’ I’m biased!” Biased in favor of vegetation, of majestic snowy mountains, and lush magical green forests which rush up to meet the mighty Pacific Ocean. Really, it’s not just Washington that I love, it’s the entire Northwest region.

Every year my family takes a trip down the west coast, we drive straight through Oregon and into Northern California’s Redwood Forrest, and then we work our way up. Every other year we take a ferry to Victoria Canada. Every city, every state, is unique, they each have something special to add to the trip, but they also share a lot too. It’s not just their temperate rainforests, or their misty water ways and rocky beaches, it’s a culture, an attitude. Something you can’t quite put your finger on, the way you may recognize the relation between siblings but not quite be able to place how they look alike.

I am not in fact, alone in my romantic sentiments towards the Pacific Northwest, and never have been. The region in which I have been babbling on about like a schoolgirl with a bad crush, is known as Cascadia. Cascadia is in fact a bioregion, a term popularized in the 1970s by the writer Peter Berg, and ecologist Raymond Dasmann(forrestsforever.org). What qualifies as a bioregion is determined by what ecosystems, waterways, soil, flora, and fauna are shared throughout an area. For instance, the largest temperate rainforest in the world spreads itself over an area ranging all the way from the lower portion of Alaska to Northern California, just one of the reasons the area has been defined as a bioregion. This concept of defining a portion of land by its natural characteristics rather than through governmental partitioning has since inspired the bioregionalist movement. Those associated with the movement not only prize the definition of a region by it’s organic characteristics, but agree with my aforementioned musings, that there is something culturally unifying about the Northwest overall. The significance of these truths have lead those associated with the movement to “the belief that political boundaries should match ecological and cultural boundaries(cascadianow).” If you live in the Pacific Northwest you may have seen their insignia: a blue, white, and green striped flag with a douglas fir at it’s center. It’s commonly found on car bumpers paired with their rallying cry, “Free Cascadia!”

For me, these realizations inspire many questions, for instance, if a bioregion shares not only it’s watersheds and ecosystems(etc.) but a particular culture, is that culture inspired by the land itself? If so, do similar bioregions share similar cultures? And more specific to the Northwest, how many people living in the cascadian boundaries actually identify with the overarching themes by which we are defined? Do other bioregions have residents as passionate about freeing the land from the tyranny of arbitrary lines drawn on a map, or are we just a bunch of liberal tree hugging hipsters hopped up on too much Starbucks? Alas, it may be so, but there is a definite charm to this new title I have for a very significant portion of my identity, cascadian, and I certainly plan to delve further into this matter in the near future. But for now, you must excuse me, for I have a date with a tree and and a hot cup of espresso.