David McCloskey passed away on July 3, 2026.
If you want to understand what we have lost, find his map of Cascadia and sit with it for a while. Not a political map, with its straight lines and its seven states and provinces, but David’s map: a great green land along its Pacific slope, dry and open across its interior, the two coasts of Cascadia held together by water that falls on the mountains and works its way to the sea. Watch how the water gathers the land. This way of seeing is far older than any of us. The peoples of this place have lived it since time immemorial, organizing life around watersheds and seasons long before anyone reached for a word like bioregion. What David did was help a forgetful settler culture remember it, and give it a name and a face we could recognize. He spent fifty years teaching this region to see itself, and most of us are still catching up to what he was pointing at.
A land of falling waters
David gave Cascadia its name as a bioregion in 1981, and he was always generous about explaining what the name carried. It is named not after the mountains, he would tell you, but after the waters, and after what the waters do, which is cascade. It was a name, in his words, that “says what it does and does what it says.” Cascadia is first a verb, he liked to say, before it condenses into a noun. He called it a land of falling waters, a great green land on the northeast Pacific rim, and the description has never stopped feeling true.
A bioregion, as David understood it, is a kind of country, made of many nations and ecosystems, drawn together as water travels from where it falls along the continental crest down to the Pacific. He drew that country whole, from the coast to the crest, from Northern California and the Great Basin north into Southeast Alaska. It is green along its western, Pacific edge and dry across its interior, the two coasts of Cascadia, and what binds those very different worlds into one is the water and the way it moves.
He also knew the name had been waiting a long time to mean this. The Cascade Mountains were themselves named for the great cascades of the Columbia, the thundering rapids at places like Celilo Falls. More than a century ago, geologists had already dreamed up a “Cascadia,” a lost landmass off the coast, and then let the idea fade. When the theory of plate tectonics arrived, and scientists began to trace the Cascadia Subduction Zone just off our shore, the old word returned with new force. David gathered all of it, the poetry and the geology together, and handed it back to us as something we could finally live inside.
Cascadia Day
“People realized, forcefully, that the earth is alive.” David McCloskey, on the eruption of May 18, 1980
On the morning of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. David returned to that day again and again, because it made his central lesson impossible to ignore. The ground beneath us is not a backdrop. It is a living, moving thing, still under construction. He tied the eruption to the revolution in plate tectonics and to the slow machinery of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the fault just offshore that is still building this coast one earthquake at a time.
David marked the date early, launching his Cascadia Institute website on the thirtieth anniversary of the eruption. In 2012 the wider movement made it an annual celebration, and we have kept May 18 as Cascadia Day every year since. It is not a celebration of destruction. It is a yearly practice of attention, a reminder that we live in a place that is still becoming itself, and an invitation to fall back into relationship with the land that carries us.
The map
David was, before anything else, a mapmaker, and he taught the rest of us what has become a first principle of this movement: maps are not neutral. A map can cut a living place into jurisdictions, or it can help a community see itself and fall back in love with where it lives. He drew his first map of Cascadia as a bioregion in 1988 and kept refining it for the rest of his life. The 2015 edition is the one most of us know, an award-winning map that carried this region onto the cover of the Esri Map Book, the annual gathering of the world’s finest cartography. Great maps, he said, see the face of the place in its fullness, and his did.
Look closely and his whole philosophy is there in the linework. He drew the Skykomish and the Wenatchee, one falling west and one falling east off the same crest, and called them sisters, silver threads rising from the same source. He drew the divide at Stevens Pass, where you cross from one world to another, the wet coast giving way to the dry interior, and he showed how a boundary can join what it separates rather than simply cut it. For David, bioregional boundaries were never arbitrary. They were natural and holistic, found where many layers overlap at once: the face of the land, the tectonic forces below, the weather above, the flow of the waters, the plants and animals, the native peoples, and the cultures that grew up inside that particular pattern.
He was sharpest about this when he looked at the lines we actually draw. He liked to point at the border with Canada, a cleared swath of forest kept visible from the air and marked with monuments, a boundary that answers to nothing in the land it crosses. A map like that, he understood, teaches us to misread where we are. A true bioregional map does the opposite. It does not just inform, he said, it transforms. His maps hang today in classrooms and kitchens and community halls all across the region, and each one keeps doing that quiet work for him.
A story of many voices
“Bioregionalism is about ever deeper levels of relationality.” David McCloskey
David did not arrive alone, and he was the first to say so. Bioregionalism is, in Doug Aberley’s phrase, a story of many voices. Its modern chapter runs through Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft, who founded the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco in 1973, and through the ecologist Raymond Dasmann, who helped give us the words bioregion and reinhabitation. Beneath all of it lies the far older knowledge of Indigenous peoples who have organized life around these watersheds for thousands of years. David saw his own work as recovering something ancient rather than inventing something new, and he understood bioregionalism, above all, as a practice of relationship, of ever deeper levels of relationality between people and the place that holds them.
He was woven into that larger fabric. When Peter Berg came north to Bellingham in 1985 to speak about mapping, David was there, and the two became friends. He read and taught the poets and thinkers of the movement, Gary Snyder among them, and carried their sense of the earth as a household, an oikos, into his own classrooms. What David added to the chorus was a particular gift for celebration and for naming, a way of turning ecology into culture so that ordinary people could feel it and not merely study it.
Some of that naming was already in the air, waiting for a mapmaker to answer it. The poet Robert Sund had sung the Ish River country, the gathering of Puget Sound rivers whose names end in -ish, Snohomish and Skykomish and Duwamish and the rest. David gave that country its map. The mapmaker and the poet were working the same ground, and the movement was always richer for having both.
The long open poem
“the first ripple of a poem / swims almost invisible by the river bank.” Robert Sund
David never let Cascadia stay on paper. Through the mid 1980s and into the 1990s he took part in a remarkable run of bioregional congresses around the Salish Sea, working alongside poets and organizers who were already deep in this soil. He helped bring the Ish River poets into that current, Robert Sund and Tim McNulty and Tom Jay among them, and at those gatherings the life of the language and the life of the land were braided together. Out of those years came some of the earliest Cascadia flags, including one that bore the region as an orca’s fin rising from a moving sea.
There was a strategy underneath the celebration. David knew that people do not fall in love with an argument. They fall in love with an image, a story, a map, a song. Our culture, he pointed out, gives us almost no language for loving a place, so he chose to work through the evocative rather than the analytical, through maps and flags and symbols and poems. “I’m not a poet the way Paul Nelson is a poet,” he once said, “but Cascadia is my long, extended open poem, that a whole bunch of people are writing.” He set down the first lines and then trusted the rest of us to keep composing.
That trust was tested as the name caught fire. Through the 1990s, Cascadia was pulled in very different directions at once. On one side it became “Main Street Cascadia,” a corridor for commerce between Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland, championed by civic leaders who saw a cross-border economy. On another it was carried by the forest defenders fighting for the last of the old growth. Through all of it, David held steadily to the deeper meaning, insisting that Cascadia was first a living place and a set of values, a home to be received rather than a brand to be used or a resource to be spent.
The scholar
“The Father of Cascadia.” a name given him by the poet Paul Nelson
He came to all of it as a scholar, and by a winding road. He did his graduate work in New York City and finished his doctorate through the University of Oregon, writing a dissertation of some fourteen hundred pages. He worked in mills and canneries and in construction between teaching jobs. Then, as he told it, an unsettling question turned him around: why did he know more about a twelfth-century European village than about his own home ground? He came back to the Northwest, took a post at Seattle University, and set out to study the place he actually lived in.
He taught there for thirty-three years, in sociology and in the ecological studies program he helped build, and he returned to that same campus for the Cascadia Poetry Festival in 2015. He first met the word Cascadia in an unlikely place, a 1972 geology textbook by the University of Washington’s Bates McKee, with Mount St. Helens on the cover. The word barely functioned in that book, David admitted, but it lodged in him, and he gave the next four decades to making it mean something.
The reach of that work is hard to take in. In a single generation, Cascadia went from a handful of friends talking on hikes to a great many people who now feel the word in their bones, most of whom never met the man who drew it. Paul Nelson called him the Father of Cascadia, and the name has stuck, though David himself would have pointed straight back to the land, and to everyone who helped him see it.
The place is a gift
“The place is a gift. The question is how do we receive that gift.” David McCloskey
Underneath the maps and the congresses lay one simple and demanding idea. The place is a gift, David said, and the only real question is how we receive it. If we learn to tell the story of the place, he believed, then we may finally find our own place in that story. Everything else he did, the mapping and the teaching, the flags and festivals and congresses, was in service of that single turn of attention, from taking to receiving, from standing over the land to belonging within it.
So he asked a great deal of us, and he asked it gently. Learn your watersheds by name. Treat this region as a home rather than a resource. Think not in election cycles but in centuries, and imagine what it might mean to live here well a thousand years from now. He gave his life to calling forth a culture equal to that ambition, and he left us far closer to it than he found us.
We will keep the map on the wall. We will keep telling the story. Thank you, David.
Read and listen more
- In Honor of David McCloskey, “The Father of Cascadia”: the Cascadia Poetics LAB’s remembrance, with the full transcript of a 2013 conversation between David and Paul Nelson.
- David McCloskey Opening the Cascadia Poetry Festival at Seattle University in 2015 on YouTube.
- The Father of Cascadia (interview audio): hear David think out loud, in a recording made by Paul E. Nelson.
- The Cascadian Prophets podcast, also on Spotify: current and archival interviews from the Cascadia Poetics LAB.
- David’s own Cascadia Institute: his maps, essays, and the fuller story of the land.
Our deep thanks to Paul Nelson and everyone at the Cascadia Poetics LAB. Their interviews, recordings, and podcasts have kept David’s voice present for all of us. Go read, and go listen.