Yesterday Sightline Institute published “Twenty-one Million Cascadians: An Overview,” the first article in a new series called Who is Cascadia, and we’ve been reading it with a lot of excitement. Jay Lee, a Sightline researcher, did the counting, and his answer is 21,561,819 people. If Cascadia were a country, he points out, it would be around the 60th largest in the world, just ahead of Chile.
No statistical agency counts people by watershed (census numbers for the Skagit River watershed are hard to come by, though Skagit County is easy to look up), so Sightline built the total from counties, boroughs, census divisions and regional districts that roughly follow Cascadia’s edges. That means every county in Washington, most of Oregon and Idaho, parts of Alaska, California, Montana and Wyoming, most of British Columbia, and a few communities in the Yukon. Jay is upfront about the weak spots, including how old the latest censuses are and how little a survey can say about a real person’s life.
A few of the numbers stuck with us. About three out of four Cascadians live in the United States and one in four in Canada. Washington, British Columbia, Oregon and Idaho hold 19.9 million of the 21.6 million. The population has grown 35 percent since 2000, outpacing the United States and roughly keeping up with Canada, and a quarter of us live in just two places, Metro Vancouver and King County. The region also holds more than 1,500 First Nations reserves and Indian reservations.
For our Landscape Groups, the table in the second half of the article is the fun part. Whatcom County is counted at about 236,000 people, Skagit County at 133,000, Island County (where Whidbey sits) at 86,000, and the Capital Regional District around Victoria at 464,000. Twenty-one million is a hard number to picture, and our groups work at the scale of a single river, with a map on the table and whoever shows up.
Jay says later installments will get into more about who Cascadians are and what we believe. We’ll be reading every one. Thanks to Jay and the Sightline team for getting it started.
Featured image: Cascades panorama from the upper meadow below Park Butte, U.S. Forest Service, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
