CBC Radio’s Ideas devoted its October 13 program to Cascadia. In “A Map of Cascadia,” host Nahlah Ayed and a producer in Vancouver ask what binds people to a place, and they begin, fittingly, with a map. The episode is the first of three on separatist and independence movements. Its Cascadia, for the most part, is a way of reading the land rather than a political proposal.
The program counts Regenerate Cascadia among the groups doing environmental restoration work on both sides of the border. We are glad to be part of the conversation, and we want to share what stood out to us.
The same land, read the other way
The producer shows two maps of the region. On the first, the 49th parallel runs east to west and separates two countries. On the second, a relief map, the lines run north to south, following the Coast Mountains, the Cascade Range, and the green corridor between mountains and sea where Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland sit. Nothing about the land changes between the two maps. What changes is what the reader sees first.
That shift is the premise of bioregional mapping, which our Landscape Groups practice with residents. A group begins with soils, water, topography, and the plant and animal communities of a place. Then it adds what people know: the places that are precious and need protecting, the places that are degraded and need repair, and the places where people are thriving. In Whatcom County, for example, residents have been mapping their local water catchment in just this way.
What a place teaches
The episode draws on research suggesting that landscape and culture shape one another. Fritz Götz of the University of British Columbia studies how geography and personality interact. In large datasets from the United States, he reports, people in mountainous areas tend to score higher on openness to experience and lower on extroversion and agreeableness. He is careful to say that environment interacts with culture and does not determine it. The producer is equally candid that the frontier thesis behind earlier versions of this idea overlooked the Indigenous peoples who already lived on the land.
For organizers, the useful point is a modest one. Places leave marks on the habits of the people who live in them, and that is one reason our landscape work begins with listening.
Words that travel by water
The linguist Julia Swan of San José State University describes a sound shift in which “bag” drifts toward “beg” among some speakers in Vancouver and Seattle. It is more common in families that have lived in the region for generations, and it shows up among speakers who resist rapid change in their neighborhoods. The program also notes that the word “skookum,” meaning solid or very good, comes from an Indigenous language and traveled with Chinook Wawa, a trade language that grew along the Columbia River. Language, like a watershed, carries memory across the lines on a map.
One program, both sides of the border
The producer concludes that belonging works at more than one scale. A person can be Canadian and Cascadian at once. Regenerate Cascadia operates as one program across the border, and we see no conflict between the two kinds of belonging.
If the episode makes you want to know your own landscape better, you can read about bioregional mapping, find a Landscape Group, or see the other ways to take part. Thank you to the Ideas team for the attention.
Featured image: a Sasquatch puppet beside the Doug flag, the Cascadia flag designed by Alexander Baretich. Map: Cascadia: A Great Green Land, second edition (2023), by David McCloskey, Cascadia Institute.