Living Maps: How Bioregional Mapping Shaped Cascadia
Written by Brandon Letsinger, published in Meander Magazine, Vol. 1, 2025.
Cascadia, a movement over 40 years in the making.
Note to the reader: The following is an interpretive blog, largely attributed to Brandon Letsinger’s article in Meander Volume 1. This blog is a condensed writing, and is not a complete version of the article.
At the 2015 inaugural Cascadia Poetry Festival at Seattle University, geography professor David McCloskey unveiled an updated map of the Cascadia bioregion, after more than three decades of research.
Rooted in relationship, movement, and form.
David McCloskey’s original map of the Cascadia bioregion appeared on the cover of the Esri Map Book. It was the first to portray Cascadia’s full ecological integrity, extending its boundaries beyond the shoreline to the offshore subduction zone and fully integrating the inner Cascadia Sea. Built from more than thirty layered datasets, it renders rivers, forests, icefields, vegetation, seafloor formations, and biocultural patterns in rich detail. Spanning over 4,000 kilometers along the Pacific coast, from the Eel River and Modoc Plateau in northern California through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia to the glacial headwaters of the Copper River, the map restored depth and coherence to a region long fragmented by political borders and conventional cartography.
McCloskey first coined the term “Cascadia” in 1981 to name the region as a socio-ecological whole. From his first hand-drawn black-and-white maps, David McCloskey’s work stands within a lineage that began with the first Cascadia Bioregional Congress in 1986, a formative gathering that catalyzed the movement that we find ourselves immersed in today. Together, these early congresses and evolving cartographic efforts helped establish Cascadia not merely as a geographic concept, but as a shared framework for understanding place, ecology, and culture at a bioregional scale.
From its inception, Cascadia’s bioregional movement has been deeply shaped by Indigenous knowledge and leadership. Early congresses in the 1980s were organized in close relationship with Coast Salish elders, including Lee Maracle and Vi Hilbert, whose roles as storytellers and Lushootseed language keepers grounded the gatherings in place-based culture and living history. The third Cascadia Bioregional Congress, held on Squamish territory in British Columbia, further reflected how the movement’s vision emerged through respectful relationships with First Nations rather than abstract theory.
Indigenous nations’ Bioregional mapping and the Supreme Court
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Indigenous nations such as the Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, Tsleil-Waututh, Tsilhqot’in, and Nisga’a led groundbreaking bioregional mapping efforts as expressions of sovereignty, cultural continuity, and resistance. In 1984, Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs advanced a legal claim to more than 58,000 square kilometers of ancestral territory, supported by maps layered with songs, oral histories, salmon runs, berry patches, and ancestral place names; work that later contributed to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in favor of Indigenous land title in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia.
The Tsleil-Waututh created a 40-sheet bioregional atlas for treaty negotiations and the Nisga’a digitalized traditional ecological knowledge for land and fisheries management using GIS. These maps were not merely technical tools, but living expressions of memory, survival, and belonging, inspiring bioregionalists across Cascadia to continue mapping place as an act of care and continuity.
“Whereas mainstream mapping depends on expert cartographers, bioregional mapping is done by ordinary citizens who rediscover local places through their map-making explorations.”
From these community maps, we can create road maps to ideas that might not have existed before, with tangible steps for how to get there. Bioregional mapping tends to be concerned with everything that current mapping is not, everything left off of Google Maps, or in between the road maps of interstates, gas stations and fast food restaurants.
Peter Berg, another seminal voice of the early bioregional movement describes this most simply as – Who am I? Where am I? And what am I going to do about it?
“It is up to all of us, each in our own way, to create and promote these changes, and lead the way forward. This article – like the maps before it – is not an answer, but an invitation.” Brandon Letsinger
Tom Greenwood, Editor at Meander Magazine
“From the birth of Cascadia’s movement to Indigenous-led mapping as acts of sovereignty, this story traces how maps rooted in ecology, culture, and memory continue to shape the Pacific Northwest and beyond.”
Volume 1: Returning to Place: Explore what it means to re-root ourselves in land, community, and the more-than-human world through essays, poems, guides, and photography. Meander is a magazine for bioregional culture, slow living, and regenerative futures.
“Brandon’s work brings years of expertise in bioregionalism and regenerative systems, offering grounded insight into how communities can align cultural, ecological, and economic life with natural boundaries.” T.G.
Volume 1: Returning to Place includes contributions by author Rūta Žemčugovaitė, environmental advocate Amelia Crews, architect and educator Matthew Woodruff, communicator and educator Isabel Carlisle, storyteller Hajar Tazi, philosopher and poet Bayo Akomolafe, environmentalist Li An Phoa, weavers Janneke Bruil and Eduardo Cáceres Salgado, writer and weaver Tijn Tjoelker, bioregional advocate Brandon Letsinger, essayist Will Brown, regenerative design pioneer Bill Reed, writer and guide Julia Plevin Oliansky, community builder Anna Kovasna, The Place Bureau founder Rosanna Vitiello, climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek, regenerative community designer Nicole Reese, founding editor Tom Greenwood, and book reviews by Lisa Richardson and Anne Cassidy.
Get your copy of this beautiful first edition at Meandermagazine.earth