Cascadia is a bioregion, a regional identity, and a growing social movement. Stretching more than 2,500 kilometers along the Pacific Rim, from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and east to the continental divide near the Yellowstone Caldera, it is one of the most ecologically and culturally significant regions in the world. Its boundaries are not drawn from political negotiation. They follow the mountains, rivers, and living systems that have organized life in this part of the world since long before any modern border existed.
The Land Itself
Geology, Watersheds, and the Shape of a Bioregion
Look at a topographic map of the Pacific Northwest and the logic of Cascadia becomes immediately apparent. The Cascade Range runs approximately 1,100 kilometers from southern British Columbia through Washington and Oregon into Northern California, forming the bioregion's central spine. It is a geologically active system: the ongoing subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the North American Plate has produced thousands of volcanoes, active geothermal systems, and a landscape that continues to change on measurable timescales. To the east, the Columbia Plateau, the high desert, and the continental divide near the Yellowstone Caldera mark the interior edge. To the west, the Pacific Coast and its offshore subduction zone define the boundary with the open ocean.
Water is what ties the region together. The Columbia, Fraser, and Snake rivers collectively drain an area roughly the size of Western Europe, carrying snowmelt from the Rockies and interior plateaus hundreds of miles to the Pacific. The Columbia River alone drains approximately 668,000 square kilometers spanning parts of seven U.S. states and one Canadian province. These are also the migration routes for Pacific salmon, which travel from deep ocean feeding grounds back to high-elevation headwaters each year, redistributing marine nutrients across the entire terrestrial landscape in the process.
Cascadia covers 534,572 square miles (1,384,588 km²). It contains the largest remaining tracts of intact old-growth temperate rainforest on Earth, including seven of the ten most carbon-absorbing forest ecosystems in the world. More than 350 bird and mammal species, 48 reptile species, hundreds of fungal and lichen species, and thousands of invertebrates and soil organisms live here. Wild populations of salmon, wolves, grizzly bear, humpback whale, and orca persist across significant parts of the region, though most face ongoing pressure from habitat loss, climate change, and altered hydrology.
None of this stops at the 49th parallel. Upstream land use in British Columbia affects salmon habitat in Idaho. Snowpack changes in the Washington Cascades alter water availability for farmers in eastern Oregon. The region functions as an integrated whole, and it needs to be understood and governed that way.
A Name for a Place
The Origins of "Cascadia"
The word Cascadia has been in use longer than most people realize. University of Washington geology professor Bates McKee introduced it as a formal geographic term in his 1972 textbook Cascadia: The Geologic Evolution of the Pacific Northwest, using it to name the ancient geologic province underlying the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.
In 1981, Seattle University sociology professor David McCloskey gave the term a broader meaning, applying it to the region as a coherent bioregional framework. McCloskey described Cascadia as "a land of falling waters," emphasizing the role of precipitation, river systems, and coastlines as the forces that give the region its character. After more than three decades of research, he published an updated bioregional map in 2015 that appeared on the cover of the Esri Map Book. It was the first map to render the bioregion's full ecological extent, drawing on more than 30 data layers and extending the boundary offshore to the subduction zone, incorporating marine, terrestrial, and cultural geographies into a single coherent picture.
In 1986, the concept was formally embraced at the first Cascadia Bioregional Congress, held at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. That gathering brought together First Nations organizers, ecologists, policy planners, farmers, and community activists who adopted bioregionalism as a shared framework: a place-based approach to sustainability, community self-determination, and regional self-reliance. A second congress followed in 1988. Together, they established the intellectual and organizational groundwork for Cascadia as a coordinated regional movement.
More Than a Place
A Bioregion, an Identity, a Movement
Cascadia is home to approximately 16 million people and generates over $1.6 trillion in annual economic output, comparable to the national economies of Canada or Italy. By land area it would rank as the 20th largest country in the world. Seattle, its largest city, has a metropolitan GDP of approximately $356 billion. The region generates nearly all of its electricity from renewable sources and already exports surplus power to neighboring states and provinces.
But the significance of Cascadia as a framework is not primarily economic. It rests on a straightforward observation: shared ecological systems create shared conditions, shared vulnerabilities, and shared interests that existing political jurisdictions are not structured to address on their own. The states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and the province of British Columbia each manage separate pieces of the same interconnected landscape, without a coordinating framework that reflects how that landscape actually functions.
The Cascadia movement is a response to that gap. It encompasses tens of thousands of individuals, organizations, and communities working across ecology, governance, economy, culture, and Indigenous sovereignty toward a shared vision of long-term regional stewardship.
People and Place Since Time Immemorial
An Indigenous Bioregion
The Indigenous nations of Cascadia were organizing around bioregional logic long before the term existed. Coast Salish, Lushootseed, Chinook, Kalapuyan, Nlaka'pamux, Syilx, Nez Perce, and dozens of other nations built their governance, economies, and knowledge systems around the same watersheds, mountain ranges, and ecological transitions that define the bioregion today. Their territorial boundaries followed ecological rather than political lines, and their systems of resource management, trade, and diplomacy operated at a genuinely regional scale.
In the twentieth century, Indigenous communities across Cascadia began using contemporary mapping technologies to reassert those claims. The Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, the Nisga'a, the Tsilhqot'in, and the Wet'suwet'en produced some of the first modern bioregional atlases in the 1980s and 1990s, using them as evidence in sovereignty and land rights cases in Canadian courts. These efforts made a point that the broader bioregional movement was simultaneously arriving at from a different direction: mapping territory on ecological and cultural terms, rather than colonial administrative terms, is both legally significant and politically consequential.
A Movement Takes Shape
Bioregionalism and the Cascadia Congresses
The theoretical foundations of the modern bioregional movement were laid in the 1970s by Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, who introduced the term "bioregion" and the concept of "reinhabitation": learning to live within the ecological limits of a place rather than extracting from it without accountability to its long-term health. Berg's Planet Drum Foundation and the journal Raise the Stakes became the primary early venues for spreading these ideas.
By the mid-1980s, Cascadia had become one of the most organizationally active bioregional contexts on the continent. The 1986 and 1988 Cascadia Bioregional Congresses brought together ecologists, writers, farmers, First Nations organizers, and policy practitioners to work through a central question: what would governance, economy, and culture actually look like if they were grounded in ecological reality rather than inherited political structure?
Indigenous scholars and knowledge-keepers were among the most formative voices at those gatherings. Vi Hilbert (Lushootseed name: taq^sablu), an Upper Skagit Elder and scholar, contributed decades of work preserving and transmitting the Lushootseed language and the oral traditions of the Puget Sound peoples. Her work represented a form of place knowledge operating on timescales and relational depths that Western science is still working to formally acknowledge. Metis-Cree author and activist Lee Maracle, drawing on Coast Salish and broader Pacific Northwest Indigenous intellectual traditions, argued that Indigenous land knowledge is not a historical artifact but a living body of understanding directly relevant to how contemporary societies should relate to the land. Their contributions helped orient Cascadian bioregionalism around what is described as a two-eyed way of seeing: treating Western ecological science and Indigenous knowledge systems as complementary frameworks rather than competing ones.
The decolonial dimension of this work is structural. The political borders drawn across Cascadia in the nineteenth century replaced Indigenous bioregional governance with administrative jurisdictions that have no relationship to the ecological systems they govern. Bioregional organizing does not simply add an ecological lens to existing political arrangements. It raises the more fundamental question of whether those arrangements are adequate to the territory and the challenges at hand.
Why Cascadia Matters
Nature Acts Bioregionally. So Must We.
The major ecological and resource challenges facing Cascadia are bioregional in scale, and none of them can be resolved by a single state or province working alone. Pacific salmon populations are declining across the full Columbia, Fraser, and Snake watershed systems, requiring coordinated management across multiple national and subnational jurisdictions. Wildfire regimes are shifting across the entire Cascade and Coast Range. Drought in the Columbia Basin is affecting agricultural communities in three countries at once. Ocean acidification is altering marine ecosystems the full length of the Pacific Coast.
The core problem is a mismatch of scale. The challenges operate at the bioregional level. The governance does not. Every community along a shared watershed has a direct stake in what happens upstream and downstream. Durable responses require coordination frameworks that reflect where ecological and social systems actually function, not where administrative boundaries happen to fall.
Bioregionalism does not argue for dismantling existing political structures. It argues that those structures need to be supplemented by frameworks operating at the scales where nature already works. That is not an abstract proposition. It is a practical requirement, and the Cascadia movement exists to help build the social, institutional, and financial infrastructure to make it possible.