Cascadia¶

Extent: Roughly the Alaska Panhandle south through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and into Northern California — bounded by the Pacific coast to the west, the Cascade and Coast ranges defining the interior edge, and the Columbia Plateau to the east.

Core watersheds: Columbia River, Fraser River, Willamette Valley, Puget Sound

Keystone species: Chinook salmon, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, orca, Roosevelt elk, northern spotted owl

The Place¶

Stand in an old-growth Douglas fir forest in the Oregon Coast Range and you are standing inside the most carbon-dense ecosystem on Earth — denser, per acre, than any tropical rainforest. The trees are 500 years old. The nurse logs rotting on the forest floor are 800. The mycorrhizal network threading through the soil connects every living tree in a chemical conversation that humans are only beginning to understand.

That is Cascadia.

The bioregion is defined by moisture. The Pacific Ocean pumps warm, wet air eastward until it hits the Cascade volcanoes — Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount Shasta — and drops its water. The west side of the Cascades gets 80 to 140 inches of rain a year. The east side gets 10. That divide creates two entirely different worlds within fifty miles of each other, and it runs the full length of the range.

The rivers are the circulatory system. The Columbia drains 259,000 square miles — the entire interior of the Pacific Northwest — and historically supported the largest salmon runs in the world. The Fraser does the same for British Columbia. Before dams, the salmon carried ocean nutrients hundreds of miles into the interior, feeding bears, eagles, and trees, whose roots were fed by the bears' scat. The salmon were the forest. The forest was the salmon.

The People¶

Cascadia has been inhabited for at least 15,000 years. The Indigenous nations of the region — Coast Salish, Chinook, Tillamook, Nez Perce, Yakama, Lummi, Makah, and dozens of others — organized their lives around the salmon cycle. Their governance systems, trade networks, and spiritual practices were bioregional before that word existed.

The 1855 treaties, negotiated by territorial governor Isaac Stevens in a matter of weeks, ceded most of the land while reserving tribal fishing rights "in common with the citizens of the Territory." Those fishing rights have been fought over ever since. The 1974 Boldt Decision reaffirmed tribal rights to half the harvestable salmon in the region — a landmark moment in the legal history of bioregional governance.

European settlement came via the Pacific shore and the Oregon Trail. By the 1840s, the fur trade had already stripped the beaver from most river systems, beginning a cascade of ecological simplification that continues today. Logging followed, then hydropower. The Columbia River now has 14 federal dams on its main stem and hundreds more on its tributaries. Four of them — the lower Snake River dams in Washington — are the subject of one of the most consequential dam removal debates in American history. ⚠️ The political status of these dams is contested and actively evolving as of 2024.

The Ecological Crisis¶

Cascadia's defining ecological crisis is the collapse of wild salmon runs. All five Pacific salmon species — Chinook, coho, chum, sockeye, and pink — have declined catastrophically across most of their range in the U.S. portion of Cascadia.

The causes are layered:

Dams that block upstream migration and alter water temperature and flow
Habitat loss from logging, development, and agricultural drainage that degrades spawning streams
Hatchery dependence that has genetically weakened wild populations
Ocean conditions altered by climate change — warmer, more acidic waters with less food

The northern spotted owl, a symbol of the 1990s forest wars, occupies the same old-growth habitat as salmon-dependent streams. Protecting old growth protects the entire system: large trees shade streams, keeping water cool enough for salmon; fallen trees create the pools and structure that juvenile fish need to survive.

The Bioregional Identity¶

Cascadia has an unusually strong sense of its own regional identity, rooted partly in geography — the mountains really do separate it from the rest of the continent — and partly in culture. The region supported a significant political bioregionalism movement in the 1970s and 1980s, centered on the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco (founded by Peter Berg) and publications like Cascadia: A State of Mind.

A Cascadian independence or autonomy movement exists today, mostly in the Pacific Northwest cities, though it encompasses a wide range of political sensibilities from eco-anarchist to libertarian. Its symbol — a Douglas fir on a blue-and-green field — has become recognizable throughout the region.

More practically, Cascadia was the site of some of the first serious bioregional governance experiments in the U.S. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, established in 1986, is administered by a bi-state commission — an unusual structure acknowledging that the gorge doesn't stop at the Oregon-Washington border.

What to Know Here¶

If you live in Cascadia:

You are in the Columbia River watershed (east of the Cascades) or the coastal drainages (west) — find your sub-watershed
The trees in old-growth Douglas fir forest are a living carbon archive; their protection is climate policy
Salmon are an indicator species — if they're failing, the whole system is under stress
Water rights in the western U.S. are complicated and contested; in Cascadia, this plays out dramatically every drought year
The east side and west side of the Cascades are ecologically and politically different — don't conflate them