Cascadia

The area along the Pacific Northwest of North America, from northern California into Oregon, Washington State, Idaho, British Columbia, and into the Yukon Territory and the Alaska panhandle, is known alternatively as the Pacific Cascade, the Cascadian Bioregion, or “Cascadia”.

In recent years, there have been grumblings among those residing there to secede from both the USA and Canada to form a separate country.

This is nothing new.

After Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the Pacific Northwest in 1803, Jefferson envisioned the establishment of an independent nation in the western portion of North America which he dubbed the “Republic of the Pacific”.

In 1941, there was an attempt among residents in counties along the California/Oregon border to secede from their respective states to form what would have been the 49th state, the State of Jefferson, with the town of Yreka (in California) to be the interim state capital.

In the 1970s, writer Ernest Callenbach proposed a new nation in his novels Ecotopia, and its “pre-quel”, Ecotopia Emerging. These books describe a new country, formed from the secessionist states of Washington, Oregon, and the northern area of California, that is based on sustainable development and steady-state economics.

Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America (1981) has the region as one of his nine ‘nations’, which he named “Ecotopia” after the Callenbach novel.

In the 1990s various micronational experiments emerged. Among these were the Kingdom of Cascadia, the Arcadian Commonwealth, and the Cascadia Confederacy.

Modern groups discussing the Cascadia concept, such as The Sightline Institute, Cascadia Commons, and Cascadia Prospectus, see the concept as one of a transnational cooperative identity short of full independence. Still others, such as The Republic of Cascadia, are a tongue-in-cheek expression of political protest.

Perhaps most importantly, The Fish Brewing Company of Olympia, Washington puts “Brewed in the Republic of Cascadia” on their organic ale.

The Arcadia Club prefers to think of Cascadia as an imaginative thought experiment, a excellent tool for long-term regional planning, and a pretty good Plan B.