This is probably the last column I will ever write for the Emerald. After great trouble thinking of an appropriate topic – over-thinking it, no doubt – I settled on an odd idea that seems to resurface again and again in classes, social conversations and political proposals: Cascadian independence.
It came about on reading a letter from a good friend who has found herself wandering abroad in Spain. She wrote: “I dearly miss the Northwest and all of its citizens.” The choice to identify “the Northwest” rather than the political entities of Washington and Oregon, as if it were its own nation-state, stuck out. Or rather, that this identification seemed so natural to the both of us stuck out.
The letter was hardly the first time two native Northwesterners have shared an unspoken agreement that the region is rightly its own entity, as if a sovereign nation.
As early as 1846, Sonoma, Calif. became the capital of a secession from its then-government of Mexico, leading to the formation of the California Republic and later to the modern-day state. In the mid-1970s, the city of San Francisco was used as the hypothetical capital of a fictional nation called “Ecotopia,” created by author Ernest Callenbach. Ecotopia was never specifically defined, but the nation encompassed roughly the area between San Francisco and Seattle.
Joel Garreau, a social demographer, attempted to trace Callenbach’s Ecotopia in the early 1980s. Garreau believed North America was less defined by its political boundaries than it was by evident regional cultures, which he called the “Nine Nations of North America.” For Garreau, Eugene was also part of Ecotopia.
Garreau’s Ecotopia begins as far south as Salinas, Calif., where lay the fields of the Earthbound Farm, the world’s largest grower of certified organic produce. It extends northward along the coast to the Silicon Valley, where the Google company uses goats to mow its campus lawns, and the first all-electric carmaker, Tesla Motors, is headquartered. Like Garreau’s Ecotopia, Silicon Valley’s most prestigious school and the arguable birthplace of the Internet, Stanford University, takes the conifer – the towering, formidable tree whose forests define the Pacific Northwest – as its symbol.
It extends into Oregon, Washington and, finally, Vancouver, B.C. – a city that, like Portland, implemented aggressive policies in the 1960s and ’70s to manage urban growth, combating the sprawl they believed was so environmentally destructive.
Garreau’s Ecotopian politics are defined by passionate environmentalist libertarianism. A landscape largely devoid of traditional Western religion and social conservatism, Ecotopia represents the only one of his Nine Nations “in which even the middle class has moved on to the idea that a person may have to lower his monetarily described standard of living in order to raise his quality of life.” Rather than how to continue a lifestyle of material excess in a future of scarcity, he says Ecotopians ask, “Were we even headed in the right direction in the first place?”
In Garreau’s analysis, this regional consensus is profoundly different from that of Southern California, or of the American East. It is a place, blanketed in mist and hidden among trees, where churches of European pioneers are transformed into Buddhist temples; where cooperatives and local proprietors often exceed the market share of multinational corporations; where even children will carry around plastic bottles for hours to avoid the deeply-ingrained repulsion they feel from tossing them somewhere besides the proper recycling bin. Not-so-insane are ideas such as permaculture farming, consumer-run health insurance, the right to use – and abuse – marijuana, and the right to suffer “death with dignity.” It is a place where jobs and growth are even sacrificed for the Northern Spotted Owl, where “small” is often called “beautiful.” It is, from the Bay Area to Vancouver Island, a place so many of us call “home.”
If we are to step outside of our childhood conditioning and think about it, it is a very, very strange place. It built most of its economy on what are thought of as “renewable resources”: fishery stocks, forest timber, fertile soils and the mind’s capacity for complex innovation. And while a straight-up secession still might be thought of by many as a treason, Garreau does accurately write that: “‘screwed-up’ is the term you hear again and again in Ecotopia, in reference to the rest of the continent.”
Will there ever be a complete revolution, even beyond Seattle’s World Trade Organization riots or San Francisco’s LGBTG Pride celebration? It seems unthinkable. But as generations grow and die, as natural conservation becomes of greater and greater value, one thing is for certain: Our cultural cohesion, as a well-rooted, modern-day Pacific Northwestern people, continues to rise. And our propensity to fight that which we see as threatening to the survival of mankind seems to be increasing along with it.
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