Quotes About Cascadia

Cascadia was able to exist for so long as a single entity because no nation cared enough to take control of this distant corner of North America. Even though four countries — Russia, Spain, Britain and the United States — explored the Pacific Northwest's coastline, none claimed exclusive sovereignty over the land mass lying behind it.

Cascadia has never had a dominant religious reference group. Historically no group has ever gained the political, religious or cultural traction to be "the" established religion in Oregon and Washington. In British Columbia neither the Catholic, Anglican nor United Church of Canada denominations succeeded in overcoming the disinterest in institutional religion of most people in the province (Burkinshaw).

Cascadia is, after all, a place of the heart as much as it is a specific landscape. No one really agrees what its physical borders are. Is it a bioregion? Is it a repressed nation defined by state and provincial borders that strains to free itself from the smothering clutches of the imperialist US of A and Canada? Are its borders defined by the tectonic plates of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, or the spawning grounds of the enigmatic Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus?