Sightline Institute has started a new series on the people of Cascadia, and it begins with a count. In “Twenty-one Million Cascadians: An Overview,” the first article in Who is Cascadia, researcher Jay Lee puts the number at 21,561,819 residents. That’s not an easy thing to count. The US and Canadian censuses count counties, boroughs and regional districts, and the bioregion runs right across all of them, so Sightline had to build its answer out of pieces.
Sightline draws Cascadia by water too, though its edges aren’t quite the ones on our own Bioregion page. Its Cascadia is the watersheds of the rivers that run through the temperate rainforest to the Pacific, and the article opens with a sweep from the Kenai Peninsula to the Russian River. It leans on a description by Sightline’s own Alan Durning that ties the region’s unity to the movement of its water, then does the unglamorous work of lining that shape up with the boundaries governments actually use.
A few of the numbers stand out. About 16 million of us are in the United States and the rest in Canada. Washington, British Columbia, Oregon and Idaho hold 19.9 million of the total. Since 2000 the population has grown 35 percent, from 15.9 million to 21.6 million, and a quarter of residents live in just two places, Metro Vancouver and King County. The count crosses the US-Canada line, reaching from Alaska down into northern California, and more than 1,500 First Nations reserves and Indian reservations lie within that territory too.
Most of those 21 million people have probably never been asked to think of themselves as living in a bioregion. Helping them make that connection is a big part of what the Cascadia movement is for, and a number this size shows how much room there is for local organizing.
Sightline says later installments will get into more about who these residents are and what they believe. We’ll be following along. If you’re new to the idea of a bioregion, our Bioregionalism page is a good place to start.
Photo: Cascades panorama from the upper meadow below Park Butte, U.S. Forest Service, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
