CN! project Rain City Slam presents it’s 2019 Grand Slam featuring legendary poet Wil Gibson. This is Rain City Slam’s most fierce competition of the year!
Did you know that we support grassroots projects in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana?
Join us, other awesome Cascadians, and climate activists around the world in signing the petition asking the Nobel Foundation Board to create a new Nobel Prize for the Fight Against Climate Change NOW!
Great Northwest Productions, a CN! nonprofit family member, presents an art & music series, filmed & recorded in unique locations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Nourishing Neighbors is a "pay-it-forward" program that lets patrons of local businesses donate towards the next meal for a community member in need.
Spokane began and continued their Cascadia meetings throughout the month of June. The meetings thus far have been pretty informal and are mostly geared towards getting acquainted with those interested in the idea, as well as working out organizational foundations. For those interested, they meet every other Friday at the Riverside Park by the Post Street Bridge.
More information and directions can be found on our Calendar events page or contact Patrick Adams directly at patsamorionadams@gmail.com
Growth in the idea of Cascadia continues to grow throughout the greater Portland area and we’re excited to announce new student coordinators at both Portland State University and Portland Community College.
Those interested should contact:
PCC contact Benjamin Bricker: Benjamin.Bricker@pcc.edu PSU contact Ellona: cascadianmycelium@gmail.com or our general Portland coordinator Lumen: lumen@riseup.net
If you’d be interested in becoming a regional coordinator for Cascadia Now! or starting your own chapter, feel free to email cascadianow@gmail.com or our visit our http://cascadianow.org/get-involvedpage.
A CascadiaNow member from Seattle University has released a great 5 minute documentary that provides a nice introduction of the Cascadia movement.
The short educational film by Kelton Sears is about the Cascadian movement, its origins, its ideas, and its presence today. The video features three interviews with members of the Seattle Cascadia Now! chapter from their May 19th meeting.
The video can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/nB7v5TmAYp8
If you would like to get involved with the Seattle chapter, they meet biweekly on every second Saturday, and you can find more information on our calendar page here: http://www.cascadianow.org/ai1ec_event/seattle-cascadianow-meetup/?instance_id=2638
or directly from their website at: seattlecascadiaproject.org
Beginning in Seattle and Portland and spreading wherever people are interested, Cascadia Now! has started an agitprop campaign. 11x17 black and white posters have been spreading through different neighborhoods in Seattle, while stickers, banners and color origami pamphlets have been appearing in various areas around PDX.
Since the campaign has begun, the http://reddit.com/r/cascadia group has been adding about 100-200 members per week, and pictures continue to filter across Twitter and Facebook of folks randomly stumbling across the idea.
It will be our goal to create a public agitprop and art gallery hosted through our website, where everyone will have access to original PDF’s and PSD files, alter, upload and add pictures of the final product in an open gallery. We’ll be working on this in the months to come.
The Doug flag is the symbol of Cascadia and a new batch of Cascadia Flags have arrived.
Those interested should send $23.50 to cascadianmycelium@gmail.com using either Paypal or Wepay.
The flags are 5′x3′ nylon and will be shipped out as soon as possible, except for between the dates of June 19th to 25th. A portion goes to supporting Cascadia Chapters.
Designed in 1994 by Portland native and professor Alexander Baretich, it can increasingly be found in cities throughout the Pacific Northwest and is becoming a common sight at soccer games, occupy protests and of course, on locally made microbrews (among our favorite, the Secession IPA or Cascadian Dark Ale).
The blue of the flag represents the moisture rich sky above and Pacific ocean along with the Salish Sea, lakes and other inland waters. Our home is of continuous cascading waters flowing from our sky and mountains back to the Pacific. Cascadia is a land of falling water from the Pacific to the western slopes of the Rockies and Cascades where water cycles as vapor and then rain and snow to run through creek and river back to the Pacific. The white represents snow and clouds and the green to represent the evergreen forests and fields of the Pacific Northwest. The lone standing Douglas Fir symbolizes endurance, defiance and resilience, named for explorer David Douglas, the first written account of the bioregion as a land of cascading waters and from where our primary mountain range takes its name. All these symbols of color and icon come together to symbolize what being Cascadian is all about.
November and December were both very active months for Cascadia organizing. Cascadia Now received mentions in several magazines and online blogs, including Vice Magazine, while several events such as the Cascadian Cartography Exhibit took place in Portland, the Decolonizing Cascadia conference took place at the University of British Columbia, the Cascadia Review, a journal of Pacific Northwest poetry released their first issue, and Portland had their first Cascadia meetup.
By Brandon Letsinger
As with the earlier day, and the night before, it continues to dump rain. The nearby river runs with a muddy brown color, and all around we’re surrounded by the verdant green of moss dripping from evergreen branches. It must be the beginning of the Cascadian Spring.
The six of us are huddled around a white van, eyes slightly glazed over. Mel is smart and the only one inside staying dry while Casey gives Tavis an introduction on the proper etiquette of drinking raw egg. Much like shot gunning a beer, they slam each end on the corner of the van door, before downing the dairy product. Devin decides he needs one too. Mike and I try not to laugh too hard as Tavis works to get the extra part out of his beard.
The van we’re surrounding belongs to Cascadia Matters, a collective of writers, artists, educators and media activists out of Bend who are working right now to finish their documentary Occupied Cascadia. They’re parked just outside of City of Eugene Campbell Community Center and we’re all bit exhausted after attending the 8-hour open space conference on building Community and Bioregional Resilience.
Hosted by the organization Unifying Cascadia, a network of groups from Corvallis, Ashland, Eugene and Portland that formed earlier in the month after setting up a speaking tour for author Charles Eisenstein, the conference brought close to 50 organizers together to discuss issues surrounding bioregionalism, community resiliency and envisioning strategies for regional networking and coordination. Among the topics talked about were building local food systems, local currency exchange projects, gift/alternative economic ideas, importance of peer to peer and decentralized organizing structures, buy local and sustainability movements among many others. The conference was held in an ‘open space’ format that allowed for participants to design the focus of the event, and allowed for anyone to submit a workshop and panel. The format worked to help catalyze and create space for collaborative discussions around a host of issues and placed emphasis on making sure individuals were where they wanted to be. Don’t like the chosen discussion? Leave. Have something you find very interesting? Host a workshop or talk.
Coming from Seattle, our primary interest lay heavily in envisioning a bioregional network. Hence, a large portion of the day for us revolved around creating a collaborative dialogue with the Cascadia Matters, Unifying Cascadia and Portland folks over what this network would look like and how we can better coordinate and mutually support our projects. Organization went into talking with the Bend people how we could use the opening of their film to help launch a bioregional film opening tour to help new groups that are forming collaborate, as well as a lot of talk with Portland about organizing around a July 1st – 4th convergence of some sort in the symbolically important place of the peace arch, in between Victoria Day in Canada on the 1st, and Independence Day on the 4th.
The next day dawned with only intermittent rain storms and we were lucky enough to be able to grab some great breakfast, coffee and the occasional patch of blue sky with Patrick and his housemates who had organized the weekend event and provided us with sleeping space (and 2 very cuddly cats) before we headed back northward.
On the way, we stopped off in Portland, to continue many of the collaborative discussions that we’d begun in Eugene the day before. Adam and Abby from the Seattle group also joined us, as well as Ian, who helped form the Olympia chapter of the CascadiaNow group and is doing a documentary about the Cascadia movement as a student project at Evergreen University.
In Portland, we were lucky enough to meet with Alexander Baretich, designer of the Cascadian flag in 1994, Illona who is responsible for organizing Cascadia merchandise, having now sold or distributed more than 500 flags, and working now towards creating a centralized online store, as well Lumen, who has been integral in organizing the recent Cascadia potlucks. Meeting at the Foster Eco-Village, we were able to really focus on organizational strategies that we could work towards in the future. Portland, Olympia and Seattle folks were all able to share projects they had been working on, talk about what a Cascadian space and group looks like, and what roles and interactions with things like the Occupy movement should look like, as well as setting several different mutual projects and events that we’ll be working together on in the future.
These collaborative discussions have helped continue a transition that’s been taking place over the last several months as people begin to get active and meet face to face that has transformed the organizational structure of the Cascadian Independence Project into a group and network of groups dedicated to raising awareness of Cascadia, mobilizing people interested in the idea, and working to support and connect these individuals to support and empower our communities throughout the northwest.
