A nice lookin' bag of chips!

Some nice lookin' chips if we've ever seen them! The official chip of Cascadia (@hardbite)

Cascadia Now! on Pinterest | 1000+ Images and Growing

Starting last week, we've gone ahead and set up a CascadiaNow! Pinterest Account. Since that time we've already linked, uploaded and connected more than 1000 images, and our gallery boards are still growing quickly as we continue to scrape the internet for all things related to Cascadia. While Pinterest is simply another image based social media site, what excites us about it is the potential for collaboration from anyone interested, who can help add pictures and photographs. It is our goal to begin to develop an collaborative digital archive, that can bring together a representative collection that captures the energy, diversity and creativity currently being generated by Cascadia Supporters.

So far, we have 8 different categories of pictures:

• Cascadia
• Cascadia Artwork and Guerrilla Marketing
• Culture and Beer
• Cascadia Cup, Sports and National Team
• Cascadia Tattoo's
• Digital Media, Logo's, and Graphic Design
• Geography
• Nature Photography

A general collection of all our pins (pictures) can be found here.

If you would like to upload, curate or help us add images to any of the galleries, just contact us via Pinterest or at cascadianow@gmail.com and we can send an invite using either your email address or Pinterest user name.

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See the full gallery here:

O’Cascadia - Forget the Fourth, Fly the Fir: Cascadia Now! featured in Seattle Weekly 4th of July Edition

For this years Fourth of July edition, the Seattle Weekly has featured a prominent article on CascadiaNow! as well as the recent postering and street art campaigns by our members around the city. The article, written by Kelton Sears, documents his trip to a meeting he went to in 2012, providing a fun glimpse into an average gathering held bi-weekly in their warehouse loft space headquarters in the industrial district of Seattle.

In it, he also provides a very nice background to Cascadia explaining:

"In the ‘70s, a sociology professor at Seattle University named David McCloskey had a thought.

In his sociocultural studies of the Northwest, McCloskey began referring to a region he called Cascadia. This imaginary country, comprised of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, ignored international borders in favor of bioregional ones. Rather than defining the area of study by its political borders, McCloskey used natural ecological features as the dividing lines. McCloskey began teaching a class called “Cascadia: Sociology of the Pacific Northwest.” In his class Cascadia was not only a bioregion, but a way of thinking for the distinct people within it.

The idea caught on, garnering bubbling support from outdoorsy eccentrics across the region. In 1994, a Portland man named Alexander Baretich designed a flag for the movement—a blue, white and green striped banner with a Douglas Fir in the middle. The stripes represent the forest, water and sky of the region. The Portland Timbers soccer team proudly flies the flag during matches. It has become the symbol for the Cascadia cup as well, an MLB championship between the Timbers, Seattle Sounders and Vancouver Whitecaps."

The article also captures in a lighthearted the fun, beer drinking, soccer talking, somewhat radicalesque cross section of Pacific Northwest culture that the movement seems to capture and bring in:

I drive around the warehouse a couple of times until I find the meeting—the area south of downtown Seattle is mostly cement factories and abandoned smokestacks—abandoned all but for the six or seven guys hanging out in the alley by the train tracks. They are drinking hoppy beer and kicking rocks around. There’s a dog too, wearing a green bandana around its neck. They look like regular guys mostly. Middle aged. Glasses. T shirts. There’s one mohawk, but aside from that, everyone seems highly employable. They don’t look like the separatists I’m looking for. They are talking about soccer. One of the bigger guys notices me cautiously coming down the alleyway. 

“Are you looking for the Cascadia Now! meeting?” he asks, “because you found it.”

He warmly hands me a beer.

The whole article can be read on the Seattle Weekly website, and can be found here: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/947560-129/cascadia-adam-says-meeting-beer-mike#img1

"Cascadia" Buzzword of the Month in British Columbia

In a recent article, the BC Business magazine has labeled 'Cascadia' as the buzzword of the month. Coming on the heels of multiple trademarking disputes, it notes that the idea has now moved from social, cultural, environmental and political movement into an increasingly mature role as cultural icon, with a powerful 'brand image' of its own - one that is increasingly having to fight to remain open, public and free:

‘The Pacific Northwest’ is so passé. There’s a fresh way to display regional affiliation - one that’s causing a brand war in B.C. and down the rest of the West Coast'

The article then goes on to state that "The oft-proposed, very conceptual unified nation of Oregon, Washington, B.C. and, occasionally, Montana and Idaho, is having a hell of a year—at least as an increasingly mined brand. Maybe it’s because of growing validation. Time magazine included the region in a piece called “Top 10 Aspiring Nations” in 2011 and commentators from biologists to tourism operators are calling it a “bioregion,” if not a sovereign state. It all started in the ’70s (of course), when an Oregon-based sociologist named David McCloskey coined the term and a sci-fi novel called Ecotopia set in the region hammered its attributes home. Twenty years later another Oregon local created the Doug flag—tri-colour with a black Douglas fir at its centre—and the concept had a visual identity... one that’s never been hotter than it is today. Especially if you’re on the wrong side of a trademark infringement."

The article then goes on to list the recent controversies that have embroiled the term Cascadia, from it's use in a Adidas commercial featuring the Timber Army, in which it declares that "Revolutions are born from simple ideas" to trademark disputes with Steamworks brewery and finally the MLS attempting to copyright the Cascadia Cup, in both instances prompting massive, grassroots resistance. In the case of the MLS dispute, resulting in supporter groups forming the Cascadia Council to help to dispute the MLS legally.

The full article can be read: http://www.bcbusiness.ca/marketing-media/buzzword-of-the-month-cascadia