A brave new world in the old frontier - Cascadia area of the Pacific Northwest, inclusive of Oregon, Washington and Canada, explores its future for binational economic cooperation

Insight on the News, May 9, 1994 by Philip Gold

"Cascadia" once referred to the U.S. Pacific Northwest and a bit of Canada. Now, some residents of the area want to position the as a key player in the global economy. Others aren't sure that economic interaction can, or should, be achieved.

In war, Clausewitz said, everything is simple. But simple things become difficult.

Today, this venerable adage also applies to the emerging global economy. Want to make money in the 21st century? Just offer a world-class product or service; contend with a planet's worth of competition; cope with a near-infinite measure of laws and regulations and deal with a similar number of bureaucrats whose ministrations range from the occasionally benign to the downright malevolent. Also, don't forget to preserve the environment, respect the relevant multiculturalisms, cultivate skilled workers and keep the image positive.

Given these ever-increasing complexities and their attendant frictions, not a few people have started calling for some serious rethinking of how business is conducted. And, in a politically nonexistent but economically coalescing part of the Pacific Northwest known as Cascadia, a growing network of businesspeople, academics and public-sector minions are operating on an intriguing, perhaps blessedly simplifying theory: In the 21st century, economically integrated and cooperating regions, rather than nation-states or individual enterprises, will be the key players and greatest generators of wealth.

Analyst and urban-policy author Neal Peirce calls these new regions "citistates" -- urban areas supported by economically and culturally relevant networks -- and notes a pair of defining traits. First, whatever their physical size, they're often transnational. Second, they find their own national governments increasingly irrelevant and sometimes detrimental to their success.

Cascadia well could become such an area. Currently it's an idea, not a clearly defined region or even a single organization. Some analysts dismiss the notion as old-fashioned, regional self-promotion and civic boosterism, albeit with a vocabulary somewhat more grandiose than that seen in a typical chamber of commerce pamphlet. Others show more faith. John Miller, a former congressman who is chairman of the Cascadia Project at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank, offers an enthusiastic but modest assessment. Miller concedes that efforts toward regional economic integration are only now yielding practical results. "Stage one was cocktail party conversation and preliminary studies. Stage three will be when things are finally accomplished. Right now, we're in stage two. The government and business alliances have been formed. The programs and pledges are coming in." And the world is starting to take note. "I'm getting calls from places like California and Ireland," he says. "People want to know what we're doing."

Cascadia is not a new word. Geographically and ecologically, it describes much of the combined U.S. Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Pacific Southwest, or -- for those with an across-the-pond perspective -- the Pacific Northeast. But Cascadia as an economic region is far from homogeneous. As Paul Schell, Seattle port commissioner and dean of the University of Washington's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, points out, the area supports an odd mix of business interests: Boeing, Microsoft, McCaw Cellular and other high-tech giants coexist with logging, fishing and farming. Indeed, Cascadia's boundaries seem to shift and blur, depending upon the enterprise under discussion.

Cascadia perhaps is best envisioned as three concentric semicircles spreading eastward from the Pacific shore. At the center, a corridor from Vancouver, British Columbia, runs south through the Seattle-Tacoma nexus and down to Portland and Eugene, Ore. This "Main Street of Cascadia" -- or, in Peirce's terminology, the city of the Cascadian citistate -- holds the bulk of the area's infrastructure, high-tech industry and capital and is the focus of Cascadia-boosters' principal efforts.

A second semicircle comprising two states -- Washington and Oregon -- and the Canadian province of British Columbia makes for a working definition of the area. Still, there are at least latent tensions among the parties involved. Roger Bull, the Canadian executive director of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, a colloquium of regional legislators, acknowledges the principle of Cascadia, but dislikes too broad an application. "It's a sensitive word in Canada," he says. "There are connotations of annexation -- an exaggerated reaction, but it exists."

Meanwhile, in Oregon, others deprecate Cascadia as a vehicle of Seattleite hubris and self-aggrandizement. Gwen Baldwin, a spokes Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts, accepts the benefits of selective regional integration, but contends that "whether you do it within framework A or B is less important." As for Cascadia's global significance: "I would never question what goes on in the imaginations of people in Seattle."