Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield; Mountaineers Books, 2023
400 pages, ISBN: 978-1-68051-622-7 |
Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide!
This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Cassia Crossbill), offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
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Where is Cascadia?
SOUTHEAST ALASKA, IDAHO, OREGON, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON--AND BITS OF MONTANA, CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, WYOMING... Cascadia is a place defined not by political maps but by watersheds. Cascadia is defined, according to the Sightline Institute, by “the watersheds of rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rainforest zone.” Bates McKee first used the word Cascadia to define a region in 1972. David McCloskey, a Seattle University bioregionalist, then used the term in 1993 to describe and map a “land of falling waters." Do you live in Cascadia? See the map below.
led by story |
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Story is foundational to our ways of engaging experience as humans and in Cascadia Field Guide.
Cascadia Field Guide reflects and honors relationships through its very structure. The beings of the book are organized not by Linnean taxonomy, but by communities. A community might be made because one being eats another (Brown Bear eats Salmon) or in more nuanced ways (Spotted Owl's call echoes over Red Huckleberry). In Cascadia Field Guide, the being stories for each of the 128 beautiful inhabitants of this region hold natural history, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, scientific study, personal connection, and more. |
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Artists |
Poets & writers |
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Each community is illustrated by a different artist from Cascadia; the artists work in form line design, cut paper, pen and ink, and engage with sensibilities from playful to scientific.
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Writers with deep ties to the region–-both established and emerging-–engage Orca, Mountain Goat, Bitterbrush, and other iconic and endemic beings of Cascadia. They are urban and rural, and they span this vast land.
Some writers are newly arrived, some have lived in the region for generations, some don't live here now but spent significant portions of their lives in Cascadia. 40 poems in Cascadia Field Guide are newly-written just for this book. WRITERS include Sherman Alexie, Betsy Aoki, Rick Barot, Linda Bierds, Allen Braden, Robert Bringhurst, Laura Da', Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer, Chris Dombrowski, Kathleen Flenniken, Tess Gallagher, Lyanda Haupt, Kim Heacox, Sean Hill, Garret Hongo, Ever Jones, Robert Lashley, Dorianne Laux, Ursula K. LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Claudia Castro Luna, Colleen J. McElroy, Frances McCue, Kevin Miller, Shankar Naryan, Richard Nelson, Lucia Perillo, Jennifer Perrine, Vivian Faith Prescott, Matt Rader, Lois Red Elk, Paisley Rekdal, Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, Rob Taylor, Alexandra Teague, Jane Wong, Joe Wilkins, Robert Wrigley, Bill Yake, Isaac Yuen, Maya Jewell Zeller, Jan Zwicky...and more. |