Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield
Mountaineers Books, March 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 Devil's Club to Cassia Crossbill), offering locals and visitors a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place. Teach/read/shareCascadia Field Guide is being used in classrooms in the bioregion and beyond. We've heard from teachers in North Carolina, Michigan, Southern California, and Massachusetts (to name a few) who are using this book in their classrooms. Book groups are discovering new love of the land in shared readings of Cascadia Field Guide. Some folks have generously shared resources for discussing and teaching Cascadia Field Guide. Explore!
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Awards & Honors
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Praise for Cascadia Field Guide:
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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 |
shared through synergy |
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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, sensory awareness, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, scientific understanding, personal connection, and more. The information in each being story is there (size, range, lifespan, use), but it's offered with delight and a mind tipped toward wonder and engagement. |
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Artists |
writers |
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Each community of Cascadia Field Guide is illuminated by a different artist from Cascadia; these artists work in form line design, cut paper, pen and ink, and approach their work in sensibilities from playful to scientific. We invited them to be free in their engagements, and the love and play shines through.
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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 in Cascadia Field Guide. They are urban and rural, old and young, and write from a wide range of cultures spanning this vast land. 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, Keetje Kuipers, Robert Lashley, Dorianne Laux, Ursula K. LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Claudia Castro Luna, Colleen J. McElroy, Kevin Miller, Shankar Naryan, Richard Nelson, Lucia Perillo, Jennifer Perrine, Vivian Faith Prescott, Matt Rader, Lois Red Elk, Laura Read, 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. |