https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2021/travel-places-to-visit-vacation/methowvalley.html

A Coast Salish inspired throw blanket adorns my couch. In a pandemic constrained world, its now the centerpiece of my Zoom videoconference background yielding several complements. Designed by Nooksack/Chinese/French/Scottish artist Louie Gong and founder of the Eighth Generation Shop (eighthgeneration.com) at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a Hummingbird pattern occupies the center composed of, and surrounded by geometric forms common to Coast Salish designs. This “three-rhythm” pattern of angular stripes shaded light, medium, and grey was described in a 1929 American Anthropologist publication.

My throw sets up a borrowed but modified analogy from Quammen’s 1996 book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions. Imagine lifting the blanket for a closeup of the weave. Wool threads compose a complex and three-dimensional tapestry. Then, take a dull knife and start slicing randomly at the fabric. The cuts sound like gasps from the long dead. Tattered remains number over two dozen. Uneven pieces pile up with distinct sizes and angles.

Severed fibers protrude from all the edges. The hummingbird is no longer recognizable. So, did we make more than a dozen new Salish blankets? Do the shreds offer any utility now? Hardly. All we are left with are ragged and frayed fragments, each one certainly worthless and commencing to come apart.

Now, apply this same logic to some of the Pacific Northwest’s iconic environments. This provides an organizing metaphor to understand the challenges of ecosystem governance in the transboundary bioregions shared across the northwestern border of the U.S. and Canada. The Cascade and Coast Range mountains stretch across 188 thousand square miles from Canada’s Yukon to Northern California. Temperate rainforests, fjords, valleys and rivers create 47 ecoregions blanketing British Columbia (BC) and Washington (WA). “An ecosystem is a tapestry of species and relationships. Chop away a section, isolate that section, and there arises the problem of unraveling” (Quammen 1996, p. 11).

In Washington for instance, a 788 page government opus reported that the state lost 90 percent of old growth forest, 70 percent of estuarine wetlands, 50 percent of shrub-steppe habitat, 70 percent of arid grasslands, and 50 to 90 percent of riparian habitats. Ecologists, biologists, and wildlife managers have been studying and trying to stop the Cascadia terrestrial and coastal ecosystems (see below) from unraveling even more since the 1970s.

In one Cascadia conception, snow-capped mountains fuel rivers of falling waters and their salmon coursing through North America’s temperate rainforests. The Cascadia bioregion resembles a green wedge stretching from Alaska’s Icy Bay to California’s Cape Mendocino on the coast and inland to the Continental Divide and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. But, human fragmentation in the form of borders, highways, suburban, and urban development divide our shared ecosystems. For instance, in August 2018, I saw this an unnatural strip of clear cut rising from a dried up dam reservoir scarring this Cascadia scene.

“They mow the border?” exclaimed one observer incredulously. Indeed, he discovered, treaties require the US and Canada to maintain a “clear line-of-sight vista for the entire 5,526 mile border. So, they poison it with herbicide as well. I photographed the landscape above straddling the US and Canadian border in the emptied northern edge of a dam reservoir. Arguably, this may be the locus of bioregionalism’s birth in Ecotopia.

Nearly 30 miles to the south and 50 years ago, Seattle’s electric utility planned to raise its Ross Dam 122 and-a-half feet. Its unnatural lake would expand ten-fold and inundate more than seven miles of Canada’s Skagit River Valley. Canadian environmentalists rallied around protecting a free-flowing river and its streamfishing according to one account. South of the border, US environmentalists proposed a single large and binational conservation area at the center of Cascadia in 1971.

Presented as the “Salish National Park” for Canada in opposition to Dam expansion on the Skagit river, activists sought to match the North Cascades and Pasayten National Parks in the United States (US). But, British Columbia (BC) forestry officials informed a US Park superintendent that “they planned to log every possible inch of BC right up to the international boundary” (Louter 1998, p. 311). The single large conservation area idea hung on through the eighties but probably peaked in the nineties.

A book Cascadia Wild: Protecting an International Ecosystem appeared in 1993 with a new map. It proposed a core binational protected area encompassing 2.5 million wilderness acres in the US and over 300 thousand in Canada. Its buffer zone encompassed several rural communities. Marketed through a poster for the 1994 conference “Nature Has No Borders,” government officials, politicians, researchers, and environmentalists representing both nations imagined a new transboundary park.

But, according to a case study in the book Protected Areas and the Regional Planning Imperative in North America, the “Greater North Cascades Ecosystem” fell victim to a conservative backlash and national antigovernment trends. Conversely, a nearby marine bioregion gained momentum in 1994. A symposium on a coastal marine ecosystem shared between BC and WA also convened government ministers, officials, and scientists. They addressed questions about the sustainability of the current and projected development on the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound, and Juan de Fuca Strait.

When you count Native American Tribes, 54 nations and hundreds of sub-national jurisdictions share the inland Salish Sea pictured above. Its drainage basin encompasses 45 thousand square miles where over 7 million people reside. According to one transborder atlas, the region’s population will grow by 1.9 million residents over the next 15 years. This growing human pressure throughout the Salish Sea presents significant challenges for this marine ecosystem.

Yet, this may be the first new North American ecosystem mapped in what several environmental historians call “the age of ecology” like Joachim Radkau, Daniel Press, and William Ophuls.