The first time I saw it, a guy in a rain-soaked Sounders hoodie muttered, half to himself: “They should just let Cascadia go.” No one argued. A few people nodded, eyes on the game. Around here, it doesn’t sound like a joke.
Cascadia isn’t an abstract idea anymore. It’s baked into the power grid, the salmon runs, the fire seasons that cross borders without asking. Washington, Oregon, British Columbia—different governments, same resources, same problems. Geography ties the region together more tightly than politics ever has.
Romantic visions of pine-tree flags and breakaway states miss the point. The real version looks like transit boards, firefighting compacts, joint climate plans. A slow re-wiring until Cascadia functions as one system, whether anyone admits it or not.
The hotter the world gets, the more obvious it becomes. Disasters don’t care about jurisdictions. They care about rivers, coastlines, fault lines. And this geography runs north–south. Not east–west.
So maybe the question isn’t if Cascadia happens. Maybe it’s whether we’ll recognize what’s already in front of us.
Because when the grid fails or the water runs short, nobody here calls Washington, D.C. They call each other. And when a stadium full of people stands under a giant fir tree on blue, white, and green, it doesn’t feel symbolic.
It feels like a border, waiting to be drawn.