Cascadia Daily, Nov. 20, 2018

by Andrew Engelson

Happy Birthday to Cascadia Daily! ?


Well, we made it to one year! The Pacific Northwest’s tastiest  selection of links to news, arts, environmental reporting, essays, fiction and poetry from across the Cascadia bioregion started up one year ago today. Hopefully, we’re a little more well behaved than a drooling toddler — but maybe as adorable?

Anyway, thank you so much for reading, we hope you enjoy the links you find here — as well as all the great original content at our parent publication: Cascadia Magazine.

If you appreciate what you see here, we’d appreciate if you recommend Cascadia Daily to your friends. If you use the link below, we’ll enter you in a drawing (one entry for each friend who subscibes!) to win an amazing map of Cascadia by master cartographer David McCloskey. It’s a true work of art, and the definitive map of the bioregion, featuring:

  • The natural integrity of the whole bioregional fabric across borders
  • Land and sea joined together as an inter-connected whole
  • Cascadia in continental context
  • Landscape colors representing vegetation and land cover, featuring the major forest formations of the bioregion

To enter to win, simply recommend friends with the link below:

Recommend Cascadia Daily to a friend

We’ll announce a winner on Wed. December 5

Cascadia Magazine original: Spokane’s thriving arts scene

Spokane, Washington has long had an inferiority complex. If you were a creative person, it was expected that you’d have to move away from Lilac City to succeed. But no longer. The city’s arts scene is keeping artists — and attracting new ones — thanks to the efforts of a group of activists working hard to build a creative community in the Inland Northwest.

In a feature now online at Cascadia Magazine, Carrie Scozzaro profiles the people who’ve been instrumental in fostering Spokane’s revival in the arts. In this feature you’ll meet:

Brooke Matson, executive director of Spark Central, an organization dedicated to helping a diverse group of people participate in arts, tech, and other creative endeavors.

Alan Chatham, who left Spokane in 2003, but returned in 2013 and shortly after founded Laboratory, a residency and exhibition space dedicated to interactive art

Ginger Ewing and Luke Baumgartner, the founders of Terrain, a vibrant arts organization that for ten years has become a central hub of Spokane’s creative scene with its groundbreaking events, arts sales, and community-building efforts.

Read more about how Spokane is becoming a haven for creative types online here.

Seattle metro area gets $1.2 billion for light rail

According to the Seattle Times, the US federal government approved allocation of $1.2 billion to Seattle-area Sound Transit to help build an extension of light rail to the suburb of Lynnwood. In other transport news, Vancouver is poised to finally approve ride-sharing from Uber and Lyft, but the Tyee wonders if its workers will be adequately protected. Meanwhile, new fast ferry service started between Kingston on Washington’s Kitsap peninsula and Seattle, and Portland and Vancouver, WA are investigating starting ferry service across the Columbia River.

Judge grants Portland group’s request to block Trump on asylum

OPB reports that a federal judge agreed to block implementation of the Trump adminstration’s plans to stop granting asylum to refugees who have entered the country outside of designated entry points. The case was brought to court by the Portland based group Innovation Law Lab.

Proud Boys in Vancouver WA designated extremist group by FBI

The Guardian reports that the FBI — after extensively investigating the activities of the Proud Boys group based in Vancouver, WA — has designated the white nationalist organization an “extremist group.” Proud Boys activists have been inciting clashes in Portland in the past year. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler has struggled to limit the conflicts, and even muttered after a recent speech he “can’t wait” to be done with the job.

Inside the karsts of Vancouver Island

Bruce Grierson, writing for Hakai magazine, has an amazing, detailed feature on the people who study and explore the karst caves of northeast Vancouver Island — it’s a fascinating journey deep below the surface, where wonders await. Says one researcher, “If you monitor a cave long enough, you will find a never-before-seen species.”

Seattle galleries tackle the topic of climate change

Over at Crosscut, Brangien Davis looks at how several prominent galleries in Seattle and beyond are featuring artwork that asks hard questions about climate change. Says Paul Yuxweluptun, a First Nations artist featured at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, “You don’t always like the subject matter. But someone has to do it.”

Reviewing two key poets of Cascadia

BC BookLook has a review of two collections of poetry by British Columbia poets who’ve helped defined the region’s poetic character: Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah. And there’s a lot more than salmon and mountains to be found within (although they have their place). “For decades, Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah have been acclaimed as eminent Canadian authors — as figures of national significance — yet their bodies of work are intensely regional, almost perversely so.”

That’s all for today from Cascadia Daily. Thanks for reading! –Andrew Engelson

Photo credit: Sound Transit train by Oran Viriyincy via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0