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BC’s best birdwatching hike: Boundary Bay Dyke Trail
In this week’s installment of Craig Romano’s Get Outside! column at Cascadia Magazine, you’ll learn about one of British Columbia’s best birdwatching sites: the Boundary Bay Dyke Trail in the Fraser River estuary. Running along the coast of Surrey and Delta, the trail is renowned for migratory birds in the fall and spring. It’s an easy, all-season trail where you can spot shorebirds, waterfowl, raptors (including snowy and short-eared owls) — as well as harbor seals and orcas. Read Craig’s full writeup online at Cascadia Magazine here.
And if your appreciate this and other hiking suggestions from across Cascadia, please consider becoming a supporting reader. You can make a contribution at any level at our donate page. And if you’re a contributing reader already, thanks a bunch!
Cascadia Magazine original: Creating Spokane
Spokane’s art scene is booming, thanks to a group of arts activists building a creative community in the Lilac City. In a feature online at Cascadia Magazine by Carrie Scozzaro, you’ll meet the people behind Terrain, Spark Central, and Laboratory — and learn why a growing number of artists are staying in or returning to Spokane.
Read more here.
Celebrate Cascadia Daily’s birthday: recommend us to a friend
This week marks the one-year anniversary of Cascadia Daily, and to celebrate we’re offering a drawing for an amazingly detailed map of Cascadia by David McCloskey. It’s a fantastic work of art, detailing the physical features, seafloor, forest ecosystems, and river systems of our region– without regard for political boundaries.
If you appreciate Cascadia Daily, we’re asking you to recommend this e-newsletter to a friend. It’s easy — you can use the button below or this link to forward this newsletter to someone you know. And if they sign up, you’ll be entered in a drawing to win this Cascadia map. We’ll announce the winners on December 5.
Did someone send you this email and you’d like to subscribe? You can sign up for free here!
And thank you for reading!
Decolonizing Thanksgiving
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US states of Cascadia, and at Seattle Globalist, Sandra Maszak has some advice for practicing gratitude while also acknowledging Indigenous history and its contemporary impact on real, living people. Sierra Red Bow reminds us that ““When you say ‘native’ it really hits on a diverse group of peoples from all over [the] United States, Alaska, and even up into Canada First Nations.” In related news, the Tyee looks at the fact that First Nations receive statistically higher criminal sentencing rates even though a 1999 supreme court order demanded changes.
How a BC mine threatens Alaska salmon
Samantha Larson, writing for Crosscut, has an amazing report on the cross-border implications of a British Columbia mining company and its effects on the fragile salmon habitat of southeast Alaska. A growing border dispute is brewing over practices of the Red Chris open-pit mine. The mine is operated by the same company responsible for a huge toxic tailing pit failure that’s one of BC’s worst environmental disasters. In related news, Sarah Cox at the Narwhal reports on proposed changes to BC’s environmental review process and finds it may still be biased toward industry.
Chinese crypto-currency firm opens “mine” in central WA
The Chinese firm Bitmain, one of the biggest players in the global cryptocurrency market, announced it will open a $20 million data center in Wenatchee, Washington — taking advantage of central WA’s below-market electricity prices. Meanwhile the New York Times reports on how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are taking a nose dive in value.
Jeff Bezos gives spare change to fight homelessness
Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos announced a donation of $5 million to an organization in Portland that assists homeless residents. While such a donation is nice and one of the largest in the city’s history, to put it in context, it’s equivalent to the cost of about 10 average-priced homes in the City of Roses. Meanwhile, Somali immigrant workers for Amazon are one of the few groups to organize and obtain concessions from the retail behemoth. And in the Department of Great Ironies, campaign workers for the Democratic Party in Oregon are facing resistance to their efforts to unionize.
Go Portland Timbers! (and other sporty news)
The Timbers, Portland’s MLS soccer team, are playing in the national semifinals on November 25 and 29, and though Cascadia Daily has a soft spot for the Seattle Sounders, we’re rooting for a Cascadia team to head to the national final! In other sporty news, the Seattle Mariners have traded pitcher James Paxton (who grew up in Delta, BC) to the dreaded New York Yankees. You may recall that Paxton demonstrated amazing Cascadia-fortitude by being unruffled when a bald eagle landed on his shoulder during the nation anthem. And in other sports news the totally bad-ass Rat City Roller Girls in Seattle will start their 15th season. If you’ve never seen roller derby, we highly recommend it!
Victoria’s Esi Edugyan wins Giller Prize
Victoria-based novelsit Esi Edugyan has won the Giller Prize (one of Canada’s most prestigious fiction prizes) for her novel Washington Black, the story of a slave in the Caribbean who assists his master in creating a flying machine. The BC author also won the prize previously for her 2011 novel Half-Blood Blues.
“Metes and Bounds,” poetry by Laura Da’
Over at the Seattle Review of Books, you can read “Metes and Bounds” by Laura Da’, who’s a professor at the University of Washington and a member of the Eastern Shawnee tribe.
“…The length of cotton
stretched between brass tacks
weaves its own
ledger-worthy autonomy…”
Read the full poem here.
That’s this evening’s collection of news, arts, and culture from across the Pacific Northwest. If you’re in the US, have a great Thanksgiving weekend! I’m headed out to the Washington coast to walk in the rain and eat vegan Vietnamese food. I’m grateful for all our fantastic readers here in the Pacific Northwest (and around the world!). Thank you. ? We hope you appreciate what we’ve been doing in the past year at Cascadia Daily and Cascadia Magazine. We’ll be resuming publication on Monday. –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: Indigenous resistance Thanksgiving poster by Flickr user dignidadrebelde CC BY-SA 2.0