A Sightline Institute report published in March 2004. Also see Cascadia Scorecard 2005.

Over the past century, the Northwest--the region encompassing British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and western Montana, also called Cascadia--has changed dramatically: Northwesterners have multiplied their number ninefold, added three decades to their lives, and increased their economic output thirtyfold. Their cities and farms have spread across the region's most fertile lowlands. Their clearcuts, dams, ranches, and roads have transformed much of the remaining landscape.

These changes--you could call them "slow news"--are extreme over decades but almost imperceptible day to day. But in most ways they shape the region's future more profoundly than fleeting, headline-grabbing events. The routine permitting and building of new houses, for example, has more lasting effects than a house fire that draws TV cameras.

But such long-term trends are poorly tracked. Even the few indicators reported in the media-such as the Dow Jones or the gross domestic product--are misleading. The GDP, for example, can rise even as economic security diminishes, as it did during the "jobless recovery" of 2003.

To fill this gap, Sightline Institute introduced the Cascadia Scorecard, a new regional gauge of progress that monitors seven trends critical to the region's future: health, economy, population, sprawl, energy, forests, and pollution.

In its regular updates, the Scorecard puts a spotlight on the long view and the questions that matter most over time: Are we living longer, healthier lives? Are we building strong human communities? Are we handing down to our children a place with healthy and intact ecosystems?

This first edition of the Scorecard--titled Cascadia Scorecard: Seven Key Trends Shaping the Northwest--included findings on which state or province "scores" best; how northwesterners are doing by national and international standards; and how long it might take the region to reach real-world goals for each trend. Following is a brief summary of the report.

1. Health: Cascadia scores eighth in the world

• Lifespan is the best single measure of a population's health, reflecting everything that can shorten human existence-from infectious diseases to traffic accidents to cancer. A century ago, northwesterners' lifespan averaged 47 years; by 2001, it had increased to 79 years. British Columbians--with an average lifespan of 80.7 years--have the longest life expectancy in the Northwest and among Canadian provinces. If it were a nation, BC would have the second longest lifespan in the world. The Northwest as a whole would rank eighth.
• The Scorecard looks at factors that may contribute to longevity, including community design, social connectedness, health care, and individual choices. British Columbia's more pedestrian-oriented urban design, for example, may explain why obesity is about one-third less common in the province than in the Northwest states. In Oregon, fatality rates from diabetes have nearly tripled over the past two decades; in Washington, they have almost doubled. In Idaho, cars and firearms were instrumental in half of the deaths of 15-to-34-year-olds and lowered life expectancy by nearly a year.
  
• If lifespan gains continue apace, British Columbia will reach Japan's best-in-the-world mark of 81.3 years in 2006; the Northwest states will follow in 2023.

2. Economy: Lagging by national standards

• Since 1990, the Northwest's total economic output has risen by more than 63 percent and per capita personal income has grown by 23 percent. But during the same period, incomes have skyrocketed for the wealthy while stagnating for the poor in the region. ?
• The Cascadia Scorecard gauges the economy's real-world effects on working families with a fourfold index that integrates typical household incomes, the unemployment rate, the poverty rate, and the child poverty rate.
  
• By this measure, the Northwest has lost ground since 1990, even as national indicators have improved. From 1990 to 2002, the poverty rate crept up from 9.7 percent to 11 percent in the Northwest states, while the national poverty rate dipped to its lowest level in decades. Since 1999 BC's poverty rate has exceeded the Canadian national average.
• Since 1995--when high-tech boom was taking off--the Northwest states' jobless rate has surpassed the national rate; BC saw a similar trend. BC's median income has shrunk by four percent from 1990 to 2001; and the Northwest states have seen fewer gains in median income than the US as a whole. And by European standards no part of the Northwest has done well at curbing child poverty. Records in other regions of both countries-the Midwest states, for example-suggest that greater economic security for the Northwest is possible.

3. Population: Birthrates dip, but unplanned births in states still high

• Population trends are an excellent gauge of women's--and families'--well-being. Around the world, as women's opportunities improve, birthrates decline, family size shrinks, and women postpone childbearing. Population growth also contributes to most increases in ecological harm in the region.
• The Scorecard analyzes a key driver of population trends--natural increase, or births minus deaths. In 2002, natural increase dropped to its lowest rate in 25 years, a product of a decades--long tapering of birthrates. British Columbia has the region's lowest birthrate, a teen birthrate one-third that of the Northwest states, and the lowest total fertility rate (lifetime births per woman). Idaho has the region's highest birthrate (and population growth rate).
• Possible causes of BC's record include greater access to effective contraception and lower child poverty rates. If the Northwest states emulated BC, they could reduce their high percentage of unplanned births-over one-third of all births in the Northwest states are unintended.
• But even BC pales when compared with other parts of the world. The province's teen birthrate is double that of Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands. Germany, Japan, and most of eastern and southern Europe have smaller average families than BC.

4. Energy use: Scoring low

• Of all the commodities produced and consumed in the region, none casts a longer shadow than energy use; it affects everything from national security to economic development, and from salmon survival to climate stability. ?
• As proxies for overall energy use, the Cascadia Scorecard tracks highway fuels and nonindustrial electricity. By this measure, Cascadia scores poorly: Northwesterners have moderated their energy consumption since 1990-but the decline hasn't been enough to budge it off the high plateau where it has been stuck since the 1970s. The typical resident of Cascadia uses more energy than a Californian, and almost as much as a Texan.
• The Northwest could emulate Germany, which has already reduced its emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide by 17 percent since 1990 and has raised its wind-power capacity to 8,700 megawatts-15 times the Northwest's wind capacity.
• Closer to home, Vancouver, BC, is a model for its use of highway fuels and Seattle for its electricity use. With the right policies in place, the region could supplant most of its fossil-fuel-fired electric power plants by 2020. This would save almost half a billion dollars a year, boost rural economies, and make the Northwest a leader in climate-friendly electricity.

5. Sprawl: A tale of seven cities

• Sprawl locks northwesterners into an auto-dependent lifestyle, with an attendant burden on pocketbooks, the world's oil fields, and the planet's atmosphere. It pollutes the air and water, turns walking into recreation rather than transportation, consumes farmland and open space, and ruins lowland ecosystems.
• To measure the pace of sprawl in three metropolitan areas and four mid-size cities-Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Boise, Eugene, Victoria, and Spokane-the Scorecard maps changes in residential density over the last decade (see Cascadia Scorecard's maps, p. 41-48). Though the region's predominant pattern is still sprawl, its record has improved since 1990: in each metropolitan area, the share of people living in compact neighborhoods increased over the past decade.
• Idaho lacks a comprehensive growth management strategy, as evidenced by Boise's status as the most sprawling Northwest city: only 7 percent of greater Boise residents lived in compact neighborhoods in 2000, compared to 12 percent of residents in Eugene, 10 percent in Spokane, and 34 percent in Victoria.
• Growth management laws helped contain new development within Seattle and Portland's urban growth boundaries. Seattle was more successful in some cases: Fully 18 percent of greater Seattle's new housing permits in 2000 and 2001 were located in compact neighborhoods, twice the share as in the three Oregon counties of Portland.
• But Vancouver, BC, is the region's clear leader in smart growth, with more than six out of ten residents in compact neighborhoods in 2001. At current rates, decades will pass before the cities in the Northwest states can hope to match the record that British Columbia's two largest urban areas have already achieved.

6. Forests: Tracking 30 years of clearcuts in five areas

• Tracking clearcuts provides a rough gauge for how extensively humans have altered the forests of the Northwest. The Scorecard tracks forest cover in five key areas of the region over a 30-year period with satellite maps from the NASA Landsat system (see maps, p. 49-55).
  
• The five study areas include the Olympic Peninsula; a Central Cascades area that includes Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helen's; an area in southern Oregon; and two areas in the British Columbia interior. Together, they include 29.2 million acres of forests--roughly 15 percent of the Northwest's total forestland.
  
• In the three US areas, clearcutting was most intense in the early 1970s-more than 250,000 acres each year-and dipped to less than 80,000 acres per year by the end of the 1990s. The Northwest Forest Plan, which severely restricted cutting on federal land, is responsible for much of the 1990s decline in logging. But since 2000, clearcutting has accelerated again, reaching roughly one acre every five minutes, or 100,000 acres a year. 
  
• From 1971 to 2002, more than 24 percent of forests in the five areas-an area the size of Massachusetts-were clearcut. The Olympic Peninsula had the largest share of its forest cut. But the Central Cascades study area lost a larger total number of acres. The two British Columbia areas saw less cutting, but the logging occurred almost exclusively in virgin forest.
  
• The Scorecard recommends safeguarding remnant virgin forests through conservation easements and expanded protected areas, and promoting sustainable forestry practices.

7. Pollution: Measuring body burdens

• Humans and other creatures contain within their tissues a thin soup of chemicals that didn't exist a century ago, and their effects also go largely unmonitored: Only about 7 percent of the 85,000 chemicals now registered for commercial use in the United States have been tested for toxicity.
• The most worrisome class of toxics-persistent bioaccumulative toxins (PBTs)-share three characteristics: They break down slowly; accumulate in living tissue; and harm human bodily functions. The Cascadia Scorecard is analyzing breast milk in mothers across the Northwest for levels of three such toxics: polychloryl biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and dioxin.
• Both PCBs, which have been banned since the late 1970s, and dioxin, an unwanted industrial byproduct, have been linked to health problems ranging from intellectual impairment to cancer. PBDEs, chemicals widely used as flame retardants in consumer products, are suspected of similar effects, and their levels appear to be rising exponentially in the breast milk of North American mothers. ?
• The March book on the Cascadia Scorecard will discuss this study, with a release announcing full results planned for later in 2004.

Measuring progress, finding solutions

What's the big picture? Four of the indicators offer good news. Cascadia shines in human health-the region's lifespan ranks eighth in the world. Its economic security and birthrates are also good, by world standards. Clearcutting has decelerated, though it remains rapid.

But there are many areas for improvement. The two biggest priorities are controlling sprawl and energy consumption: despite a well-deserved reputation for innovation in energy efficiency, northwesterners still consume like Texans. And though they are building communities that are more compact, sprawl is still the region's dominant pattern of growth. Unintended pregnancies and births to teens remain commonplace. And northwesterners' economic security did not keep pace with North America overall.

The Scorecard presents an experimental, three-step method for combining the indicators into a unified index that marks how far away the region is from reaching a real-world goal for each indicator. Japan, for example, is the target for lifespan. Vancouver, BC, offers a best-in-the-region model for sprawl. Germany suggests a goal for energy use.

Thousands of northwesterners are already at work turning the region toward a future in which Cascadia leads the world, in which the Pacific Northwest achieves the elusive goal of reconciling people with place. The book points to several priorities. To yield dramatic improvements in energy and sprawl will require approaches that are systemic, such as tax shifting; redirecting markets to promote sustainability; and-as a foundation-better monitoring of the region's progress through projects like the Scorecard.

What we watch, we change. Attending mostly to the dramatic, we neglect the slow. Monitoring flawed gauges such as stock prices, consumer confidence, and gross domestic product, we organize our institutions to generate high stock prices, confident consumers, and an increasing GDP. Conversely, because we do not watch them, we do not get the healthiest lives, the strongest communities, or the most vibrant ecosystems. The ultimate aspiration of the Cascadia Scorecard is to give us these things.

Cascadia Scorecard was written by Sightline Institute's research team: Executive director Alan Durning, research director Clark Williams-Derry, and research associate Eric de Place. For a copy of Cascadia Scorecard, or an interview with one of the authors, contact Elisa Murray at 206-447-1880, ext. 111 or elisa@sightline.org. An online press room for Cascadia Scorecard is available at www.cascadiascorecard.org.