Sightline Institute monitors key trends shaping the future of Cascadia--and the most important solutions for the region to implement. But what is Cascadia?

Cascadia is another name for the Pacific Northwest, a region defined by the watersheds that flow into the Pacific Ocean through North America's temperate rainforest zone that includes British Columbia, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and adjoining parts of Alaska, Montana, and California.

The Northwest is home to more than 15 million people, along with diminished but still impressive numbers of salmon, eagles, grizzly bears, killer whales, and wolves. It boasts an economy that generates more than $450 billion worth of goods and services each year.

Long united by similar indigenous cultures, Cascadia was once briefly a single political unit-the Oregon Territory-shared by several nations. The region has since been divided into different political jurisdictions, but this place has a dawning sense of itself: a place bound by salmon and rivers, snowcapped mountains and towering forests, and a people who share geography, history, and aspirations.

Cascadia has traditions of innovation in the public and private sectors, a well-educated populace, and a reputation for a commitment to the environment and quality of life that continues to draw migrants even when unemployment rises.

This is no accident: Cascadia retains a larger share of its ecosystems intact than perhaps any other part of the industrial world and has helped set the conservation agenda for the continent-with the first bottle bills and urban growth management laws in the 1970s, trend-setting energy conservation and curbside recycling efforts in the 1980s, old-growth forest protection in the 1990s, and the first endangered species listings to affect major cities.

But there is a broader challenge to which Cascadia is just beginning to rise: gradually but fundamentally realigning the human enterprise so that the region's economies and their supporting ecosystems both can thrive. Daunting, complex, systemic, seemingly quixotic, this goal-harmonizing people and place-is nonetheless more attainable here than anywhere else on this continent. If northwesterners can reconcile themselves with their landscapes, they can set an example for the world.