Be the Story Evolution

From Borders to Bioregions: The Birth of Cascadia

Two decades ago, the world realized that at the current pace of climate change, there would be no world left for our descendants.  At a meeting of the United Nations, there was intense debate and discussion about what should be down, the current countries that existed were counter intuitive as they were draw from lines that were made hundreds of years ago.  After much debate, it was decided that something needed to be done about the current organization of the world because the way it was right now led to much conflict and competition amongst the existing countries.  There was a theory that had existed for awhile called bioregionalism, one that felt that the earth naturally structured itself in a certain way, a way that was natural.  Since man had tried all they could do they decided maybe it was time that they try to embrace this change and maybe experiment with one new country first to see how it would work out.  This first country that they decided to create was called Cascadia.  

It was formed from parts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California.  When they created it, they deemed that it should be able to govern itself without outside interference and people from the existing United States and Canada could migrate to and from Cascadia as they pleased.  One key tenet though of this new society was that they wanted to see what it would do about its contributions to climate change once they were let free to operate as a smaller independent country and integrated that into its charter or constitution.  Naturally, the Pacific Northwest area, was already environmentally conscious, so they took up to this challenge immediately.  They now had the financial capital of a country that they never had before and took that challenge to take on ambitious infrastructure projects to decrease their impacts on the environment.  This plan trickled down to all aspects of society, from the country down to the individual to the city.

Cascadia as a whole had several key projects that they wanted to work on connect their region and deliver massive amounts of clean energy cheaply for their residents.  They took inspiration from ideas that had already taken hold in other countries and began to implement them.  France was looked to as a beacon of clean energy as most of their energy was from carbon free sources, nuclear and hydropower.  The cascades were already scattered with dams, all Cascadia had to do was leverage those plus construct additional nuclear plants on the east side of the state to avoid the tectonic activity in the west.  With these new power sources, supplemented with solar and wind for peak demand in the summer, they were able to provide clean power while not charing too much, providing a boost to their local economy with cheap power.  They also looked to China for inspiration on how they should be transporting people and goods throughout their country, the solution high speed rail.

High speed rail was constructed first north to south connecting all the major cities throughout the region.  Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland were connected first to provide a major thru-way to transport goods around, utilizing what used to be interstate five to provide the land they needed to build it.  They did the same when connecting Seattle to Spokane utilizing the old interstate ninety to do that.  All throughout the region though there were still cities that were not connected and people still needed to begrudgingly drive to.  The overall solution they proposed was a regional rail network fully electrified that could provide higher-speed rail to all the cities that were not yet connected to the high speed rail network and integrating the two so that trains would be able to travel from one to the other without needing to stop.  The cities within Cascadia, inspired by the moves of the country each came up with their own plans to address climate change as well.

In Cascadia's capitol city of Seattle, there had long already been environmental movements at play within the city.  Seattle was one of the first cities in the United States to implement city wide composting in a goal to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that were produced by landfills that the city had been sending waste to.  Even though they had been lacking in transit, they also in the beginning of the century embarked on one of the most aggressive public transit expansions that they had ever seen to that date.  Inspired by these early efforts in transit, they decided that they should be able to make the capitol city car free so that absolutely no one would have to drive there.

It began with a purposely to aggressively expand the light rail network so that everyone lived within a ten minute walk of either a major station or a street car line that would then connect into the light rail system.  This was a tall order to implement but the city chased after it with a singular vision, leveraging advantages in automation such as robotics to greatly speed up the construction of such a transit network.  The real changes though that enabled cars to be taken away from city streets happened within the neighborhoods themselves, the city realized that they could only connect the neighborhoods like they had in the past, not force them to be a place that people wanted to walk about and live in.

Queen Anne is a perfect example of how one of these neighborhoods when from a car-infested network of dark roads into a vibrant green fantasy like only seen in an urban designers wildest fantasies.  The first thing they started with was increasing the frequency of trolleybuses within their neighborhood which was powered by overhead wires.  They then expanded the network of these buses so that everyone was within a five minute walk of one of these stops.  Soon, people were giving up their cars in favor of this form of transit since it was so much faster than driving.  To improve quality of life further, trolleybuses were soon replaced with streetcars that were quieter but still could get around easily.  Soon streets were getting ripped out and the tramways were becoming green.  Goods were being delivered by drones eliminating the need for roads to transport freight within the city.  This vastly improved the daily live for all citizens as walking forced them to live a healthier more active life increasing the longevity of the average person.

One of the people living in Queen Annes was Jacob.  Jacob is a video game designer who works in the nearby suburb of Redmond.  His daily commute involved taking the light rail too and from work, while taking in the amazing views of Mt Rainier when weather permitted.  He loved how now he was able to take calls and work on the train to work, reducing the amount of time that he spent in the office, but also make his days more productive since now his focus in the office was that of interacting with his peers and collaborating to make the next great thing.  Drones delivered goods to his house so he never had to worry about driving to get things, and when he wanted to hike on a trail outside the city, regional rail was now able to take him there.  All he had to do was bike to the trailhead on his e-bike, and then soak in the scenes as he walked on amazing trails such as Park Buttes in the Mt Baker wilderness.

Given the success that they had with Cascadia, the UN decided maybe it was time to embrace bioregionalism more fully.  They split the world into the proper bioregions, and let them decided locally how they wanted to tackle climate change and mitigate their impact on damaging the planet.  Will this solution work, only time can tell, hopefully Cascadia was not just a one off solution.