Bullitt Foundation

Originally endowed with an extravagant abundance of natural biological capital, Cascadia is at an inflection point in its history.

Originally endowed with an extravagant abundance of natural biological capital, Cascadia is at an inflection point in its history. Following more than a century of intensive exploitation of its natural resources, Cascadia is now turning green. It is restoring its abused landscapes, and it is on the cusp of becoming a global model for a new approach to human ecology.Cascadia already has a reputation for environmentally enlightened leadership. Through its innovations in science, technology, commerce, and culture, the region exerts a disproportionate national, and even global, impact relative to its size and population. Its political leaders tend to be unusually knowledgeable about, and committed to, environmental values.Here, as around the world, human activity has reached a scale where it is interfering with such fundamental global phenomena as the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the hydrologic cycle. Often we have no clear sense of all the consequences of our actions, but we have a mounting awareness that many of these consequences will be dire.