David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed below.

To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here.

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Transcript of Paul E. Nelson interviewing David McCloskey (The Father of Cascadia)

 

Pt 1:

Paul E. Nelson:

When you look back at the recent congressional shutdown of the federal government, it seems like such petty politics, so random, unnecessary and futile, yet it is the same mentality that created many of the lines we know now as international boundaries. The 49th parallel that separates the US from Canada being one line we’ll discuss today as we chat with a man who has dedicated the bulk of his life to a bioregional understanding of the part of the world some called Cascadia, which includes parts of Northern California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, West of the Continental Divide, all of Washington, most of British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle. David McCloskey, former professor, I should say Professor Emeritus at Seattle U. I’m so honored to sit down and talk with you and have tea and, and discuss Cascadia. 

David McCloskey:

Well, we’re sitting here, almost at Dia de Los Muertos, in Eugene at the end of the Willamette Valley and the last light sifting through the golden trees. And, I began by giving you an orientation to where you are at the upper end of the Willamette Valley. 

PEN:

I almost wish I was recording that because everything that’s coming out of you is really remarkable. It’s rooted in place and is a real education for me, so I’m grateful. 

DM:

Well, I start from place because place is where we live and where we learn, need to learn to dwell. Starting from political boundaries transposes us into an abstract space. And so much of our lives, so much of our education is caught up in abstractions and idealities. Our moralities are idealities for the most part, which are ungrounded. And so when you start from where you are, you start from the real world, try to get your feet on the ground and try to establish some fundamental or originary relationship with the place. To me, the place is alive. And I think that is the tradition of most of humankind that the places where we live are alive, that it is a living earth and the bioregion is not only a live place, but is itself alive. So when I think of Cascadia, I think of the waters pouring down our mountains. 

And so Cascadia is not first an idea or a political entity in any traditional sense. It is a verb, a phenomenon. It is a standing forth of energies. And the bind, bounding of those energies creates this house. And that house has a particular character in context. And it’s that house or oikos in which we live that we need to recover a fundamental relationship with. And so that’s the essence of the bioregional vision and that is the essence of Cascadia. So you think of Cascadia first as a verb. Not as a political entity, as a spatial construct, as an idea, as a utopia, all these projections onto the idea of Cascadia. And it’s just taken on these accretions over and over and over again as people engage in their wish fulfillments and have to begin to unlearn their own culture, which is basically separating us from these places. 

PEN:

Wish fulfillment. Projections. Psyche projections. 

DM:

Psyche projections. And they’re not inherently bad. [Paul laughs] For what people are searching for is a place to call home, in which there’s a window to an acceptable future in which we can not just survive, but thrive. I don’t know about sustainability, but I’m calling for like restoring our forest for a thousand years. Let’s think about a thousand years, not a couple generations, or children or grandchildren. But what would it mean to dwell in this place a millennium from now or two? 

PEN:

You use the word oikos, which Gary Snyder talks about, talks about that being the root of the word ecology. So Earth Household is a Gary Snyder book and, and he’s very much steeped in a bio-regional point of view. That’s a place we could go, a place that we might follow up with. But you also talked about abstraction. That could be a long sidebar as well. [both laugh] And, and you being a former academic. I don’t know, can you be a former academic person, once an academic, always an academic? You said on the walk that you could out abstract just about anybody. The abstraction going back to the Greeks, the separation of myth and logos. 

DM:

Yeah. Yeah. Gary one time told me that…we were up in the Queen Charlottes on a boat and he said, “I just had to admit it lately that I’m a scholar.” And I thought that was a way, because he is. And that tremendous depth of Asian, Chinese, et cetera, Zen scholarship. And so many of our poets in the region have such a deep familiarity with those traditions. And I think with native traditions, and they’ve come on even more, you’ve got a book of sculpture and prints here that’s very important. When you begin with political boundaries, and those entities as defining our identities in the place, telling us who we are here together and what our, our frame and purpose and ground is, then we’ve transposed our lives into those abstractions. And I think it’s a fundamental mistake to think first in terms of political boundaries. 

So I would not start the description of Cascadia in terms of the slices of states, but rather the Pacific slope, the Pacific rim of fire, the great forests that clothe the place, the native peoples that dwelled here for 10,000 years. And so it’s basically the life and the life forms of the place that define the place as a bioregion, as an oikos that has its own life, characteristic life and, and context. So, it’s interesting to see people struggle with the notion of a place, a life place of Cascadia as a bioregion, et cetera. Because the first take that people have is their conventions. Those then reveal all the categories and the abstractions and the idealities that displace us, that take us out of the place, that really lead to the undoing of ecology, of the creation of a grounded culture here, the cause of our environmental crises, et cetera. 

So our relations with the place and relations with each other are undone by all these transpositions into abstract categories. And people need to get their feet on the ground. And the ground here is wonderful. It’s a beautiful place. 

PEN:

We see the ultimate manifestation of that abstraction in patriots and people who use, you know, patriotism as a religion. And I’m thinking of the quote, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” And we see that at its, perhaps its all time epidemic high with the kind of jingoism and anti-immigrant sentiment that we have in the United States. So it’s interesting what starts out as an abstraction, how it manifests into, you know, drone warfare and bombing wedding parties and, you know, war on forests and many manifestations of that dominator impulse. I wanted to get into something that you and I talked about when we were walking and that was your having grown up in Cascadia. 

DM:

Well, we’re sitting on the patio in front of a house on a corner where I grew up. And so one of the themes of becoming Cascadian, becoming a dweller in the land is home. I’d rather give a different take on place and patria and the country. First, if you’re gonna work on that abstract level, you would need to distinguish between the country and the state and the nation. And most of our critiques are directed at states as an entity, as a political entity. But not the country. And then what we need to do in terms of nations is call forth a new identity here. I’m trying to, myself with others, create a new culture here, an ecological culture, a culture that’s grounded in the life of the place. So we’re really working on a poetics of landscape here for 20-30 years in trying to evoke a new set of images, maps, poetry, stories. 

And so in order to become a people here, we have to have a shared story of who we are here. And so that’s what my invitation to, to poetry [laughs], and to other artists and thinkers and so on is to help engage in that process. Now in terms of home, I like Ursula’s always coming home as a, as a refrain, as a title. 

PEN:

Ursula Le Guin. 

DM:

Yeah. But it’s a story of a people who might be going to have lived here. And that kind of future perfect tense is a very interesting thing. And that’s who we are. As we try to unfold a story of what it means to live in this place, within the life of this place. Then we’re trying to take on the imagination of the place. To dwell within that imagination. Now we could unfold that as a sidebar, what would that mean? 

PEN:

But I’d like to get the story of you being a kid, running around these woods. 

DM:

Well, okay. So we’re in the home place here. So when I retired, we looked for places and we kind of had a reservation here. But that was always an option to come home. And so, being true to the bioregional vision, we came home. It was a very difficult, long process of building a new home or remodeling the family home. But I grew up here between the hills and the river, and so we kind of oscillated as kids always going, fleeing to the woods and building forts and all that stuff that boys do. And then rolling on our bikes or running down to the river and playing in the river. The rivers, the Willamette River, the great river of this valley, the kind of Eden for which people trekked west. But there were actually two rivers growing up here. 

One was brown and one was green. One was dead and one was alive. Unfortunately, the river closest to me, that we could just roll the ball down the hill or ride the bike down the hill, just naturally everything goes down to the river. The river’s the center here versus Puget Sound. Everything’s an edge. High edge in the mountains or lower edge with glaciated islands and so on. But everything here rolls down to the river. It’s a different kind of phenomenon. So that’s where we grew up. In that tension between the mountains, the foothills where I live and, and the Great River. The Green River was the Mackenzie River and it was alive. It was a whitewater river. It was a humming river, a fishing River, a river-running river, fabulous river, dangerous river. And it tumbles out of the deep well of springs in the high Cascades here. 

And it has some of the most fabulous waterfall trails, waterfalls, Sahalie and Koosah. And so I grew up with the images of that iconic white water river and the sound of these thundering waterfalls and then the waterfall trail. Then when I got my [laughs] my feet as it were, we could move out. We spent all our time in the woods and in the mountains. And when I could actually go climbing and hiking, we roared up to the high Cascades. But I actually didn’t conceive of Cascadia then or really know Cascadia because I only had five or six years here before we married, moved to graduate school. When I went to graduate school, like with everybody else and moving into that professional world, you move out of the life world. You move out of the community. You move out of your relations with friends and family. You move into a vertical world. The sociologists call that gesellschaft, means a rational organizational, but it’s a world dominated by those abstractions that we’ve learned from the Greeks from 2,300 years [ago]. And you learn to tell the secret code. The secret code is the code by which you control the world through organizations and through various mentalities. But what it does is it displaces the place. And so the theme of coming home means to unlearn that secret code. And I know that secret code as well as anybody who runs any organization or sets up a discipline. The French have this word disevermont, to disever. Or the Montana poet, I forget his name. I forget his name. Paul. Anyway, right now, he has the great line, “The opposite of remembering is not forgetting but dismembering.” And that’s what we’ve learned the practice of dismemberment or dis- diseverment. 

And we see the consequences of that in our families, in our communities, in our economies, in our culture and in, above all, the ecosystems. And it has the same root cause each time is that same secret coding, which puts us into abstract idealities, which leads to the disseverment or the dismembering of our life world. So anyway, I really recovered that life world in the mid ’70s, late ’70s when I got out of graduate school and stopped all this [laughs] incredible abstraction and trying to master that secret code. I wrote a 1400 page dissertation. And so that’s how far you go into that. And then I taught for 33 years at Seattle U. And I loved it. There’s a place for it. But I actually escaped and learned Cascadia in the backyard of Seattle, in the North Cascades. I realized that was where I really became imprinted on the fabulous, fabulous forest. 

The silver fir forest and the mountain hemlock forest and the steep gradients and the, god, the green and white plaids, the hanging valleys and the, oh my God, the rivers, the Nooksack and the Skagit and the Snoqualmie and the Skycomish and they’re just a necklace of rivers. We used to chant the song of the rivers as we’d go hiking and climbing up there. Has the most fabulous alpine wonderland, the parkland, the heatherlands up there in the North Cascades. So the North Cascades became the formative place for Cascadia, not growing up in Eugene. I was imprinted here, but you’re too young and you’re just learning the world and you don’t even know that there’s a secret code. Is that too much, too fast? 

PEN:

No, no, no. No, I’m just – 

DM:

There’s a lot of levels involved here. Stories go round and round.

PEN:

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. You know, Charles Olson said, the projective verse approach to making a poem was, “a use of speech at its least careless and least logical.” So I like the conversations to be that way as well, spontaneous. [laughs]

Pt 3:

 

PEN: Mid- 70s, I’m trying to picture how the concept of bioregionalism got into your head. Because you know I had interviewed Peter Berg many years ago, of the Planet Drum Foundation. And that’s how I learned about how to look at things in terms of a bioregion. And he said, “No look at the place where you live, all those rivers end with -ish, that suffix, Snohomish, Duwamish and what have you. And he said you know that’s from the native language, Lushootseed, or Twulshootseed. And I joked that it means kill the white man with a hatchet, [both laugh] but it doesn’t, what it means is the people of that particular river. 

 

DM: Of that river, upriver and downriver.

 

PEN: Right, so how did you learn about bioregionalism?

 

DM: Well, I went to graduate school in New York City and then finished up at the University of Oregon and wanted to come home. And then that wanting to come home…it was fabulous living in the city and on the east coast and so on, and you know you need to leave home, everybody needs to leave home. So this is not about provincialism at all. It’s about, Bioregionalism is about ever deeper levels of relationality. So when I give a critique of something it does not mean that I’m negating it necessarily but trying to put it in a larger context. 

 

So in the late 70s, mid-late 70s, I was finishing the dissertation. I spent ‘76 on an NEH fellowship in Berkley with Robert Bellah and out of that came the Habits of the Heart book, out of the people in that seminar. In Habits of the Heart, Bellah and his co-writers had a nice little phrase in there where they were talking about community, right, and the loss of community. It was Reagan’s era and Reagan was doing to American economy and community…I was listening to Bruce Springsteen the other day, My Hometown, he puts the kid on his lap and takes him around, and sings, “Job’s are going now son, take a good look around, this is your hometown.” And I had the feeling of this fundamental, pervasive, perfidy, that the people in charge of the economy and the politics and the culture were perfidious, they were losing faith. They may say they were conservative, they may say they were progressives but they were selling us all out. And we saw that with Reagan’s era Rape of the Forest. And the Rape of the Forest by the Reagan regime here was the start of one of the great land use battles over the Old Growth and then Salmon in the 20th century. And that was basically the Back-to-the-Landers after the Cambodian invasion and Reagan there. So the bioregionalists were the first ones to dig their heels in and swear this fierce loyalty, identification, and defense of the place. Of their own backyards. It began against toxic spraying, it began with various things but it coalesced into the Old Growth. And that was one of the great crusades of the last part of the century. 

 

But I felt it on many levels that the same kind of perfidy that we were seeing in the forests was going on with the economy and the culture. And the people in charge were actually undermining things, with Reagan being a classic example of that. So [I was] chaffing at having to finish classes and degrees, I had everything done for the doctoral degree at 23 in New York City. 23, what do you know? You don’t know anything at 23 you’re just barely trying to master a language, an abstract language. 

 

So I came home, dropped out, came back here, worked in a mill, in a cannery, did construction, taught night school, then I moved up to Seattle U. And I needed something to ground me in the real world. I was obviously very successful in that abstraction conceptualization world, but it didn’t seem real. So anyway I taught at Seattle U, then came down here to finish at Oregon, then went to Berkeley. But throughout all of that where the world was just changing on its axis and disintegrating I felt like I was not in it, part of it. And one day I said, “Um why the hell do I know more about a 12th century village than I know about my home place, my region.” And there was this kind of existential shift on an axis, snap as it were, in about ‘76-‘77. And the books, I began signing Cascadia in there. 

 

Now, Ecotopia was big at the time and everybody read it, but Ecotopia was useful as a story that did two things. It gave us a narrative against the Reaganite onslaught against the forest and so on and it kind of institutionalized Berkeley-environmental-consumerism from the ‘70s. I was there, I knew exactly, y’know, what Berkeley in the mid 70s, ‘76-‘77 was like and that was what Ecotopia and Callenbach wrote. And it’s a very lame story, and Ecotopia 2: Emerging was unreadable [Paul laughs]. It became iconic up here, but it never led anywhere because it was another ‘topia’. And I became not interested in it at all. 

 

Cascadia was among those searching for a grounded alternative and digging in their heels to fight for the life of their place and their families and economies. Cascadia began to seep in. and I caught the bug. It was a new myth. And I had heard about it before, Freeman House, for instance, on Whidbey was talking about Cascadia, and Eugene people were talking about Cascadia, and projecting all kinds of utopian images into it. 

 

But then I finally found [McKee’s] book Cascadia: the Geologic Evolution of the Pacific Northwest, and I thought here’s the start, this is great. And I loved the cover. It had Mt. St. Helens on the cover, and I thought, now this is it. And it was a valuable book in a way because it’s the first one that treated the Pacific Northwest along with [British Columbia] as a whole. It harkened back to the first myth of the place, which was from the geologists at the turn of the century. In the beginning there was Appalachia and Cascadia, and these were these two great outliers on either side of North America. And they gave themselves up. Cascadia was this mythical landmass off in the North Pacific that eroded away, and they knew because the sediments washed westward. Well, up off the Rockies and Cascades the sediments would’ve washed eastward. Normally off the Pacific slope you find sediments washing westward toward the ocean, right, so there must’ve been something there. So Cascadia was this myth of the geologists and botanists around the turn of the century, from about 1895 or so to about 1914. 

 

It was wholly the construct though, of a geologist, a historical paleontologist at Yale, Schuchert, who is one of the great edenic figures of all time. He created hundreds of names for mythical continents. And made all these maps of paleogeography. For 50 years he was the Dean of Paleogeography. Well that’s what it just was, a myth. And people believed in it for a while and then the underlying dynamic of the geology faded and they no longer believed in synclines and eugeosynclines. Until right here off our shores in the 1960s a new myth was being created, a new form of earth poetry, and the geologists here created plate tectonics. Out of our subduction zones and transformed faults and so on. And that’s a fabulous story all unto itself, most people don’t know it. 

 

PEN: And that’s talking about the Cascadia Subduction Zone?

 

DM: Yeah, before it had a name, it didn’t have a name. So over and over again, this term Cascadia, which the 19th century geologists derived from, of course, the Cascade Mountains. Well, then you go back and say what were the Cascade Mountains named after. They were named after the great cascades of the Columbia River. Just this fearsome series of … the Celilo Falls, that was the great one, and then the “Chute”, Lewis and Clark called it the Chute, the Great Cascades. And that was where the Bonneville Landslide, in the earthquake of 1706 or 1710, brought down what the Indians called the Bridge of the Gods that dammed up the Columbia and caused the Great Cascades. Wow! Boy what a start of diving into that myth. And what’s this resonance that Cascadia is speaking to us over a series of generations here? And it’s a search for a new name, a name that’s true to the spirit of the place. And it’s named Cascadia not after the mountains, but as in the original name. It’s after the dynamism of the waters. And so that’s why Cascadia is a verb first. So all of this began to unpack and unfold out of Bates Mckee’s book in 1972. Now just stay with me a minute more on Bates Mckee. Bates Mckee’s book in 1972 was a college textbook, he was at UW. And, it was pretectonic. There was no explanatory, causal mechanism that had anything to do except hinted at for a contemporary thing. Plus Cascadia had no explanatory narrative function in the book. It didn’t function in the book at all! When you really begin to read the book it’s quite a… I love the image of the book and what the book seemed to evoke, but it wasn’t in the book. So where did Cascadia as a bioregion, as a dynamism [come from]? From us, from me, from the bioregionalists. Were the ones who gave Cascadia the contemporary notion as a bioregion that is blessed or created by all these dynamisms. 

Pt 4:

 

PEN:

When you say us, tell us besides yourself, who are the people involved? 

DM:

Well, there were some poets. But basically it was, in origin. Okay, so anyway, in 19, late 1970s, I began to sign my books when I bought a book about the region, Cascadia. Cascadia, Cascadia. So I taught the first class in 1980 and then again, 1981, 82 at Seattle University on Cascadia. And then we did, a friend and I, Jim Riley, at what was called the Chinook Learning Center, now, it’s the Whidbey Institute and taught a course on Cascadia there. And actually that was pretty influential because it had a whole bunch of people who were young, educated, progressive, searching for a new kind of home and an ideal. And we provided an aegis and they actually spread the word quite a bit. And then I spoke and we spoke and other people spoke, gave talks all over. 

And then we sponsored, in a tremendous burst of energy, a whole series of conferences from 1985, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93 to 95. There were 8 to 10 conferences, bioregional conferences, basically in the Puget Sound area, but we had one down here. The Cascadia Bioregional Congress, the Ish River Confluence, Pacific Cascadia, Cascadia, Cascadia, Cascadia. In 1985, Peter Moulton and his friends down at Everett. In 1985, Peter Berg and others came up at Bellingham and gave a talk on mapping, which I went to and Peter and I became friends. And that had quite an influence in Bellingham. Then in 1986, the Evergreen folks, got a tremendous crew down there, Peter Moulton, Rusty Post, a whole bunch of guys. Reese Roth organized along with our help, the first Cascadia BioRegional Congress in the 80s, in 86 at Bellingham, at Evergreen. We had the poets there, the Ish River Poets. And I made a special effort to get, maybe four or five of them there. 

PEN:

Robert Sund? 

DM:

Well, Doug Dobbins, Tim McNulty, Tom Jay, and Robert Sund. I introduced them and that was one of the first linkages directly of poetry to the bioregional in Cascadia. 

PEN:

You know, you’re talking about the guys from the old days and you’ve mentioned all men, and yet it was a woman who is a key player in your own understanding of Cascadia and bioregionalism and your own inspiration to dig deeper into this issue and that’s Tanya Atwater. 

DM:

Well, she’s at a far removal. I’ve never met Tanya Atwater. That’d be quite an honor. We’re now back into the unfolding of the geological story, the new earth poetry of that. And the connection there is that instead of doing abstractions or fictions or utopias, the story that began to unfold through the new geology got to be more fabulous every month. Every year it was just another revelation. Talk about living through a Newtonian revolution. It just was fabulous. And Tanya Atwater was a player, a major player in this. In 1970, she was a graduate student, and she wrote a paper on the Farallons plate. And the Farallons plate is the mother plate of Cascadia. It was the plate that, what gave rise to the Kula plate and the Farallons plate. 

And these sound kind of like abstractions, but if you understand plates as these fairly rigid platforms and then the subduction zones, the ocean trenches. The Farallons plate was this giant Pacific plate that, as the story went then, the story is different now. And that’s another great thing. As I said once to you that the best poets that I know really are the young geologists, they have the most fabulous imaginations I have ever seen. All the rest of us are just all stuck in convention. You read their stuff and talk to them and hear them and you go, “No, that can’t be true.” [laughs] One time I told a friend that the Olympics, Olympic mountains hadn’t always been there, that they were rafted or accreted in from the Pacific. And that they were shaped like a horseshoe, and you can go up there and pick off a slate off the top of some of them. And he said, “No, no, they’re not. They’ve always been there.” [laughs] They’ve always been there. In his lifetime or in his imagination. 

So anyway, Tanya Atwater wrote this seminal paper of plate tectonics. And I want to emphasize that Cascadia and the dynamics of our sea floor played a  crucial role, not complete, but a very important role in the plate tectonics revolution, which is ongoing. So she gave us a myth of this, this Oor plate here who’s been largely subducted, who created Western North America in large part, and whose fragments are the remnant microplates, the Gorda, Juan de Fuca, and Explorer plate, which go from Cape Mendocino up to Vancouver Island. So, just go back. So the search was for an authentic name that really says what it does and does what it says, that grounds us in the life of the place that has an evocative power. 

And that’s a crucial thing. Not just description or make a map that merely describes or is accurate. You want something that not just informs, but transforms, flames, and transfigures. That’s what we’re after here. And Cascadia has this resonance that almost seems transcendental. That generations now, for over 100 and almost 120 years now, people have been dreaming. Or rather turn it around, Cascadia has been dreaming through us and various generations. Now I came on the scene in the late ’70s and we had this dalliance with Ecotopia, this dalliance with Pacific Rim, and the rest of it. But when I got Cascadia and we began to bore in and see that it spoke to the place, to the dynamism the place, it’s as if the resonance set up this field of evocative power that then began to speak back through us. And I’m convinced even though I might be the proximate source and much of the articulator of it, that the dynamism comes from the place itself. 

That is the spirit of the place speaks through us and that’s why we’re pursuing this. And that’s why it has almost infinite depth that just keeps unfolding. And to me, that’s the poiesis which is the breaking into being through meaning. And so even though I’m talking a lot here, the first thing I try to help people learn is to learn to listen to the place and the life of the place so that it can speak through us. So I’ve got this kind of mantra. If you would speak for the place, then the question is, what does the place say to you? And if it doesn’t say anything, why should we listen to you? If the place, however, speaks to you and through you, then we have an opening into a future. 

Pt 5:

DM:

Right. So I’d adverted to Bellah’s Habits of the Heart before, where they talked about this conundrum where people deeply desired community, but when they came to talk about it that the only discourse, the language was an abstract language of individualism and of individual rights. And so they didn’t have a discourse of community. They didn’t have a way of talking about it because our culture didn’t have that. In sociology it’s called gemeinshaft, the warm fellow feeling of being in the horizontal life world with each other. And so that’s one of the things I realized that to try to talk about a language of place and a bioregional language, we didn’t have a natural discourse for that. So you couldn’t go through even if we had the money and time, you couldn’t go through the standard analytical or political, et cetera, conventionalities or conversationalities, we just didn’t have them. 

Now, if we’d been native peoples or traditional peoples, indigenous folks that, that had a deeply rooted identity in the place with the ancestors and so on, but we didn’t have it. How are you going to start then a new culture in which you’re trying to enculturate this deep relationality with the place? So we decided to short circuit the analytical and to go through the evocative. And the easiest ways we could do that is through, this is a strategic decision as it were, in terms of a visionary anthropology to use maps, flags, symbols and a symbolic language. And in fact, that was a very good move because not only is it the heart of culture anyway and the psyche, but it had a tremendous evocative power. So over and over, over the years, see, Cascadia is my long…people ask me, “Are you a poet?” Well, I’m not a poet like, like Paul Nelson is a poet perhaps, but Cascadia is my long extended open poem that a whole bunch of people are, writing. Well, I issued the call, as it were. 

PEN:

But listen, Charles Olson talked about the concept of a saturation job, where you learn more about one subject than any human alive. And he said, he gave you three examples. It could be barbed wire, Pemicon, or Patterson. And of course, Patterson, an illusion to William Carlos Williams and his, you know, his serial poem about that New Jersey town that he lived very close to. And speaking of falling water, there, you know, the falls there are very important in the mythos that Williams was looking at. 

DM:

Yes. 

PEN:

So you’ve done a saturation job on Cascadia and you’ve created a lot of the groundwork that makes it easy for me to step in and say, “Here is something that’s working on a mythic level, and that’s where the real juice is. ” And that’s why I think we find ourselves at the same table because I’m interested in the kind of deep connection to place and the kind of revolutionary spirit, with a sense of duende that Lorca talked about. So, you know, you’re talking about wanting it so badly that the possibility of death is there. That’s what Lorca was after, you know, was a real kind of very intense kind of thing. And so the revolutionary spirit is there, but it’s more than just making a flag and saying, “Let’s secede,” and protesting and that kind of thing.

DM:

Well, that’s a bunch of triviality. 

PEN:

Exactly. And so what, where the real thing is, is the story that you’re talking about. You used a word with anthropology. I forget exactly. 

DM:

Visionary anthropology. 

PEN:

Visionary anthropology. Exactly. So this is what interests me and I think what’s gonna interest poets of the future because looking at things bio-regionally is itself an inherently extremely political act. And so, but we’re not talking about so that the next step could be, you know, let’s have a revolution and secede from the United States. You’re talking about a deep culture that is connected to place. And so that’s a thing that’s going to take generations. 

DM:

Well, it is. And the fact, and it is an evident fact, you say, “Well, how long is this gonna take?” But look what’s happened in, it really was in, 15 years that went from a pipe dream, just, you know, sitting around and could never believe beyond a circle of friends that anybody would be ever interested, much less talking about Cascadia. And then, my god, what kind of life has it taken on? Literally, there are thousands or tens of thousands of people who think about Cascadia, refer to Cascadia, or even call themselves Cascadian. And they aren’t necessarily in touch with one another. Some are. They aren’t necessarily reading the same things, but there is this evocation and this search for some authentic ground for a life together here that has a future for us. So, to me, that’s been a, in terms of cultural innovation and diffusion has been extraordinarily successful from the most modest of means and marginal status that we should even be taking this seriously. 

PEN:

You’re touching a, you’ve touched a nerve. 

DM:

Well, see, you touched a nerve or you said earlier that the time is right. I think we need, we could also reverse that in saying, Cascadia has been imagining through us for over a hundred years in different generations in different ways. And, I think when I say of poiesis as different than mimesis, for instance, as a breaking into being through meaning, and that occurs through learning to listen before one speaks, well, who’s speaking there? [laughs] If you would be a poet, if you would write, first learn to listen. Well, then listen to whom, to what? And who is speaking? You say, “Well, I wrote this poem. I wrote this thing.” Well, you’re speaking, but I want to know to whom are you speaking and who’s speaking to you? And it seems to me the poetics that’s going on now is this whole cycle from the spirit of the place to those who would listen and learn to speak and they speak and then others listen to that and they speak and tell that story in turn. 

And then it’s in the telling and retelling of that story that then the culture emerges because that’s what culture is in a practical way, it’s the telling and retelling of our story here together. Right. So that we would even begin to have this conversation means that this, we’re actually far down the road from where my friends and I were 20, 30 years ago dreaming this up, you know, on hikes in the mountains and you go, “My god, look at that waterfall. Look at this place. Fabulous.”

Pt 6

 

PEN:

And the wild thing about life in this age is that velocity might be the most remarkable thing about living in 2013. Things are happening so fast. And you know, we did see the breakup of the Soviet Union in our lifetime happen very quick. We never did get that peace dividend they talked about. The opposite happened. But the fact is that by talking about this and by establishing this regional identity and by exhorting people to have a deep connection to place and we, you know, with many people, we don’t have to do that. They’re going to REI, they’re getting their backpacking gear, they’re going into the Olympics, they’re getting lost and being rescued by helicopters. [laughs] You know, there’s a segment that already has that. Their religion is going to Glacier Meadows at Mont Olympus and seeing Blue Glacier. That is their religion. 

DM:

Now, Blue Glacier, wow. You see, here’s the conundrum. You say, “Well, we want to create a bioregional culture.” Well, in a sense, you’ve already got the foundation because there are many people here, whether they call themselves Cascadian, whether they know anything about that at all, who are people of the place and who love the place and identify with the place. And at least around here, I know it’s true in Seattle and a lot of other places, but around here it astonishes me. The fierce devotion and intensity and fight for the place they love. My god, you don’t have to create it. 

PEN:It’s there. 

DM:

It’s a bit much sometimes. Yeah. And I applaud it. I live in the heart of that, but still I’m astonished sometimes by this fierce identification. 

But when they come to articulate that, it’s like Bellah said with community. There is no discourse or language that allows us to begin to develop that love and the culture-place. Environmentalism is one example of that. Various forms of service to the place and so on. But there is not a framework and you say, “Well, why don’t we have that framework?” Well, that’s what we’re trying to help articulate some of the grounds of it. I used to come in very strongly, I can give you a thing called Ecology and Community: the Bioregional Vision. Which, that particular essay 15 years ago, has a strong critical component because we were still fighting the Reagan era Rape of the Forest and so on. The assault on the environment. And so Bioriginalism really comes out of both the environmentalism and the social reform, social justice, social-economic justice, and so on kind of thing. It has the root in both of them.

What I’ve learned in the meantime is this whole undertaking adventures. Yeah, I think Cascadia’s first an adventure into the openness of being here and learning to dwell here. And that’s been one fabulous thing. It just keeps unfolding. Not a movement, but the understanding of Cascadia has this dynamic verge of a place that unfolds and unfolds on all these levels. So what I’ve learned is that we’re all captive of a certain epistemology and metaphysics that comes from… At first I thought it was American. Then I thought, well, maybe it’s the Protestant ethic. It’s the Puritan. Oh, maybe it’s the Enlightenment. You know, and you do your history and you go back and I learned a lot of history. I taught history for cultural traditions for quite a few years. And that was quite an adventure in kind of the retrospective thing. 

How did we get here? But, but more and more, and it’s really been conversations with a friend who’s a philosopher, but I’ve come to reject everything he believes and stands for [laughs] because I see that it’s an intractable addiction to a logic and a language that goes with that logic and a set of categories and a set of transcendental idealities that really came from the Greeks. And with the Greek philosophy, it was a fabulous achievement. On many, many levels taught us to think. But it’s not really American or really Protestant or really Enlightenment or really even Western culture that is at the root of it. The secret code we’ve all learned, and it is the means of entry to any profession or organization. It’s really what runs the world is this secret code that we inherited from the Greeks of how to think and also our ethics are part of that. 

So, I no longer believe in political definitions of our dilemmas. I have now a radar for when people are captive and they don’t know it and that the secret code is speaking through them. And I can identify this secret code like that. And the great struggle for the last 10 years or so, on the side related but separate to Cascadia, is unlearning that secret controlling code of the West. 

PEN:

And, and the code is going back to the separation of myth and logos. Man is estranged from that which he is most familiar, Hericleitas, right? 

DM:

Oh, oh, absolutely. And the logo… Okay, we’re into philosophy and we’re into metaphysics. No, no. 

PEN:

We don’t have to go too far down this.

DM:

No, no, but let me just loop it rather than go forward into it. If you want a philosophical underpinning and people need to get much deeper than, oh, let’s become independent or let’s have a flag or something. It’s just a bunch of… I don’t listen to that anymore because it’s so naive and uncritical that when you’re engaged in a fight with empire or colonialism or capitalism, all these, these negations, you become captive of the very same thing that you oppose because underlying that is a framework that holds you both. And so this, this naivete – 

PEN:

Einstein said sometimes two sides disagree because they’re both wrong. [laughs] Right? 

DM:

It’s the presupposition. It’s the whole framework. So if you want the bioregional and Cascadia as the embodiment of that, if you want its revolutionary import, it has to do with unlearning that secret code, which estranges us or leads to that diseverment, that dismembering of the world and dismembering of relationality. There is, was a philosophical breakthrough in the late 19th century and early 20th century,  which just goes hand in hand, however, with bioregionalism, with place and with Cascadia. And that’s the existential and the phenomenological break with traditional metaphysics as an existential rather than essential, which anchored everything in a transcendental set of categories and logics and language and so on. And that really from Husserl and Heidegger on through Merleau Ponty and…

 

PEN:

Duluth. 

 

DM:

Well, yeah there’s a whole bunch of contemporary ones. I’m just doing kind of some of the pioneers. Levinas and so on. 

It’s hard to read, but once you realize their project, which was the unlearning or undoing of that secret code of a whole series of transcendentalities and idealities. So now coming forward, I’ve read very deeply in contemporary philosophy as a way to help me unlearn that. And bioregionalism is another one. 

PEN:

Whitehead among those philosophers that you’d look to? 

DM:

I’ve never really read Whitehead. People keep saying, “Oh, you’re doing Whitehead and so on. ” And that’s nice, process and field theory and so on. I actually haven’t needed it because I really only read the existential and the phenomenological philosophers. The last one which was in that vein I read, was Wesler’s thing on Robert Irwin. The, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” the quote from Paul Valerie. And that is a fabulous story of an artist who really is a practicing phenomenologist in the best way who recovers perception as a living presence. 

PEN:

Tell me the title again. 

DM:

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. It’s 25th edition, if you can believe it, these guys, this guy kept with Robert Irwin for 25 years, 30 years and carried on that conversation. So it’s an analogous. So I see a whole bunch of people making a similar move, but none really as rich and as grounded as the bioregional. And no bioregional vision or effort is as far along as Cascadia.