About Us

My connection with Cascadia began in 1980. I had been living in Boise, Idaho since 1973, and when Mt. St. Helens, a volcanic peak in the Cascade Mountain Range of Southwestern Washington, erupted with fury on May 18, 1980, my interest in the Cascadia Bioregion was piqued.

During my time in Idaho, I regularly explored this extraordinary part of the Pacific Northwest and grew enamored with its beauty, magic, and majesty.

At the time, I did not realize that Cascadia was a diverse bioregional ecosystem that defied state and international borders.

When I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 2008, my interest in Cascadia re-sparked and rekindled. In 2015, I began the process of formulating a business strategy to build a consumer branding platform based on Cascadia as a consumer brand.
Buoyed by the nationwide legalization of cannabis in Canada in 2018, and earlier statewide legalization in Colorado, Washington and Oregon, I saw an opportunity: to build a superior quality consumer brand in cannabis that epitomized “The Cascadia Mindset” of expanse, beauty, independence and passion for the environment and natural world.

Having spent most of business career in creating, building and managing consumer branded products in a range of market segments, from frozen potatoes (Ore-Ida) to athletic footwear (Reebok, Converse and Puma), I recognized that the while there were over 5,000 brands of cannabis in North America, few, if any, would survive when the industry moved from a nascent supply/commodity focus to a mature consumer-demand driven industry.

Having witnessed firsthand how quality brands can differentiate companies, and help them build awareness, credibility, loyalty and trust with the consumer, the Cascadia Brand stuck me as the ideal branding platform to build a long-term profitable strategic share of market in an emerging global industry.

In 2016, I put together an ad hoc team of marketers, product developers, designers and legal professionals to help me build the Cascadia Brand for the cannabis industry.

I began by securing the relevant domains, and in October, 2016, I filed for a registered trademark with CIPO (Canadian Intellectual Property Office). The registered trademark was for the Cascadia Brand name in cannabis and large number of important product and service categories.

My original intent in 2016 was to build Cascadia into a global brand leader in cannabis and related products from the Cascadia Bioregion. As fate would have it, it took four years and numerous hours and dollars to secure the Cascadia Trademark allowance.

Stephen Encarnacao
January, 2024

Books
Callenbach, Ernest. 1975. Ecotopia. Banyan Tree Books.
Garreau, Joel. 1981. The Nine Nations of North America. Houghton Mifflin.
LaFemina, Paul. 2017. Bioregional Ecopoetics of Cascadia and Roots Words:
Original Poems. Green Mountain College.
McGinnis, Michael Vincent. 1998. Bioregionalism. Routledge.
Moothart, Ryan C. 2016. Towards Cascadia. Mill City Press, Inc.
Nowak, Lisa. 2013. The McCall Initiative Episode 1.1: Deception. Webfoot
Publishing.
Olson, Sylvester. 2015. A Detective from Geoduck Street (The Matter of Cascadia).
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Schoonmaker, Peter, Von Hagen, Bettina, and Wolf, Edward C. (eds.) 1997. The Rain
Forests of Home: Profile of a North American Bioregion. Island Press.
Stewart, Frank, and Carolan, Trevor (eds). 2013. Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the
World. University of Hawaii Press.
Newspaper & Magazine
Cascadia Magazine. https://www.cascadiamagazine.org/
Cascadia Review. https://cascadiareview.org/
Cascadia Times. https://www.times.org/
Davidson, Darren. 2016. ‘Should Cascadia Leave North America?’ Kootenay
Mountain Culture Magazine, 1.
http://mountainculturegroup.com/cascadia-leaving- north-america/
Patail, Martin. 2012. ‘Cascadia Rising’. Portland Monthly, July 2012.
https://www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2012/06/cascadia-rising-july-2012
Portland Radicle. 2012. ‘An Interview with Alexander Baretich on Cascadia: Part II’.
https://portlandradicle.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/portlandradicleaugust.pdf
Schodolski, Vincent J. 1994. ‘Northwest’s Economy Defies National Borders’. The
Chicago Tribune.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-08-01-9408020025-story.html
The Vancouver Sun. 2008. ‘Cascadians: Shared Cultural Traits, Values’. Canada.com
Web Archive.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story.html?id=46e85a2e9c- 4b5f-8c21-e5dcd72b35c3&p=1
Yardley, William. 2010. ‘Dreams of a Unified Northwest Are Halted at the Border’.
The New York Times, February 26 2010.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/americas/27cascadia.html
Zeschky, Jan. 2016. ‘Cascadia: A state of mind, a bioregion of beer’. The Province.
https://theprovince.com/life/food/beer/cascadia-a-state-of-mind-a-bioregion-of-beer
Journal Articles and Theses
Border Policy Research Institute. 2018. ‘Cannabis in Cascadia: Impacts of
Legalization in the Region’. Border Policy Research Institute Publications, 110.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/bpri_publications/110
Crane, David, Fraser, Paul and Phillips, James D. 2004. ‘Western Regionalism: Views
on Cascadia’. Canada-United States Law Journal, 30: 321-347.
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cuslj/vol30/iss/52
Freed, Molly D. 2015. ‘A Call for Bioregional Governance in Cascadia: Shaping an
Ecological Identity in the Land of Falling Waters’ [Thesis]. Scripps Senior Theses,
608.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/608
Henkel, William B. 1993. ‘Cascadia: A State of (Various) Mind(s)’. Chicago Review,
39(3/4): 110-118.
MacGregor, Jean. 2005. ‘Curriculum for the Bioregion: Learning to Live Sustainably
in Our “Life Places”. Applied Environmental Education & Communication¸4(3): 239-
243.
DOI: 10.1080/15330150591004689
Montgomery, Thatcher. 2018. ‘One Region, Four Movements: Constructing Cascadia
through Rhetoric’ [Thesis]. Carnegie Mellon University. DOI: 10.1184/r1/6686267.v1
Sparke, Matthew. 2000. ‘Excavating the Future in Cascadia: Geoeconomics and the
Imagined Geographies of a Cross-Border Region’. BC Studies, 127: 5-44. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/bcs.v0i127.1537
Conference Proceedings
Ish River Country. 1987. Ish River Bioregional Confluence, August 14-16 1987.
Cascadia Underground Archival Material
https://cascadiaunderground.org/ish-river-bioregional-confluence-1987/
Scott, Lance and Carpenter, Julie (eds.) 1988. The Second Bioregional Congress of
Pacific Cascadia — 1988: Proceedings, Resources and Directory. Cascadia
Underground Archival Material
https://cascadiaunderground.org/bioregional- congress-of-pacific-cascadia-1988/
South Sound Bioregional Network. 1986. First Cascadia Bioregional Congress
Proceedings, July 25-28 1986. CascadiaNow! Archives
https://www.cascadianow.org/first-cascadia-congress
Websites
Cascadia Department of Bioregion. https://cascadiabioregion.org/ .
Cascadia Hemp Co. https://cascadiahempco.com
Cascadia Independence Party. https://cascadiaindependenceparty.mystrikingly.com/.
Cascadia Institute. http://cascadia-institute.org/index.html
CascadiaNow! https://www.cascadianow.org/.
The Cascadia Underground. https://cascadiaunderground.org/
Cascadia Wildlands. https://www.cascwild.org/
Pope Brak. 2013. CDP: A Cascadian Dark Poem. Screaming Robots [blog].
http://screamingrobots.blogspot.com/2013/04/cdp-cascadian-dark-poem-by- popebrak.html
Tour Cascadia. https://tourcascadia.com/
Documentary and Television
Hess, Devin and Sweet, Mel. 2012. Occupied Cascadia [Documentary].
Lewis, Timothy G. 1996-2005. Cascadia Alive! [Television programs].
Pretty Good Productions. 2012. ‘Explorations of Cascadian Cartography’ [Online
video]. https://vimeo.com/52648978
Teagan, Sebastian, and Smit, Nicky. 2017. What is Cascadia? [Online video].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFswaoTxnKQ&feature=emb_title
Images
Cascadia Art Museum. http://www.cascadiaartmuseum.org/
Holtmeier, Matthew. 2019. Images, Maps, Movies: Bioregional Imaginaries of
Cascadia from the Archives. Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, WA.
McCloskey, David. 2015. ‘David McCloskey’s Map of Cascadia’.
http://www.marshamccloskey.com/cascadiamap.html
Music
Black Sun Wheel. 2013. ‘The Cascadian Black-Metal’.
https://bswheel.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/the-cascadian-black-metal/
Cascadia Underground. Sanctuary City Music Project Archives.
https://cascadiaunderground.org/category/segments/sanctuary-city-music-project/
Little Bear and the Fostervillagers. 2011. Cascadia the Free.
Said the Whale. 2019. Cascadia. Arts & Crafts Productions Ltd.
Vivola, Lloyd. 2010. O Cascadia.
https://sites.google.com/site/ocascadia/folk- anthem-for-the-pacific-northwest