Content area
Full Text
Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia - Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest Douglas Todd, editor Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008. 326 pp. Illus. $21.95 paper.
Fourteen individually authored chapters (and several supplements) reflect on a shared and bifurcated bioregion and, in the process, assemble the varied ways in which the designation "Cascadia" has been applied. Among the surprises in the collection, one, attractive partly because of its relative daring, amounts to a history of the International Peace Arch at the Blaine, Washington/Douglas, British Columbia, crossing. Author Eleanor Stebner comes to this topic by way of a brisk search for a symbol of Cascadia. For all the obviousness of the Douglas fir, salmon, and so on, she lights, with only the slightest trace of irony, on the Peace Arch. Because I have twice written a little about this site, I was pleased to discover here several details I did not know; for example, that "it was one of the first structures along the Pacific coast to be built earthquake resistant" (197). I like the way Stebner sets the monument into an architectural history of monuments - usually celebrating military triumph. Her summary of the "two-way" symbology of the gateway Arch might also describe the dynamic of the book as a whole: "It was a portal . . . having the role of moving people from one reality into another reality: people crossed from one country into another country, and from conflict...