Nature and tradition at the border: landscaping the end of the nation-state

It was the best of years; it was the worst of years. Not 1789, but 1996; not the Paris and London of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, but the Vancouver and Seattle of local business planners; and not the end of the monarchy and the modern birth of a real republic, but rather the end of the nation-state and the seemingly postmodern birth of an invented cross-border region called Cascadia. The concept of Cascadia as a binational region linking the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon (Figure 5.1) had been in the works for almost a decade by 1996, having been given a significant boost by the implementation of both the Canadian/U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1989 and the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. By the mid-1990s many of the high hopes of Cascadia’s promoters had started to seem more feasible. The plans to ‘bulldoze the checkpoints’ at the border on the 49th Parallel, and expedite business and tourist travel; the plans to make a bid for a binational Olympic games; the plans to develop high-tech infrastructure for business and build a fast bullet train between Vancouver and Seattle; the plans to cooperate in promoting a so-called ‘Two Nation Vacation’; and many other such schemes to develop the international profile of the region had begun to appear as more than just the pipe dreams of a few entrepreneurial urban-planning gurus. This growing sense of imminent cross-border reterritorialization was captured in 1996 in suitably postmodern fashion by the publication of a large coffee-table book of photographs by Morton Beebe, designed and marketed for a popular mass audience under the title Cascadia: A Tale of Two Cities (Figure 5.2). ¹ This book, like the cross-border regional aspirations it sought to capture in almost 200 pages of glossy, colour photographs, evoked Cascadia as a region that was at once borderlessly brand new and at the same time based on an ancient natural environment: both a hightech hub of international business and a sublime space of enduring ecological integrity, a place where you could sail from majestic wilderness to urban opportunity with natural grace and speed. Cascadia was thereby said to have traditions, but they were presented as naturally postnational traditions — and, as such, the basis for anticipated economic success in the new borderless world economy.