Cascadia Field Guide: Art | Ecology | Poetry
Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman,
and Derek Sheffield
Mountaineers Books | 2023 | 400 pages
Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry is a collection of 128 organism profiles created collaboratively by numerous writers and artists and grouped into 13 living communities. Although preserving the individual species format of traditional field guides, this book’s organization sets the reader up to think relationally and to consider the interconnections among beings. The form of the entries—a combination of ecological prose, poetics, and black-and-white art—offers multiple ways to engage with the characters and ecology of Cascadia, an area that encompasses Pacific-draining watersheds from Alaska to northern California. This field guide honors human and nonhuman beings with First Nations language, capitalized plant and animal names, and eschewal of the usage of “it” to describe members of an animated world. In some cases, the book also recasts scientific perceptions by suggesting more appropriate names, such as replacing Oplopanax horridus with Oplopanax splendorous (Devil’s Club), supplanting fear with wisdom.
Organism profiles comprise intersecting prose, poetry, and artwork that engage the reader in the lived experiences of Cascadia’s inhabitants. Each section begins with prose that imagines interactions and sensorial experiences within the shared ecosystem of this group of beings. In Tidewater Glacier, for example, Eva Saulitis’s “It Begins with Ice” asks the reader to reflect on the knowledge of glaciers, their agency, and the Earth stories held in their ice. The poem also considers relationships with this forged landscape and planetary time. All sections include informative and unusual physical descriptions of the beings as well as their ecological roles, unique traits, and remarkable evolutionary histories. The profiles also convey capabilities, adaptations, relationships, and the ways in which beings have woven themselves into human lives as foods, medicines, or material items. Poems express the embodied experience of sharing life with the beings of Cascadia. Artwork exemplifies the diversity of the region, ranging from the bold stylized forms of Indigenous artist Chloey Cavanaugh to the psychedelic-scientific illustrations of Erin Fox.
Through tales of beings’ lives and the places they help to create, this collection draws the reader into intimate encounters unfolding in Cascadia. Humans are invited to join the interconnected worlds of plants, animals, and landforms and to experience their personalities, strengths, and vulnerabilities. The reader has an opportunity to develop kinship with nonhumans and become part of worlds that might not have been imagined. Such a transformative experience of becoming other is captured by Denise Levertov describing a moment with Wren:
I feel myself lifted,
lightened, dispersed:
it has turned me into air,
it can fly right through me.
Descriptions of the vulnerabilities of plants, animals, and place evoke empathy for all beings striving to live in a changing world. The Bald Eagle’s susceptibility to DDT, Pacific Madrona’s intolerance for human interference, Lungwort Lichen’s sensitivity to air pollution, and Ochre Star’s struggle against sea star wasting syndrome draw attention to the common plight of human and nonhuman beings. Yet the reader is uplifted by hopeful stories like that of Coyote, who skillfully lives in widely varied habitats including those dominated and controlled by Humans, or by the relatively rapid resurgence of diverse life on the post-eruption slopes of Loowit (Mount Saint Helens). This sentiment of exposure, change, and loss is summed up exquisitely by David James Duncan’s poem “From Hearts Like Mountains”:
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts to remember how much wild wealth and beauty and joy has been lost, diminished, unloved, destroyed. But when it’s the loving heart that hurts, I say, Let it. Mountains, broken and broken and broken again, become the pebbles of our beloved salmon’s birth houses. May our hearts be like the mountains.
The liveliness and wonder of Cascadia are entwined with loss and grief. This essential duality is articulated by Greg Darms’s “In the Last Oak Meadows,” which laments the demise of creatures including:
The Common Banded Skipper—but try
to find one.
The last meadows are fenced.
The ministry would like to spray, and will.
And will we know
when iridescent wings,
quiet as the oaks,
are gone?
The sadness that emerges from these passages speaks to the affirmation of relationships Humans have long held with nonhuman beings. This is due, in part, to the knowledge shared by these beings. “Holdfast” by Holly J. Hughes exemplifies this by integrating barnacle knowledge into human knowledge systems and illustrating ways in which nonhuman beings might serve as guides for how to live in a particular place:
It knows the principle of hunkering down,
riding out the storm, staying put. All
winter, beneath the sea’s relentless chop
it holds fast, gives over to each storm,
flows with each rising tide. All winter
it lets go what it can, holds fast to the rest.
That’s what we’ll do come November.
Hold fast to what sustains: our friends,
a steaming bowl of soup, this beach.
Other plant and animal communications are also conveyed, such as Skunk Cabbage indicating to people the time to fish for King Salmon. Or Alpine Larch dropping deciduous conifer needles (giving away “their summer gold”) and bending to the ground in windstorms, suggesting ways in which Humans might be more adaptable, generous, and flexible. Likewise, Brown Bear smells the signals of medicine plant roots, digs them up, and shows people where the best medicine is. I wonder what I might learn spending time with 1,000+ year old Western Red Cedars….
Cascadia Field Guide reveals many of the mutualistic bonds plants and animals make with each other and the living landscapes they create, but it also leaves some of the relational story and knowledge shared among species to the imagination. Each creature lyrically lures the reader deeper into the animated world of Cascadia, but it is up to us to find our way into the realm of collaborative multi-species Earth-making that is occurring within these interconnected ecological-social lives. Herein lies the offerings of Cascadia Field Guide—a call to join the ecological network and material for envisioning and enacting new ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing one another. Accentuating this point, the text ends with a section on the Human component of this living landscape. As I close the pages of this book, I am comforted knowing that I am part of interconnected ecosystems and the lives unfolding everywhere. In the delicate entanglements of Cascadia’s many beings, love and grief are tangled up together. Finding comfort through difficult times is a matter of which part we hold close.
View seven prose, poetry, and artwork entries from Cascadia Field Guide appearing in Terrain.org.
Dara Saville is a Geohumanities PhD student at New Mexico State University. She is also the author of The Ecology of Herbal Medicine and the director of the botanical medicine program Albuquerque Herbalism and the nonprofit organization Yerba Mansa Project.
Header image, Eastern Rivers Cluster, by Justin Gibbens, from Cascadia Field Guide. Photo of Dara Saville by Jessi T. Walsh.
