Cascadian Spirit, Utopian Dreams

Nature inspires a spiritual streak in us that usually doesn’t involve church

By Rich Donnelly

Growing up in North Vancouver, Douglas Todd took for granted the spectacular backdrop for his boyhood adventures — the coastal mountains we can see from Bellingham on a clear day. Raised in a non-religious household, he didn’t realize he was developing a unique brand of spirituality that typifies our part of the world, the least churchgoing part of North America.

“You can’t ignore nature here; it’s kind of in your face,” says Todd, who for the last 15 years has held down the “religion and ethics beat” at the Vancouver Sun. This Saturday he’ll be at Village Books to talk about his new book, Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia (Ronsdale Press).

For the book, Todd has assembled an array of thinkers and writers to contribute chapters on their own particular take on Cascadia, the region we live in that spans the international border, with little else strictly defined about it. It’s “a place of the heart as much as a specific landscape,” according to contributor Andrew Greenville. “Nobody really agrees what its physical borders are.” But though the book mostly restricts is view to Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, Todd’s vision is really concerned with another dimension, the spiritual one.

“Statistics show that people [here] are the least inclined on the continent to go to a religious institution,” he says. “We have the lowest attendance rates. But you scratch the surface and everybody thinks they’re spiritual,” he says, adding that the book explores the nature of that feeling, “tying in spirituality to place and bioregionalism.” In B.C., 36% say they have no religion, and 25% in Washington state, about twice the respective national averages. But across the region, about 60% rarely or never attend church.

Todd thinks that our magnificent surroundings in this region affect everyone, giving us “a civil religion of nature.” Even organized churches recognize stewardship of the environment as respecting God’s creation. “But there are lots of atheists who are also profoundly into nature as a source of meaning and well being.”

Todd’s inspiration for the book was research into contemporary Pacific Northwest spirituality by Patricia O’Connell Killen, provost and professor of religion at Tacoma’s Pacific Lutheran University, and Mark Silk of Trinity College (Hartford, CT), who has written extensively about religion in the United States. Todd sensed that their findings about the Northwest mirrored trends in British Columbia.

“I wanted Mark and Patricia and other American thinkers to work with British Columbian scholars and essayists who also have a deep understanding of the region’s qualities,” he says. “I wanted this to be a strongly interdisciplinary work, including everything from economists to literary specialists, because that is the only way to capture the complexity of the values held by people in the region.”

The myriad regional institutions devoted to coordinating efforts on both sides of the border testify to the multifaceted nature of Cascadian awareness. But spirituality is not usually on the list of scrutinized border trends, which encompass transportation, business, the environment, and native rights. Many groups focus on ways to make working together across the border easier at the local level, in the face of the drumbeat for security that comes from Washington, DC. It’s not an easy time to be an advocate for relaxing restrictions, but cross-border efforts are still finding success. It’s part of that Cascadian spirit.

“I think there’s still a bit of a last-frontier mentality here,” Todd says. “People think this is where you come to try something new, so that means making up your own rules as you go along. It ends up being this real freedom-loving mentality: Nobody’s going to tell me what to do, so I’m gonna make it up on my own.”

This translates into a resistance to organized religion — in fact, for many people who relocate here to “get away,” one of the things they’re getting away from is religion. So for many Cascadians, a passion for nature has filled the religious gap. But with it comes what Andrew Greenville calls “a sense of personal responsibility and willingness to embrace the different.” Statistical surveys bear this out, with some intriguing numbers providing a jumping-off point for several contributors to Todd’s book. For example, 50% of Cascadians have “not very much” trust or “none at all” in organized religion, compared to 33% in the rest of North America. Yet we still have faith: 73% of people in this region “trust people to do what is right” as opposed to 58% across North America.

Todd enumerates the unique set of values that characterize Cascadia: “Reverence for nature, a fierce individualism, a wariness about institutions, a limited sense of history, a tolerance for diversity, an openness to experimentation and a strong sense that we can create a future that has never before been seen on the planet. A possible utopia.”

That lack of history and tradition may give some of our creations a shaky foundation.

“There’s this obsession with newness — we in Cascadia are an exaggerated version of it, because our institutions are weak here,” says Todd. “That’s why it’s called the ‘elusive utopia’ — there’s a real future-orientedness here, that we’re creating something new. We don’t really know what it is, but it’s gonna be great!”

A strong Cascadian regional identity might seem paradoxical in this era of globalization, telecommuting and easy communication across the planet. While there’s a danger of being homogenized by our mass culture, book contributor Peter Drury of Seattle-based Sightline Institute says that’s not likely. (Drury will be a part of Todd’s book tour stop in Bellingham.)

“I think this is a generation-upon-generation enduring question, the local and the global,” he says. “There is a substantial increase in the notion there is no such thing as ‘advancing global sustainability’ separate from ‘advancing local sustainability.’ Many local solutions —and community, identity and local inspiration play a profound role in this — together can comprise global solutions.”

The subtitle of Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia is Exploring the Spirit of the Pacific Northwest. That reflects the vision of its editor and contributors, a hope that those with an amorphous spirituality will make the effort to look a little more deeply into what makes them say “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”

“I think it’s mostly subconscious for people. They go for a walk and it’s very spiritual,” says Todd, but that’s about as far as it goes. “It’s in our bones and we don’t even know it. This book is an attempt to get people to do some deeper thinking.”

Todd’s evolution from his upbringing in a house where “religious people were considered kooks” was driven by a curiosity about religion and spirituality. He studied world religions at the University of British Columbia and eventually became a reporter at the Sun. In the early nineties he put his interests to work and became the faith and religion reporter at the paper.

“I thought I was taking a demotion in journalism. It was kind of a low-status thing to do,” he says. “But it’s turned out the opposite. About 10 years ago the word ‘spirituality’ became popular. People can talk about religion again and you’re not shunned for it.” Todd has twice won the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top spirituality writer in North America’s secular media.

Todd’s book has something for everyone, offering many different perspectives, and illuminating our place in Cascadia. He’s also doing his part to make the region a bit more functional by bringing together thinkers, visionaries, and scholars. “This border has kept good people apart. There should be way more cross-fertilization,” he says.

Todd admits that his writing about spirituality covers almost everything, mirroring how intertwined the natural world is with our everyday lives around here. He feels that spiritual undercurrent is what gives our way of life its promise for positive change.

“My gut is that something exciting is coming out of this region.”