A beautiful new map for Ish River Country
This piece was originally published in Cascadia Spoke, a community publication dedicated to raising awareness of the Cascadia movement and bioregionalism.
David McCloskey, creator of the Cascadia Map, is excited to release his new map of the Ish River country. It is a companion to his map of Cascadia—as an Ecoregion is a room in the house of a larger Bioregion…
Ish River, like Cascadia, is poised on the verge of Mountains and the Sea. Great Western valleys like the Willamette center on their rivers, but this place is all Edge….And this Edge is alive! bursting with energy from every pore….Such relentlessly dramatic dynamism shines thru the map image; one can almost feel the surge and flood of tidal currents, pulse of whitewater pounding down from glaciers, continuous rising and falling rhythm of mountains and sea in this great bowl of waters….
David McCloskey, “Ish River Map Story”
Cascadia and the Ish River were first given names in a 1985 article by David McCloskey in RAIN Magazine, giving rise to ideas like “the Salish Sea” by Bert Webber in 1988. Planet Drum artists hand-drew this first illustration in 1985.
This new map of the larger Ish River-Lillooet Country centers on the Salish Sea as a whole, with its own distinctive character and context. It shows the place with its natural and cultural integrities working in depth on many levels: Terrain, Coastline and Bathymetry (Seafloor), Hydrology (rivers & lakes), Ice in the great Icefields and Glaciers, Vegetation in the form of Forest & Woodland Formations, Population Centers, etc. Among many other innovations, it graphically tells “The Story of Ice” which carved out the face of the place. It also has an insect with a new map of the many “Ecoregions of Canada.”
The map can be found at: marshamccloskey.com/cascadiamap.html.
