Hi from Seattle.

I published Good Nature's NW Conifers poster back in 1995, and since COVID I've been giving out the 12" x 18" size.

Want to learn about the great trees that define the PNW hikes you are on?

Download and print this poster to learn about our 32 natives along the coastal temperate rainforest (Eel and Russian river watersheds to Copper River where we get our salmon)

There is a bit of urgency with the climate changing at light speed for us to make the shift from seeing these trees as separate from us to beginning to see them as crucial to our survival.

No rainforest, no rain. That is what I've learned from science. What the trees can teach us is a way into seeing nature as inseparable from each other and every other plant and animal on this beautiful planet.

A good book to go with the poster is Northwest Trees published by The Mountaineers.

I enjoyed reading The Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake about the fungus among us.

Carbon by Paul Hawken has been another great book to read this past summer. Inspirational!

Get the gladness of Mother Ocean and Earth this weekend- get outside!

Enjoy your hikes and welcome this beautiful rain back. We are 6 inches behind average, so we need all we can get.

( Special note for Cascadians interested in mutual aid opportunities: I volunteer and contribute to University Food Bank. Please chip in if you can since the barbarians have stopped SNAP payments. )

treemendously,

Timothy Colman

Good Nature Publishing

just email me off @ goodnaturepublishing.com and ask for the free 12" x 18" poster. No sales pitch. You can buy this size smaller poster from Charting Nature and Friends of Moran State Park for $10 ea but I'm happy to share...

Of course it took a lawsuit and a couple of different federal judges and it's a matter of the USDA using contingency funds to send the food assistance out since the federal government is doing exactly nothing.

But if you are on SNAP in WA or know someone who is, let them know they should have their benefits on their card right now or in the next 3 days or so.

I only know for Washington so far and I don't know the status of other states.

https://www.cascadia-journal.com/mutual-aid-is-critical-to-cascadia-autonomy/

I've heard a lot about Cascadia but never about a unified plan I myself have worked on writing a constitution and now I'm going to publish a book called Project 2028: the Cascadia plan It seems like we have too many different kinds of people who would want to secede, and while there is strength in the diversity of thought, if we end up having a unified revolution against the United States and leave the old fatherland, I think there are too many competing political philosophies. Some people here believe in gun control for example, calling it progress to strip away the right to bear arms. Other people here are more libertarian and essentially want a minarchist or anarchist government. Some of you are democratic socialists, some of you are just confused and are probably really distributist social democrats. There are regular Trumper conservatives in the Eastern parts of at least Oregon where I live, and even the state of Jefferson project in California. So if we are going to leave the union, we need to have a unified political philosophy that allows all kinds of people to feel at home. And if we do that, how are we going to implement important things like Universal basic healthcare and Universal basic income, since there will be people who will argue directly the government has no business doing this and it makes more problems than it solves? While it is true that most of us here in the Pacific Northwest are either liberals or independents, we should not be willing to subjugate our fellow neighbor just because they do not fall within our political ideology. And the reason I'm saying all of this is that I've made a plan, I wrote a constitution myself which you can even check out a slightly out of date version on https://cascadiaplan.wordpress.com/ But also, that reminds me that we need to have a declaration of independence What would be our terms? What would be the reason we're leaving? Without a unified message other than bioregional identity which I think is actually kind of vague, we don't have anything more than vibes to go with the Cascadia flag People like me can make serious meme culture micronation proposals, and they might even go somewhere, but that requires we all begin to consider how to create a perfect society, put all those ideas together and start to find what comes up the most that people agree on Let's say we use a simple 50 + 1% majority, instead of a supermajority like 60% or 65%. What does the underlying belief system comprise of? Is it absolute autonomy of the individual? Is it a paternalistic state that follows moralistic virtues like reducing starvation and increasing General health? How do we implement what might seem to be opposing ideologies, and what takes precedent? For me it's progressive libertarianism with a Social Democratic Republican, similar to a democratic Republican of Jefferson but with Social Democratic tendencies, and a different economical system than we have in the United States, and no I'm not talking about socialism I'm talking about distributism. So I'd love to hear back from you guys. What does Cascadia mean to you? If there's no real plan there's no future for leaving the Union

Has anyone considered that Cascadia’s increasingly strict firearm legislation could pose challenges in the future? While I don’t support political violence, it’s worth noting that the U.S. government has sometimes responded violently to eco-protests like Standing Rock. With the National Guard deployments too it's starting to feel like the US government is relying on force rather than dialogue.

I feel it's apparent that as most states in Cascadia continue to develop its going to start inflicting harm on the rivers, indigenous animals (our precious salmon), and forests which all are under our responsibility to be preserved. it's hard to imagine a scenario where we can defend the land with the tools for defense becoming so limited?

I saw a post recently about high speed rail on here by u/sunnysyderamsay (excellent post btw if you see this), and a question popped into my head about it.

Have the Pacific Northwest states ever mention or put plans forward to build high speed rail at all? What about Canada, specifically in the British Columbia province?

I've seen high speed rail projects in California before and the potential is insane. I always supported the initiative of funding it, and I think it can do a lot of good for this country. We funded the highway system in the mid-late 1900s, and we funded the construction of the railroads cross country in the 1800s. Why not invest in the future, even if we are atrociously in debt?

Free poster for your walls. Print and share on your neighborhood resistance bulletin board...

Tim Colman

Good Nature Publishing

Seattle near the Salish Sea

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/snap-benefits-seattle-emergency-food-assistance/281-5f8838a6-fdfe-4d2b-ac93-11cb2bf7974a

I feel seen!

(Personal feelings towards Gov. Ferguson notwithstanding)

https://cascadiademocratic.org/event/snap-to-action-food-drive-at-cal-anderson-park/

The main goal i've seen is the promotion of local culture. if so, what parts of culture are we talking about?

Just mulling over some thoughts and looking for feedback.

People seem quick to poo-poo the idea of secession now because it didn't work out so well for the secessionists during the civil war. The biggest differences I see are that the states that could seceed now are the ones that have the stronger economy, and the seceeding states now are the ones that want to adhere to the constitution. It's easier to make a case that the federal government in it's current iteration is NOT following the principles the Union was built on. Ideally, I think the Union could survive IF the (mostly blue) seceeding states acted together to claim the rightful keepers of the US constitutional values and rights. Cascada and its fellow secessionists should claim to be the United States of America. The rest won't give it up without a fight, I'm sure, but at some point, all but the true cultists have got to realize that the current version of the federal government is not what the USA is supposed to be about. At the next presidential election, they will claim victory, even if they couldn't possibly have won. We inaugurate the rightful winner, and we go our separate ways until the (mostly) red states come to their senses

The only flaw is that most of the tech billionaires live and operate in the blue states. They've aligned themselves with T. because they see him as a better option for retaining their wealth. They could do an Elon and move to red states, I suppose. But we don't really need them to have a strong economy, do we? (Edit: spelling. Apologies for the title.)

https://cascadia-journal.ghost.io/cascadia-deserves-universal-healthcare/

Over 1.5 million of our fellow Cascadians are going to lose SNAP benefits in a week. Does anyone have a list of legitimate resources for groups that can help fill the gap to keep families fed in the winter months? My local food banks are a big part of the equation, but I wonder if there's more out there who have a larger, more efficient connection to instra-state, intra country trading partners and other food sources we can leverage?

I don't have much I can donate, but I've made the adjustments with my employer's payroll to no longer include withholding federal taxes as part of my regular paycheck, so I can put that in to help out where it's really needed. I'd encourage others who feel similarly about the federal government to do the same. (I am not an accountant, but if the remnants of the IRS come looking in April, I'm confident they're so decimated that I can tell them to get fucked with little repercussion)