Culture
While the dominant culture in the Pacific Northwest today is Anglo-American and Anglo-Canadian, there is significant Mexican and Chinese influence. 23% of Vancouver, B.C. is Chinese, and 50% do not speak English as their first language. Parts of Oregon and Washington are bilingual in both English and Spanish, and Native American culture is strong throughout the Pacific Northwest. The hippie movement also began in California and the Pacific Northwest. There have been proposals for certain parts of the Pacific Northwest becoming its own country because of the shared ecoregion and culture. The most well known proposals are Ecotopia from the Nine Nations of North America and Cascadia. However, the region is strongly divided by the international border, and this division has grown more rather than less powerful over the 20th century. In addition, although the metropolitan centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland are bound into a kind of urbanized region, they originated and continue to thrive as east-west gateways, competing with each other, rather than north-south connectors.
Pacific Northwest has among the most introverted people in the United States.
Cannabis use is relatively popular, especially around Vancouver BC, Bellingham, Seattle, Olympia, Spokane, Portland and Eugene. Several of these jurisdictions have made arrests for cannabis a low enforcement priority. Medical marijuana is legal in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, as well as in Alaska, though that state prohibits its sale and has no licensed dispensaries, and in the Yukon, although less than 50 of the territory's residents are licensed to use medical marijuana and no legal dispensaries operate within its borders. As of December 6, 2012 possession of less than an ounce of marijuana for recreational use is slated to become legal in Washington state as a result of the state ballot measure, Initiative 502, which was approved by the state's voters on November 6, 2012 by a ten-point margin.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.”
—Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)