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.
Read more about this topic: Pacific Northwest
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a
transcendental kind.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)