Subject: RE: Pacific Northwest
Date: Oct 3 13:38:33 1994
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at ups.edu
For some reason I didn't get Michael Price's posting about the Pacific
Northwest, so I'm glad Gene Hunn included the whole text in his response.
Michael, you are certainly correct to feel that most USers (pronounced
"you-essers") (*that* should be our name, not *Americans*) are
nationocentric and rather calloused to the sensitivities of the residents
of other countries, and Canada has suffered more than most. I suspect deep
in the subconscious most of us USers wish that everything north of the
Mexican border was one country, so we wouldn't have to think about you
people to the north as different (too much thinking messes up your mind).
After all you do look a lot like us, you speak the same language (eh?), and
when we drive on any main southern Canadian street, we have to look very
closely to see we aren't in the U.S. Do Canadians feel the same when they
cross the border? I have heard over and over again that there are demeaning
elements about it, for which I apologize for at least my tiny
representation of the USA.
Your comments about the title of my shorebird book prompt me to say that,
even though I knew Vancouver isn't in the Canadian Northwest, I really
thought, like Gene Hunn, that the part of North America we both inhabit was
called the Pacific Northwest. Is there such a term in Canada? It would have
to refer to the Queen Charlottes, I guess, as so little of Canada fronts
the Pacific Ocean! I wish someone would have raised this point in a serious
way; I would have loved to title my book "Shorebirds of the Pacific
Northwest and Southwest." Canada furnished <1/4 of the area but a lot of
records, as you wrote.
And Mike Smith's point is certainly well-taken too. I've mentioned that
aspect of it when I've given lectures on "seabirds of the northeast
Pacific."
Well, I keep hoping Political Correctness will fold up its tents and steal
away, but instead it's added geographic references to its
repertoire....argghh. But it does call attention to the irony of just about
every aspect of life. There's a whole lot of countries that have Pacific
Northwests, when you think about it--also Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica,
Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. I haven't heard from any of them
yet....
Dennis Paulson