The Pacific West region is vast, encompassing the American states of Alaska, California, Hawai'i, Oregon, and Washington and the territories of American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. The region measures some 4,525 miles (north-south) by 5,697 miles (east-west), resulting in a triangular area of more than 10 million square miles, from Alaska to Mexico, from the US to Canada to Asia. The natural features of this region represent the range of those of our planet, from rainforests to arctic tundra, from mountains to flatlands, and from arid deserts to coastal waters. The region contains the largest state (Alaska: 586,412 square miles), the most populous state (California: 33,871,648), and the least populous territory (American Samoa: 67,000). The population of the Pacific West totaled 45,323,637 people in the 2000 Census, or 16 percent of the total population of the United States (including territories). The Pacific West is a region diverse in every sense--topographically, environmentally, economically, and culturally. The people inhabiting the region represent multiple cultures, ethnicities, and heritages. Both native peoples and immigrants share rich histories through the layered development of their cultural landscapes.

As might be expected, few people claim a sense of personal identification with the Pacific West per se, and instead claim a relationship with regional identities that range from the geographically quite small ("my neighborhood") through the moderately-sized (the Los Angeles basin) to the large (Pacific Northwest). At the same time, however, people in the Pacific West recognize four large subregions: Alaska, California, the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington), and the Pacific Islands (Hawai'i, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas).

There are many cultural and geographic patterns that in fact connect the Pacific West's disparate subregions. Most obviously, all parts of the Pacific West are also parts of the United States, bound in a common polity in which the presence of the federal government has loomed large, notably through its management of vast public lands and through the military in times of war and peace. The Pacific West has been home to an unusual amount of extractive industry and agribusiness and has experienced in their wake the rise of powerful environmental protection movements. The natural landscapes of the Pacific West, for all their variety, are made alike by their vast scale, by the high degree of seismic activity within the Pacific Ring of Fire, and by the ubiquitous presence of the Pacific Ocean itself, whose waters have long been a source of sustenance in all the subregions and a highway between them. The ocean has also kept the region continuously open to influence from other parts of the world, especially Latin America, Canada, Russia, and Asia, in ways that are not entirely shared by the rest of the United States. Perhaps most significantly, the four subregions of the Pacific West are culturally and racially heterogeneous in ways that are different from each other and from the rest of the nation. These commonalities--expressed differently in each of the subregions--are some of the characteristics that mark the Pacific West as a place unique in the nation about which we may reasonably pursue important regional questions.

These and other large historic processes at work throughout the Pacific West warrant close attention with respect to their effects upon the experiences, understandings, and expressions of people within the region and how the region has affected the wider world. Thus, the Pacific West Center takes as an open question the idea of "regionalism" for the Pacific West.

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