The Cascadia Scorecard is Sightline's index of progress for the Northwest, an alternative to influential but misleading indicators such as the Dow Jones or GDP. We publish it annually (though we're skipping 2008). Find the latest version here. Here's why we chose these seven trends to track over time.

Health: Sightline chose lifespan because it is widely considered the best single measure of a population's health. Lifespan reflects all of the diseases, accidents, and lifestyle choices that shorten people's lives, as well as the effectiveness of medical care in helping us live longer. And contrary to first impressions, it does not simply reflect medical practices that extend lives without improving them: across nations, every added month of life expectancy tends to bring more than a month of good health. For mortal beings, time is the most precious resource, and a nonrenewable one at that. So health-how much time we have, our lifespan-is perhaps the most fundamental indicator of human well-being. Go to health.

Economy: Conventional statistics like GDP and average personal income often obscure the economic status of ordinary people, a key trend measured by the Cascadia Scorecard. Since 1990, for example, the top-earning fifth of households in the Northwest states have added enough to their income to buy a new SUV every year, while others have seen little gain. In order to gauge the economy's real-world effects on working families, Sightline researchers created a fourfold index that integrates typical household incomes, the unemployment rate, the poverty rate, and the child poverty rate. Economic security is also important to measure because the fortunes of ordinary people are so closely tied to the region's future. Long-term poverty has enduring social consequences, among them slowed learning in children, increases in crime and delinquency, and teen pregnancy. Go to economy.

Population: Population trends are an excellent gauge of women's-and families'-well-being. Around the world, as women's opportunities improve, birthrates decline, family size shrinks, and women postpone childbearing. Teen birthrates and the frequency of unplanned pregnancies diminish especially quickly. Population also powerfully shapes the Northwest's environment, driving most increases in ecological harm. The measure that the Scorecard examines is birthrates, which-unlike migration-account for the share of this population growth that has global as well as local implications. Globally, human numbers are rising more slowly than in years past, but are still increasing by 74 million a year. And adjusted for northwesterners' resource-intensive lifestyles, the Northwest's growth counts for more in the global equation. Go to population.

Energy: Of all the commodities produced and consumed in the region, none casts a longer shadow than energy; it affects everything from salmon survival to climate stability, and national security to economic development. The Northwest produces very little petroleum or natural gas, for example, so dependence on fossil fuels siphons tens of millions of dollars a week out of the regional economy. And energy use is an indicator of northwesterners' overall consumption of natural resources, because it rises and falls in tandem with most other consumption trends. The Northwest's residents, like others in North America, consume their body weight each day in raw materials, and the resulting waste, pollution, resource depletion, and habitat disruption are the principal environmental shortcomings of the Cascadian economy. Achieving vastly greater efficiency of resource use is the region's primary test of sustainability. Go to energy.

Sprawl: Sprawl-dispersed, automobile-oriented urban development-figures into the Scorecard because it contributes to a distressing array of ills. Sprawl locks northwesterners into an auto-dependent lifestyle, with an attendant burden on their pocketbooks, the world's oil fields, and the planet's atmosphere. Sprawl also consumes farmland and open space, and ruins lowland ecosystems. It endangers health by putting people behind the wheel, by tainting the air and water with toxic pollutants, and by turning walking into recreation rather than transportation. The Scorecard measures the best single indicator of sprawl: residential density, or the number of people who live on each acre. Density reveals to what extent growing populations are consuming new land. And studies of more than 100 cities on four continents show that neighborhood density is the most important determinant of how much people drive. Go to sprawl.

Forests & Wildlife: Monitoring the health of the Northwest's ecosystems may be the Scorecard's greatest challenge, given the lack of good data and the innate complexity of these systems. As a limited but informative substitute, we initially chose to track forest cover in five areas of the region by measuring acres of clearcuts over a 30-year period with imagery from the NASA Landsat system (see our awesome animated maps of this here). Tracking clearcuts provides a rough gauge for how extensively humans have altered the forests of the Northwest--and for how effectively northwesterners are safeguarding their distinctive natural heritage. Starting in 2006, we could no longer track clear-cutting effectively because the Landsat system broke down, so--after extensive research--we replaced the forests indicator with a wildlife index that tracks the populations of five key indicator species, and compares their current well-being with their historical abundance.  Go to forests indicator, and the wildlife index.

Pollution: All living things in Cascadia contain within their tissues a thin soup of dozens or even hundreds of chemicals that didn't exist a century ago. The most worrisome share three characteristics: they break down slowly; they harm bodily functions; and they accumulate in living tissue, reaching high concentrations in humans. The Cascadia Scorecard analyzes human breast milk in mothers across the Northwest for three such toxics: PCBs and dioxins, which have been linked to health problems ranging from intellectual impairments to cancer; and PBDEs, chemicals that are widely used as flame retardants and are suspected of similar effects. Pollution in breast milk is a good indicator for contaminants in the bodies of both men and women; it's also the pollution that most poignantly shapes the future. Go to pollution.

See also
Why the GDP needs to be fixed