the past 10 years of my life to walking across the Earth, I’m sometimes asked, “How do the big issues of our day look—from boot level?” Or, “Has walking changed the way you weigh current events?” Or put more simply, often by schoolchildren, “Any surprises?”
Some questions I can reply to handily: The answers have been juddering through my bones, sure as a metronome, over the past 25 million footsteps, or more than 12,000 miles of global trail.
Viewed at the intimate pace of three miles an hour, for instance, I can confirm that Homo sapiens has altered our planet’s ecology to such a radical degree that we should be suffering from mass sleeplessness—not just from bad consciences but from genuine dread. (In more than 3,500 days and nights spent trekking from Africa to East Asia, I can tally, depressingly, the number of meaningful wildlife encounters on my fingers and toes.) The most corrosive injustice encountered, up close, in every single human culture I’ve walked through? That’s easy: the shackles that men lock, cruelly, arbitrarily, on the potential of women. (Who’s always underpaid? Who’s typically undereducated? Who wakes up first to a morning of toil? Who’s the last to rest?) Meanwhile, climate worries haunt trailside chats with everyone from grandmotherly Kazakh farmers to gun-toting Kurdish guerrillas.
