A Walking Life isn’t about famous walkers

Ask yourself this question: would you be able to walk anyplace you needed or wanted to go if you walked outside your door? Are you able to walk to a store, a library, school, or your place of employment? What's holding you back if your answer is "no"? Distance, highways, private property, sidewalks that are broken, missing, or inaccessible?

These were some of the thoughts that ran through my mind as I worked on my book A Walking Life. I intended to write a book for "everywalkers" like myself: a single mother working two jobs; a family living in high-crime areas with crumbling sidewalks and no parks; a wheelchair user with limited access to usable sidewalks or reliable public transportation; a 46-year-old father who commutes an hour each way to a corporate job he despises and sees his children rarely.

What does it mean that humans have designed walking out of our lives if bipedal walking is actually what makes our species human, as many paleoanthropologists claim?

Humans were already spending more time sitting and alone than ever before, even before a global pandemic trapped many of us in our homes and apartment buildings. Our progress was hampered — and continues to be hampered — by a car-centric society and an insatiable desire for production.

This predicament, however, was thrust upon us; it was not a choice we made voluntarily. As I worked on my book, I couldn't stop thinking about how we lost our right to walk (Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City is an excellent resource on this topic), and what that loss means for the strength of our communities, democracy's future, and the pervasive loneliness of individual lives.

It's not about great walkers like Thoreau, Wordsworth, Rousseau, the peripatetic Stoics, or even Rebecca Solnit in A Walking Life.

It's about the rest of us and the world we live in: community, connectivity, and highways; disability, technology, and evolution; faith, children, and mental health. I spoke with Karen Adolph, a New York neuroscientist who has dedicated her career to studying how infants learn to walk (they fall 17 to 30 times per hour! ); Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist who studies bipedalism in millions-of-year-old fossils; and Luke Urick and Scott Moss, two young Marine snipers who founded the Montana Vet Program to take fellow veterans on 100-mile-plus treks in the Montana wilderness to confront the grief, loss.

I discovered that loneliness is now recognized as a severe and more prevalent health issue while researching the linkages between walking and social connection. In an interview, neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who spent decades on the front edge of loneliness research before writing his book Loneliness, said:

"When all other circumstances are taken into account, chronic loneliness increases the risk of dying young by 20%." Which has a similar effect to obesity, though fat is not as depressing as loneliness."

And there's a lot more on the line. As we lose our ability to walk and live in a walkable environment, we not only jeopardize our own health but also the health of our communities. In a recent crossover issue with Tom Scocca's Indignity newsletter on the hellishness of living in a car-centric culture, AP writer Alex Pareene highlighted one method for this:

"What struck me was how easily you can turn into a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel; everyone else is the problem, there are too many people here, everything would be perfect if it weren't for all these OTHER people, etc." When you relate that to all other aspects of politics, it opens up a whole new world. Because of the traffic, many do not want new neighbors. It's only a short journey to some very terrible beliefs if you don't want more neighbors. And it's just a mood associated with driving. I've never been to the park and been annoyed by how many other people also chose to walk that day!"

Then there are the immediate consequences of driving: nearly 40,000 people die in car accidents in the United States each year, including over 7,000 pedestrians and cyclists; tens of thousands more suffer lifelong traumatic brain injuries, paraplegia, or other disabilities as a result of car accidents.

Walking's loss as a personal and communal act has the potential to undermine our deepest spiritual relationships, democratic societies, neighborhoods, freedom, health, and lives. We may, however, recover it. Rather than paving over that magnificent human gift, we may begin to create a world that embraces the walker, the pedestrian.