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| Paul Salopek and his traveling companion (Photo: By John Stanmeyer, courtesy of nationalgeographic.org.) |
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is one migrant among many. He’s retracing our ancestors’ ancient migration on foot out of Africa and across the globe and writing about his adventures. His story has been shared by PBS NewsHour, the New York Times, NPR and Christiane Amanpour, among many.
As he begins the seventh year of his global trek, billed as the “Out of Eden Walk,” Salopek senses a changing planet.
As he wrote earlier this week on the National Geographic website (nationalgeographic.org) from Varanasi, India, it was exactly six years ago that he ducked out of a tent in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia, “clipped a pedometer to my belt, clapped on a cowboy hat, and began hiking to the Middle East on the Out of Eden Walk: a global ramble along the pathways of the first ‘Homo sapiens’ who dispersed out of Africa in the Stone Age.”
As Salopek recalled, by the desert dawn of January 10, 2013, some 60,000 people already had died in the distant war in Syria (a toll that now exceeds 400,000). “Barack Obama was soon going to be sworn in for a second term as U.S. president. And in Ethiopia, cell phone usage was exploding at the rate of 400 percent a year, though coverage hadn’t yet reached my desolate camp. I was using a satellite phone. It’s sudden ringing that silent morning startled me. It was an American radio host.”
The radio interviewer asked Salopek if he was still carrying his New Mexico house keys. The answer was no. The writer had sent them back years ago while he was walking in Cyprus. He no longer owns a house. He has a map. Home is on it everywhere.
“Ancient migrations have guided my walk’s route and storytelling across the world from Africa to my finish line, the tip of South America,” writes Salopek. “So it’s natural that some readers – the calling journalist included – tend to see my project as an antique and maybe ethereal endeavor, a monkish pilgrimage, a ‘journey out of time.’ But it’s been just the opposite.”
By Salopek’s estimate, over the past six years, he’s walked nearly 16 million footsteps from his starting point at a human fossil site in the wilderness in the Horn of Africa and his current location on the cultivated plains of northern India. His days, he says, “have been extraordinarily busy: crammed with incident and talkative people, immersed in modern problems and current events. In this way, the Out of Eden Walk has been more like a trek into a common future: After all, we’re walking together into the shared bottlenecks of the 21st century.”
According to Salopek, after walking for six years on his trek, “two broad impressions have emerged, at boot level of this vast world.”
First, he says, “we’re living in a golden age of human migration” as desert villagers by the millions try clawing their way into urbanized global economies.
“Even at the utterest ends of the Earth, I’ve found myself walking among striving people on the move. In the remote Afar Desert of Ethiopia, I stumbled across the bodies of African migrants who had died of thirst on the unforgiving desert trails to find jobs on the Arabian peninsula. I slept in sandy Jordanian fields among Syrian war refugees.”
As Salopek points out, “the UN (United Nations) estimates that more than a billion people – one in seven humans today – are voting like this with their feet, migrating both internally and across borders. Such numbers may alarm the more settled, richer corners of the globe. But history teaches that the forces behind human exodus are rarely contained by walls.”
Are you listening, President Trump?
“I sit dusty and sweating under a ficus tree, one walker among many,” writes Salopek, “watching busloads of India’s hardworking poor come and go ceaselessly. Sooner than later, the world must learn to harness the extraordinary energy behind mass aspiration.”
As for the second change, Salopek likens it to a tectonic shift, “a new geological weight over the horizon that tilts the surface of the planet east.”
For the past three years, Salopek has walked the old Silk Road from Turkey to India. In Central Asia, he writes, he’s seen societies transformed by Chinese economic power: “new highways, pipelines, communications grids, railroads. Part of this is the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, the most costly infrastructure project in the world today.”
Salopek writes that he’s unsure whether this will be the century of the Chinese. “But it is clear from hundreds of trailside conversations in shops and farms, in schools and offices that we collectively walked across a new Asian threshold some time ago. All roads may yet lead to Rome. But there are new Romes now. And the old ones have lost something of their glow.”
The writer looks forward to exploring these new questions, on foot of course, as he walks east, toward Myanmar, toward Yunnan.
“Whatever the case,” writes Salopek, “there is no need for fear. The key is stop and talk, and then to keep moving. To cross the next river. To look around the next mountain. Humankind’s ancestors did this, and they gave us the world.”
Salopek has a map. Home is on it everywhere. “And it will do.”
(The Out of Eden Walk is Paul Salopek’s multiyear, 21,000-mile storytelling odyssey across the globe in the footsteps of our ancestors. Join the #EdenWalk journey through social media on Facebook and Twitter.)
