Leaving Footprints

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Abroad View Fall 2006, Editor's Letter

As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Villages were distanced a day’s walk apart and, with the occasional exception of horseback or boat, it was by foot that our ancestors traversed and populated the globe. We don’t walk as much as we used to. We don’t have to.

But we are perilously close to forgetting what it means to walk. And not just to the bus stop, or to the grocer, or to please a canine: but to walk a great distance. To walk and feel the ground beneath our feet, see the land and the people on it. It is, in the words of Walt Whitman—a very good walker—to “bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” It is freedom. Whitman, again: “freedom—to walk free and own no superior.” Or, another walker of the highest order, John Muir: “walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom.”

Some are still walking. Four years ago, a Scotsman names Rory Stewart walked across Asia. This remarkable journey included a trek across Afghanistan months after the Taliban fell. If it were not for Stewart’s stubborn will to walk the dangerous route—and his vast knowledge of the region’s history and languages—we would not have The Places in Between, a beautiful book about the people he met on his long walk.

In a similar fashion, aided by the occasional motorcar or bus, Alex Doniach visited Rwanda with a genocide survivor named Bonaventure (page 60) and found the journey was far more about his own heartbreaking reunion with his homeland than her own experience. And Miriam Young, a participant in the inaugural International Youth Volunteerism Summit (page 24), realized after a long walk ending in a broken leg that she would dedicate her life to the service of others.

Closer Look (pages 32-49) is about alternative, sustainable solutions for the environment and for society. Many of these elegant answers would not have been arrived at without the intimate interaction—the “freedom to walk free”—students had with villagers.

This issue arrives during a period of increased environmental awareness. Sustainability is suddenly chic (Vanity Fair cover and all). But I challenge us to look past what it means to be sustainable and start thinking about what it means to better the broken world we have inherited. This means a change of habit. This means, perhaps, more good long walks. There is no need for us to leave such large, unnatural footprints.

—Ryan Bradley