As explained in the previous essay, walking has been perhaps the single most important evolutionary innovation for the human body and the human mind. Is it too much to attribute the evolution of human intelligence to walking? In the essays that follow, I will describe and analyze numerous examples of people who, throughout human history, have done their best work and their best thinking while walking on foot, even when other means of transportation were available. And sometimes not.
As the late Joe Amato explains in his book On Foot, for most of human history walking has been the only available, or reasonably available, option for going from one place to another. Until quite recently, roads between human towns—everywhere in the world—were scarcely better than trails, hardly suitable for wagons or even horses, unless conditions were perfect. As I explain in Forgotten Landscapes, Native Americans built a civilization on trails that connected cities and large villages. Amato makes it sound as if even the much-praised Roman roads were not too good for most of their length. It is a miserable story of humans trying and often failing to travel to new locations.
As soon as other conveyances became available, Amato explains, they instantly created a hierarchy—those who could ride a horse or in a carriage had higher status than miserable pedestrians, and so it remains even today. In America, if you are on foot, people in cars think something must be wrong with you. This attitude is not as prevalent in France, where I now live.
But even in modern warfare—that is, before the age of missiles and drones—most of the movement was on foot. Chevaliers rode on horses, some soldiers rode in tanks, but most of them have been and are infantrymen.
But also throughout history, people have chosen to walk, sometimes very long distances, on foot even when it makes no logical sense to do so. The immediate example everyone thinks of is pilgrimages. Pilgrims considered it sinful to do their pilgrimage some other way, although rich pilgrims often figured out a way to justify it.
When I first met Joe, he was walking. He was my colleague at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, where I worked until 1998. In 1993, he had just published a book about a pyramid scheme that took place right in Marshall. It involved getting farmers to plant Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), a kind of sunflower with a big starchy root. The roots could be used to produce biofuels. This is all very well, but the corporation that promoted it made all its profits off of getting farmers to sign up for it. Joe called his book The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. I was the new botanist at the university, and Joe wanted me to speak at the book launch.
I think Joe appreciated nature walks very much, but that is not what he was doing that day. He was walking around and around in the interconnected hallways of the university. In Minnesota, the winter wind on ice can blow you down. The university system decided to build Southwest State to be a campus where you could go anywhere without stepping outside. It was an intentional magnet for all the disabled students in the state university system. Joe wouldn’t let even major heart surgery stop him: he had just had major heart surgery when I met him. He lived another forty years. He was an offbeat genius and very amiable.
No comments:
Post a Comment