Caravan Project | The planetwalker “How to Change Your World One Step at a Time.”Caravan Project

The planetwalker “How to Change Your World One Step at a Time.”

«Part of the mystery of walking is that the destination is inside us and we really don’t know when we arrive until we arrive.»
˜John Francis

One day in 1983, John Francis stepped out on a walk. For the next 22 years, he trekked and sailed around North and South America, carrying a message of respect for the Earth — for 17 of those years, without speaking. During his monumental, silent trek, he earned an MA in environmental studies and a PhD in land resources. Today his Planetwalk foundation (www.planetwalk.org) consults on sustainable development and works with educational groups to teach kids about the environment.

The year was 1971. Two oil tankers collided in the waters off the Golden Gate, spilling 440,000 gallons of crude, catalyzing one man’s troubled mind into a whirl of questions: What is my part in this? Why are we living our lives at 60 miles per hour? How can one person make a difference? Then a friend of his died shortly after the spill. Francis commemorated the man’s life with a memorial walk from his home in Inverness to San Anselmo and back. In hindsight you could call it a spiritual crisis, some kind of grief that was pushing Francis to break out of the boundaries of his life.

He decided to see what would happen if he stopped traveling in cars. After a few months of walking, his world view was starting to polarize: the elation he felt at his newfound freedom, the despair he felt watching the world pass him by. He could see that if he continued his decision was going to transform his entire life.
nd yet, so threatened were people by the statement he was making that he found himself embroiled in many a pointless argument. On his 27th birthday he decided to treat himself to a break from all the noise by spending the day in silence. And in the bizarre, inconceivable way that time accretes, that day turned into two, and those two into a week, a month, a year. Before it ended, Francis’ birthday gift turned into 17 years of silence. «You have to experience it,» he says, looking back on those years, «You can’t explain silence by saying something.» But for those of us who are more inclined to view such behavior as an aberration, he will point to its virtues: It quieted his mind, it gave him the opportunity to really listen to others, and it kept his intentions from getting diffused in chatter.

Compelling, and well precedented, is the narrative of the sadhu, the silent, wandering holy man who lives completely on the margins of society. Certainly Francis has been no stranger to the margins. Over the years of his pilgrimage he has spent plenty of time painting in the wilderness or strumming his banjo along the side of some blue highway. But what makes Francis’ life so remarkable is the extent to which he continued to work within the mainstream. For in those years of silence he earned a B.A. in Oregon, an M.A. in Montana, and got his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

The chain of cause and effect started curving back around when Francis decided to make oil spills the focus of his doctoral studies. Hard though it is to believe, it came at a time when there were very few, if any, graduate students conducting this kind of research. Francis completed his course work around the spring of 1989, at the same time a certain tanker captained by a certain skipper ran aground on a certain stretch of Alaskan coastline, instantly embedding the concept of oil spill into the national consciousness. Copies of Francis’ doctoral dissertation found their way to the Coast Guard, which was looking to rewrite regulations to satisfy the requirements of the Oil Spill Act of 1990.

He was visiting Vermont in the spring of 1991 when the Coast Guard offered him a job. On Earth Day the previous year he had decided to break his silence, but he still hadn’t ended his abstinence from motorized transport. When he told them it would take him two months to bike to their headquarters in Washington, D.C., he figured that would be the last he would hear from them, but they called back to say there would be a job waiting for him when he arrived.

After a year spent sculpting the new regulations, he decided his usefulness was waning. «They wanted me to stay, but I felt that I would just be collecting a paycheck. I knew that year could turn into another and another and another.»

So Francis walked away from a $70,000 salary and on his way again around the globe. He caught a sailboat to the Caribbean, working his way from island to island for a year and a half, and eventually caught a boat down to Venezuela. It was while walking through the jungles of Venezuela that he had his next epiphany. Looking back on his courting with the Coast Guard, it occurred to him that if they hadn’t been so flexible, he would have blown it. «I was so caught up in the act of the walk and silence that I would have completely forgotten the reason I was doing them.» For while each year he would re-evaluate his decision not to speak, he had never questioned his avoidance of the fossil fuel conveyance. He arrived in Brazil during the Christmas of 1994 and climbed aboard a plane and flew home.

I made it up to Point Reyes Station in four hours, enough time to devour a giant scone from the Bovine Bakery before pedaling up the mesa to meet Francis at the house he rents with his wife and son. Francis appreciated my efforts, although he owns a car these days and even deigns to drive it. Over lunch he put my gesture into perspective. «It’s not so much that you’re gonna save enough oil to make a difference in any way. If you and I do it, it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket. But we all are interconnected in such a way that we learn and we teach each other. So we can learn from your experience. And it gives us the opportunity to see things that we might never have seen before. That’s the real power in what you’re doing.»

The sight of a 6-foot-2-inch black man walking down the backroads of Marin strumming a banjo would be no less distinctive today than it was 25 years ago. But given his history, what is most striking about Francis in person is how unaffected and non-eccentric he seems. With the addition of wife Martha (who he met while working for the Coast Guard) and 1-year old son Samuel, his life these days is more rooted than it has ever been. But behind these wild lifestyle changes, Francis remains committed to his own personal style of activism.

One thing becomes immediately clear – his years of silence stemmed not from any inability to chew the fat. This he demonstrates over the course of a lazy Saturday afternoon as he gives me the update on his life’s adventure.

When he got back from Brazil, he reconceived his planet walk to bring his message to a wider audience. «I said to myself, ‘I still think walking is really the way to go. It’s really good for understanding a country, to meet people, to slow down and to be at peace with yourself, so I think I’m gonna do it the rest of my life. But I’ve had experiences that are unique, and it is my responsibility to share them. So I’m going to start using automobiles, to get back to where I’m going, to go speak and do whatever other things I have to do. Then I’ll come back to my journey and I’ll keep walking.’ » When he got back to the States he started accepting speaking engagements around the country, such as the annual World Affairs Seminar at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, attended by some 1,200 high school juniors from around the world. He hooked up with GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment), an international educational program started by Al Gore tying together 5,000 schools in 97 countries, and would beam them reports from the trail. He wrote articles for magazines and journals, sold paintings and raised money for the next segment of his walk. In this piecemeal fashion, walking for a spell, coming home for a spell, Francis made it down to Tierra del Fuego by January of 1999.
For information on Planet Walk, check out www.planetwalk.org.