NOVEMBER | FROM THE EDITOR
What did Paul Salopek
do after walking for more
than 15 miles through
the Qizilqum Desert of
Uzbekistan—one of the
most difficult passages
of the Out of Eden Walk
up to that point? He pre-
pared a meal of hay for
his donkey, Mouse.PAUL SALOPEK IS nearly halfway
through the most improbable hike
imaginable: He is taking a 24,000-
mile walk around the world, retracing
our ancient ancestors’ journey out of
Africa to the tip of South America. So
far, he’s been on the road for nearly
nine years, trying to see what might
be learned about our frenetic world
by experiencing it one step at a time.
“My aim has been simple,” the two-
time Pulitzer Prize winner explains in
this issue. “To foot-brake my life, to
slow down my thinking, my work, my
hours. Unfortunately, the world has
had other ideas. Apocalyptic climate
crises. Widespread extinctions. Forced
human migrations. Populist revolts.
A mortal coronavirus.” And earlier
this year, in addition to all that, he
walked into Myanmar—and straight
into a coup.
The National Geographic Society
has been the principal funder since
the start of what Paul named the Out
of Eden Walk. This issue’s essay is the
10th feature by Paul that the magazine
has published during the walk, along
with his hundreds of dispatches for
NationalGeographic.com.
Paul has written repeatedly about
battlements and fortresses he has
passed, vestiges of history’s wars. They
may have been strong enough to block
out enemies, he notes—but they also
locked in “intolerance, anti-rational
purges, and, ultimately, stagnation.”
Paul paints everyday scenes in mov-
ing detail. At a truck stop in Djibouti
where Somalis offered red tea, “I was
surely the most privileged walker
within a thousand miles,” he recalls.
“Yet these men, who had left comrades
dead of thirst in the desert, spooned my
sugar for me as if I were the starveling.”
And he writes of refugees—refugeeseverywhere, of all nationalities, an
army of the displaced. In Jordan, he
talks with families picking tomatoes
that they share with him. At every turn
he sees Syrians—no surprise, given
that some 6.6 million have fled their
strife-torn country.
I glimpsed the refugee crisis, briefly
but unforgettably, when I met up with
Paul on the walk for a few days in 2014.
In Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey, dis-
traught Syrians told us of their longing
for their homeland and their certainty
they would never see it again.
Often in the company of our extraor-
dinary photographer John Stanmeyer,
Paul Salopek is documenting the
planet in a way no other journalist has.
We’re proud to publish his work and to
share his insights about how we can
navigate through our troubled century.
Thank you for reading National
Geographic. jBY SUSAN GOLDBERG PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN STANMEYERAt a Purposeful Pace
Through Our World
THE OUT OF
EDEN WALK