Photo: Annie Spratt / Unsplash

Ask yourself this question: if you stepped foot outside your door, would you be able to walk anywhere you needed or wanted to go? Can you walk to a store, a library, school, or work? If your answer is “no,” what’s stopping you? Distance, highways, private property, broken or absent or inaccessible sidewalks?

These are some of the questions I carried with me as I wrote my book A Walking Life. I wanted to write a book for the “everywalker:” a single mom working two jobs; a family living in areas of high crime with decades of disinvestment, crumbling sidewalks, and no parks; a wheelchair user who has little access to usable sidewalks or decent public transportation; a 46-year-old father who commutes an hour each way to a corporate job he hates and rarely sees his kids.

If bipedal walking is truly what makes our species human, as paleoanthropologists claim, what does it mean that we have designed walking right out of our lives?

Even before a global pandemic shut many of us up in homes and apartment buildings, human beings were spending more time sedentary and alone than ever before. Our movement was — and is — restricted by a combination of a car-centric culture and an insatiable thirst for productivity and efficiency.

But this situation was imposed on us, not a way of life we chose willingly. As I wrote my book, I wondered constantly how we lost the right to walk (Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City is an invaluable resource on this front), and what implications that loss has for the strength of our communities, the future of democracy, and the pervasive loneliness of individual lives.

A Walking Life isn’t about Thoreau or Wordsworth or Rousseau or the peripatetic Stoics or even Rebecca Solnit — names that often come up in tandem with walking.

It’s about the rest of us and the world we inhabit: community, connection, highways; disability, technology, evolution; faith, childhood, mental wellness. I interviewed people as varied as Karen Adolph, a neuroscientist in New York who’s made a career of studying how infants learn to walk (they fall 17 to 30 times an hour!); Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist who studies bipedalism in fossils millions of years old; and Luke Urick and Scott Moss, two young Marine snipers who started the Montana Vet Program to take fellow veterans on 100-mile-plus treks in the Montana wilderness to confront the grief, loss, and PTSD they carry from war.

One of the unexpected results of my research was how often loneliness came up as a serious health risk, to the point where it’s been identified as an epidemic. Neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who was on the leading edge of loneliness research for decades before publishing his book Loneliness, said in an interview that:

“When you allow for all the other factors, you find that chronic loneliness increases the odds of an early death by 20%. Which is about the same effect as obesity, though obesity does not make you as miserable as loneliness.”

Loneliness, he said, even decreases the effectiveness of sleep, affecting our heart health and immune systems.

The necessary responses to a global pandemic — distancing in particular — combined with widespread societal mistrust, and exacerbated by social media echo chambers, have only made the problem worse.

And there is more at stake: As we lose walking and walkable lives, we erode our own health but also our communities, neighborliness, and an ability to live together. Writer Alex Pareene of the AP stated much of this problem perfectly in a recent crossover issue with Tom Scocca’s Indignity newsletter on the hellishness of living in a car-centric world:

“What struck me is how quickly and easily you become a sociopath, even a borderline eugenicist, behind the wheel; everyone else is the problem, there are too many people here, this would all be fine if it weren’t for all these OTHER people, etc. And then you connect that to all other politics, and it unlocks so much. People don’t want more neighbors because of traffic. Not wanting more neighbors is a short trip to some really dark beliefs. And it’s literally just a mood tied to driving. I’ve never walked to the park and been upset at how many other people decided to walk to the park that day! Regularly driving in American cities is the fastest route to Malthusian thinking and it’s entirely about traffic and parking.”

None of this even begins to count the immediate harms: the nearly 40,000 people who die in the U.S. every year from car crashes, over 6,000 of them pedestrians and cyclists; or the tens of thousands more suffering with lifelong traumatic brain injuries, paraplegia, or other disabilities caused by car crashes.

To start to confront loneliness and the erosion of social capital, and to save lives, we need walkable communities and a walkable world.

The loss of walking as an individual and a community act has the potential to destroy our deepest spiritual connections, our democratic societies, our neighborhoods, our freedom, our health, and our lives. But we can reclaim it. We can start to make a world that welcomes the walker, the pedestrian, rather than trying to pave over that incredible human inheritance.

Walking can be a tool to enact political change, take charge of our health, and connect with our communities. Our feet don’t need access to gas stations, electric rails or charging stations, or even roads. Walking is part of what made us human, and it belongs to all of us.