What Paul Salopek Has Learned from Walking Across the World

Now we turn to one man's epic quest to retread the steps of some of the planet's first migrants.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Paul Salopek spent 13 years walking across four continents, covering more than 38,000 kilometers.

He describes it as slow journalism, exploring the human condition at ground level.

He spoke to Hari Sreenivasan on the last leg of his odyssey, traveling through North America.

Paul Salopek, thanks so much for joining us again.

I want to point out to our audience the first time I interviewed you before you started this walk, I was naive enough to believe you when you said it's going to be about seven years.

I mean, in fact, we titled the video, Paul Salopek aims to walk the globe in seven years.

That was 13 years ago.

To refresh people, what is this sort of act of slow journalism that you're performing and why do it?

So this project is based on kind of on many layers, but the base layer is I'm trying to follow as well as science can tell me the pathway of the ancient people who first spread out of Africa back in the stone age, right, in the Pleistocene.

So it's a rediscovery of the planet on foot, using deep history to try to unravel current events.

I'm a journalist.

And so using my body to report.

So I'm moving through the big stories of our day, you know, whatever their politics, economics, culture, war, environment, at a walking pace.

And slow journalism isn't just slowing down.

I mean, that's de facto, that's my default mode.

But it's more about approaching current events in news, like a hunter, like the original hunters that moved out of Africa.

And that means not knowing what the story is ahead of me, right?

And I have to be constantly alert.

Stories appear by serendipity, by chance, they're not boxed in by preconceptions.

And it's a wonderful way to work, actually.

It's basically giving your curiosity foreign.

You've also kind of been at the right place at the wrong time and the right place at the right time.

I mean, there was COVID-19 and, you know, when that happened, you were walking your way through Myanmar, if I'm right, and you said, "In Ethiopia, I've walked through a ferocious resource war between pastoral groups and I've been shot at by the Israeli defense force in the West Bank.

Kurdish guerrillas ambushed me in eastern Turkey and my hike through Afghanistan was delayed by a Taliban offensive.

But never in all my experience of murdered innocence had I stumbled into anything like the coup in Yangon.

What happened there?

Tell us.

I was in northern Myanmar waiting to renew a visa and COVID hit while I was there, as you mentioned.

And so I was actually in a quarantine in the big commercial city of Yangon when the military coup occurred.

And I could hear demonstrations outside.

I could hear people by the thousands marching in the streets.

And what was so heartbreaking, Hari, even for me, who have covered many, many conflicts around the world, was the innocence of these young people.

This was kind of five years into Myanmar's fledgling democracy.

They were just kind of getting their feet under them after decades of military rule.

And the young people were young digital nomads.

They were people who lived on the Internet, like kids anywhere now.

They had this naive innocence that the world was going to come rescue them.

And I had to kind of hold my tongue saying, "No, they're probably not."

And when the military started shooting them, it was heartbreak, simply because there was nobody there to kind of come to their rescue.

We should remind our viewers that you're not walking completely solo.

Throughout every different country, you've got these amazing volunteers, walking partners that go with you, maybe for 10 miles, maybe for 100 miles, maybe for 1,000 miles.

So you spent about two and a half years walking through China.

We in the United States or in the West, we have these conceptions of what China is.

And I guess over those two and a half years, what challenged those conceptions for you?

What did you come away with?

The way I tell my readers, it's more than one and a half times walking from LA to New York.

It's like walking the flight line from Chicago to Paris, but it's all through China, right?

And it's all through the belly of China.

It's through this kind of vast center and West that not too many people go to.

I'm not talking about the far West in Xinjiang, which is in the news for political reasons, human rights reasons, and rightfully so.

I'm talking through this kind of vast center.

But my surprise going in was just how incredibly variegated the Chinese population is outside of the big cities, and certainly from that industrial eastern quarter, where all the people like you and me are based, right?

Beijing, Shanghai, who are not allowed to travel easily into the interior.

So the diversity of China's landscape, the diversity of the peoples, people are all mixed up from past diasporas, you know, everything from Mao's kind of failed experiments in the 60s, where they displaced millions to the Mongol invasions, you know, 700, 800 years ago.

So there's this notion of China kind of as being monolithic, this being the factory of the world, this gigantic kind of industrial park.

I have amazing privilege of going through China that even the Chinese themselves, that would be kind of an alien country, because so many people have migrated over the past few generations into the cities.

This is the land of the ancestors.

This is the land of kind of a depopulating agricultural zone.

It's a land where it's, you know, people were so startled to see me at some locations, they asked me if I was Japanese.

Right.

So it was an amazing walk to go through this this kind of transect of the Middle Kingdom.

There is an interesting kind of merging of kind of digital life and real life in both of these countries where the export image might be of these hyper 5G super connected cities.

But as you point out, what were the kinds of costs?

Who are the kinds of people that you met in Korea and in Japan that showed you that?

Well, there are these tradeoffs as a society that we're starting to make.

Loneliness.

You know, it's with an epideveloped economy, you can purchase the luxury of privacy, number one.

And when you plug into a highly post-industrialized, you know, into the information age technology, AI and all that, it is even possibly further isolating if you're not careful with society.

My walk, because of practical reasons, goes through an awful lot of countryside, right?

I do walk through giant megacities.

I walk through the outskirts of Tokyo, one of the biggest metropolises in the world, 38 million people.

And it takes days and days and days to walk across these big cities, and I write stories about it.

But I would say about 80% of my route is through agricultural zones, through rural zones.

And what I saw leaving mainland Asia, from China, then to South Korea, and then to Japan, was this really sobering after effect of the vast migration of country people into cities.

They call it hyper-urbanization.

That was fueled by hyper-globalization, right?

The hyper-connectedness of these societies has pushed people into the cities to have, you know, urban jobs.

So in South Korea and in Japan, I walked through landscapes of loneliness, where I would walk through villages, especially in Japan.

It got more and more acute as I was heading eastward.

I walked through villages where there was maybe one or two old people.

I'm talking people in their 70s.

And all the houses were empty.

And the Japanese government is trying to kind of encourage people to go back to villages to alleviate the pressures of urbanization.

So strangely, some of these villages were really well-maintained.

They're like villages under bell jars.

Cleaned up lawns, parks, but they were empty.

Back in China, you wrote about social media influencers.

And you said, "Dong Yaxu is 22 years old, looks a hygienic 17, but often feels like a life-weary veteran of gladiatorial warfare."

Which is to say he's a KOL, or a key opinion leader, an alpha toiler among the legions of Chinese live-streaming celebrities whose online survival balances on the fleeting attention span of the world's largest click economy.

What did these creators reveal to you about Chinese society?

And you could say, to an extent, Korean society has K-pop bands where there's images and our kind of presentations of ourselves digitally, and how important that is now in the world.

In societies, and you know, both of these societies have an element of Confucian kind of bedrock to them about the work ethic, right?

You work really long hours, you're super disciplined, they can tend to be by, you know, American standards, somewhat hierarchical, you know, your boss really has a large measure of control over your life.

So this digital world assumes enormous power, it's very attractive.

So you have kind of the hyper-urbanized landscape and then floating somewhere off the ground above it is this social media world.

And the scale of it, Americans, I don't, you know, think would comprehend.

The guy that you just mentioned is a small-time influencer.

He has a million followers.

The big time influencers have more than 100 million.

That's a third of the population in the United States who regularly go to watch them do whatever they do.

And they're live streaming their daily lives.

They're on camera constantly.

And it's this kind of very, very surreal disassociation from, you know, often lies that can be often routine or repetitive.

So there are very small chunks where you have to, there is no land and you have to take a ship across.

And you made a fantastic kind of time-lapse video of the container ship and you wrote about the people that are on board when you came from Japan to Alaska.

And you said on this ship, "Yet 1.9 million seafarers who keep this vast conveyor belt of globalization moving remain anonymous, unacknowledged, all but invisible to the public.

Where are the blockbuster films set in the wheelhouse?

Where are container ship shanties, the merchant marine bestsellers, the nautical memes?"

Tell us about some of these men that you met.

It was, again, another gift of the walk.

I had no idea that I'd be taking a container ship across the Pacific.

And I used to be a fisherman, a commercial fisherman in my day, but nothing on these gigantic... This ship was 300 meters long, like three football fields long.

It was carrying something like 7,000 containers of everything that we wear, what's in our homes, what we drive.

It's on this ship.

I was hoping for a container of ice cream that would break open.

And there were 21 crew.

And it's globalization's alternate kind of crystallization in the workforce, which these crews are multicultural, multinational.

They're mainly from Asia.

Philippines, which seems to be dominant, from India, China, Eastern Europeans, and the males around the tables were Western and Eastern, kind of alternating day after day.

And these were mostly young people, mostly men.

I think it's one of the most masculine work, kind of job descriptions still left in the world.

I think something like 98% men.

And they are moving all of our stuff for us.

The reason we can order stuff on Amazon, the reason we can have a delivery economy and e-economy are these young guys in their 20s and 30s from South and East Asia.

And they sometimes stay at sea for six to nine months without seeing their families.

It's quite a sacrifice.

You went and spent some time in Shishmaref, which a lot of the journalists that have gone there, this is one of the classic kind of Alaska towns that are really falling into the sea.

And you've not just covered the climate in Alaska, you've covered the effects of climate change now for these past 13 years in all these different countries and all these different ways.

What are you seeing?

It's probably one of the ultimate, if not the ultimate, stories of our time that is obscured by all these other concerns, the geopolitics, the wars.

It was a constant theme.

Almost every footfall for the last 18,000 miles had an element of this drastically changing climate across all the planets I've been walking across.

It's on everybody's lips and nobody sort of knows what to do because, you know, it's such a massive thing that people feel disempowered.

There are very powerful vested interests to keep, you know, fossil fuels going.

So it adds to a sense of kind of melancholy and passivity.

But I think in Shishmaref, the reason why journalists go there is this little village of Inupiaq people, these people are hunters, they hunt walrus, mainly at sea and seals, is eroding into the ocean.

And so their village, they're on a barrier island, the whole island is going to be gone in 20 or 30 years, one generation.

And what kind of was fascinating to me as a writer is that they're still paralyzed about what to do.

They keep holding these tribal councils with votes.

It's a community of maybe 600 people.

And the votes are always razor thin about whether we leave or we stay.

And my project is about rootlessness.

My project is about migration, human novitism, voting with your feet, the oldest coping mechanism for crisis that goes back to day one for human beings.

Here are people who said they just in November voted to finally relocate.

And it's going to take years.

They still have to find funding, but it's heartbreaking.

What have you learned from some of the elders that you visited with?

What is sitting in those spaces in all these different contexts taught you?

Centuries ago, every culture, most every culture and civilization has a tradition of wondering monks or wondering scholars where you would walk to a master and sit at the master's knee and listen.

And the Out of Eden Walk kind of conforms to that old, old model.

And so it's been one of the most enormous gifts of the project.

It's been one of the greatest rewards is to be able to meet these folks in a world that is entering what I call kind of cultural aphasia.

We're kind of entering a phase where we don't have a memory.

And to tap into their memories of a way when there was human connection.

I'm not romanticizing kind of the difficulty of their lives.

The guy who built the Burrard Road had a very difficult life, right?

He was a village boy who had to work, you know, for months for almost no wages through the jungle, building, bashing this road across the mountains to, you know, for, to ward off the enemy in World War II.

And I think what I get from my readers, Hari, is a thirst for this kind of storytelling, because this thing of looking at our phones is as reward, as informative as it can be, or as disinformative, is like having, it's watery, it doesn't have too strong of a flavor.

It's very diluted and people have a yearning for kind of authenticity, for authentic experience.

And I think in my humble opinion, what the walk has taught me and listening to these elders, men and women, who were born in the pre-digital age, is that the key ingredient to authenticity and meaning is time.

It's the ability to take time to think before you act, to think before you speak, to think before you create.

And that golden kind of ingredient, I think, is giving rares diamonds these days.

I wonder, how has this kind of changed, if it has, you as a person?

I mean, you've been doing this for much longer than you ever thought you were going to.

But when you kind of look at your life now, what are the things that you're most grateful for from this experience?

It's going to sound paradoxical and maybe not even coherent, but community.

I'm the man from far away who walks in over the horizon, stays a while and then walks on.

But what the walk has given me is this extremely beautiful ability to discern the power of human community.

And so I create my own community, my walking partners and my family, but also I get to stay with communities that are very strong and are grappling often with the same problems, whether they're in China, Japan or the US or Mexico.

All the things, climate change, urbanization, political repression, freedom of thought, all these things, jobs, and how human beings kind of often perform better when they work together in groups, right?

And kind of look out after each other.

And so that's been, I think, the lingering gift of the walk.

I've just entered North America that even getting used to the pace of life in the U.S.

is a bit of a change.

I've told my friends I feel like Gulliver, coming back home after years of the, you know, in Lilliput, where he felt so disassociated from his home country that he's ended up talking to his horse.

I don't think I'm quite that bad.

It is a bit odd to be back in the U.S.

for the first time since 2013.

I'm just getting used to it.

Well, it is one of the greatest stories being written.

You can go check out all of Paul's dispatches at outofedonwalk.org.

Paul Salopek, thanks so much for joining us.

It's always a pleasure.

Come walk.