Walking the Walk
By Dashka Slater
One Friday morning in February, a group of students at the University of California at Berkeley settled onto the blue upholstery of a north campus lecture hall and readied themselves for a guest speaker. The students — undergraduates in a class called Introduction to Culture and Natural Resource Management in the U.S. — had been told that John Francis PhD’91was a man of unusual commitment to the environmental cause; he had gone for twenty-two years without riding in a motorized vehicle, and seventeen years without speaking. They prepared themselves for someone noble and ascetic — someone who would exhort them to be uncomfortable — and more than one of them felt slightly irritated at the prospect.
But Francis was not exactly what they had expected. For one thing, he was playing a banjo.
The banjo is a happy instrument by nature, but in Francis’s hands it became positively exuberant. He danced a little as he played, shutting his eyes, swaying, smiling, and tapping out a rhythm on the banjo’s silver body. Some of the students clapped along. When the song was over, Francis held out his arms.
“Thank you for being here,” he said. “And I say, ‘Thank you for being here’ because after seventeen years of not speaking, those were the first words out of my mouth.”
Francis’s journey began in 1971 when two oil tankers collided beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling 840,000 gallons of crude into San Francisco Bay. Determined to end his participation in the oil economy, Francis walked across the United States and South America. Along the way, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Southern Oregon State College, a master’s degree at the University of Montana-Missoula, and a PhD at UW-Madison. Eventually, he got a job at the U.S. Coast Guard writing oil spill regulations, was named a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, and wrote a book about his experiences that has been optioned to be made into a movie. Now the man who became famous for walking and not talking spends his time flying around the world giving speeches.
But Francis doesn’t just talk. He acts out any story he tells with a precise and comic pantomime vocabulary developed during the years he was mute. Standing in the UC-Berkeley lecture hall, he acted out driving to see the oil spill with his girlfriend, Jean, his arm slung over her invisible shoulder. He acted out walking twenty miles from his former home in Inverness, California, to the town of San Anselmo in homage to a friend who had died in a boating accident. He even acted out the chip he had on his shoulder,
the chip that said, “I’m walking for the environment. What are you doing?”
By the time his lecture was over, the students — part of a generation that is not particularly attracted to the notion of personal sacrifice — were completely captivated. “I thought it was going to be really serious,” one student remarked to another afterward. “But it was so chill.”
It’s a common response to an encounter with Francis. His story makes people expect him to raise a haughty eyebrow at their profligate lifestyles. Instead, they find a merry-eyed man who is far more interested in listening than in lecturing.
“He has a tune in his head that he marches to, and he definitely does what he thinks is right for him,” says Barbara Borns, former student services program manager at UW-Madison’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “But he doesn’t pressure people to accept him or buy into his lifestyle.”
When I first met Francis, twenty-eight years ago, he was living in Ashland, Oregon, and he was undoubtedly a local personality. I was a sixteen-year-old high school student, and Francis was then in his mid-thirties, but we were both mentored by the same teacher, the poet Lawson Inada, who taught at Southern Oregon State College, and we had friends in common. I remember Francis as a gentle, humorous presence who communicated with whistles and gestures and sometimes by writing on a pad of paper.
One Friday morning in February, a group of students at the University of California at Berkeley settled onto the blue upholstery of a north campus lecture hall and readied themselves for a guest speaker. The students — undergraduates in a class called Introduction to Culture and Natural Resource Management in the U.S. — had been told that John Francis PhD’91was a man of unusual commitment to the environmental cause; he had gone for twenty-two years without riding in a motorized vehicle, and seventeen years without speaking. They prepared themselves for someone noble and ascetic — someone who would exhort them to be uncomfortable — and more than one of them felt slightly irritated at the prospect.
But Francis was not exactly what they had expected. For one thing, he was playing a banjo.
The banjo is a happy instrument by nature, but in Francis’s hands it became positively exuberant. He danced a little as he played, shutting his eyes, swaying, smiling, and tapping out a rhythm on the banjo’s silver body. Some of the students clapped along. When the song was over, Francis held out his arms.
“Thank you for being here,” he said. “And I say, ‘Thank you for being here’ because after seventeen years of not speaking, those were the first words out of my mouth.”
Francis’s journey began in 1971 when two oil tankers collided beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, spilling 840,000 gallons of crude into San Francisco Bay. Determined to end his participation in the oil economy, Francis walked across the United States and South America. Along the way, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Southern Oregon State College, a master’s degree at the University of Montana-Missoula, and a PhD at UW-Madison. Eventually, he got a job at the U.S. Coast Guard writing oil spill regulations, was named a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, and wrote a book about his experiences that has been optioned to be made into a movie. Now the man who became famous for walking and not talking spends his time flying around the world giving speeches.
But Francis doesn’t just talk. He acts out any story he tells with a precise and comic pantomime vocabulary developed during the years he was mute. Standing in the UC-Berkeley lecture hall, he acted out driving to see the oil spill with his girlfriend, Jean, his arm slung over her invisible shoulder. He acted out walking twenty miles from his former home in Inverness, California, to the town of San Anselmo in homage to a friend who had died in a boating accident. He even acted out the chip he had on his shoulder,
the chip that said, “I’m walking for the environment. What are you doing?”
By the time his lecture was over, the students — part of a generation that is not particularly attracted to the notion of personal sacrifice — were completely captivated. “I thought it was going to be really serious,” one student remarked to another afterward. “But it was so chill.”
It’s a common response to an encounter with Francis. His story makes people expect him to raise a haughty eyebrow at their profligate lifestyles. Instead, they find a merry-eyed man who is far more interested in listening than in lecturing.
“He has a tune in his head that he marches to, and he definitely does what he thinks is right for him,” says Barbara Borns, former student services program manager at UW-Madison’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “But he doesn’t pressure people to accept him or buy into his lifestyle.”
When I first met Francis, twenty-eight years ago, he was living in Ashland, Oregon, and he was undoubtedly a local personality. I was a sixteen-year-old high school student, and Francis was then in his mid-thirties, but we were both mentored by the same teacher, the poet Lawson Inada, who taught at Southern Oregon State College, and we had friends in common. I remember Francis as a gentle, humorous presence who communicated with whistles and gestures and sometimes by writing on a pad of paper.
We had been out of touch for decades when I met him at his office in Point Reyes Station, California, last winter. Housed in the upstairs floor of an Old West saloon, his office was small and sparse, with a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookshelf, and a window framed by stained white curtains. On the walls were photographs of family and friends, a couple of his watercolors, and an immense map of the Yukon River watershed, where he had recently traveled.
At sixty-two, Francis was no longer the willowy beanpole that I remembered from my teen years, and his dreadlocks and beard are going gray. He drives now (a hybrid Toyota Prius), and he talks. But the basic spirit was the one I remembered — affable and inquisitive. His laugh is an infectious, sputtering guffaw that seems to seize his entire body.
Still, much has changed. He is married now, with two sons, aged one and seven. (He also has a nine-year-old daughter who lives with her mother in Bolivia.) His book, Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time, which he self-published in 2005, was recently reissued by National Geographic Books. His Prius was a gift from producer/director Tom Shadyac (Evan Almighty, Liar Liar, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), who wants to turn the book into a movie. In the course of catching up, Francis mentioned canoeing one thousand miles down the Yukon River with Native Alaskans to highlight environmental and social concerns, speaking at an outdoor retailers convention, participating in a walk with the American Indian Movement’s Dennis Banks, and giving the closing address at the prestigious TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, right after Al Gore.
He’s also been an ethics adviser for Strong Angel, a national disaster relief initiative. And overseeing Planetwalk, a nonprofit organization that he founded to raise environmental awareness, keeps him busy developing environmental curricula for schools, as well as handling a number of related projects. It’s a diverse and wide-ranging resume, which Francis sums up in the broadest of terms.
“I’m a planetwalker,” he says. “A planetwalker is someone who realizes that we are on the planet with everybody else, and they’re just kind of walking around. It’s a metaphor for a lot of the problems we seem to be facing. They’re so huge, and we cannot imagine taking them on. But if we do it one step at a time, with a vision, I believe we can solve most of the problems that are facing us.”
Francis first had the idea of ending his collaboration with the oil economy after witnessing the oil spill on San Francisco Bay in 1971, but he didn’t act on it for several months. When he did, he found it immensely difficult. Traveling at three miles per hour while the rest of the world went sixty meant missing out on everything from impromptu volleyball games (by the time he got there, the games were over) to his job as a volunteer firefighter (he couldn’t ride in the fire truck). And he made people angry. His choice not to drive seemed an implicit criticism of their car dependence. People wanted to argue with him about the futility of his action, and being a twenty-seven-year-old man with passionate convictions, he found himself more than willing to oblige.
“I got to the place where I was arguing so much with people about it, that I came upon my birthday, and I decided I was just not going to speak for one day,” he recalls. “And that really changed my life. The first thing I learned was that I was not listening to anyone. I already knew what I thought was the answer.” Intrigued by what keeping silent was teaching him, he kept silent for another day, and then another, and then at last decided to remain silent for a year. Each year on his birthday, Francis would evaluate whether he wanted to continue his silence.
When Francis stopped talking, he discovered he could no longer lie, at least not without putting a great deal of effort into it. And he realized that he had been lying quite a bit, compensating for the low self-esteem that can be the legacy of growing up black in America. Being silent meant that not only could he no longer lie, but he had to allow himself to become something like a clown. He writes in the book about becoming a “colorful local character” — the black man with the banjo who neither drives nor talks. “I decided to embrace my condition, to grab the tail of the tiger and use the notoriety to further the cause of environmental protection,” he writes. “I decided to use my life for change.”
At sixty-two, Francis was no longer the willowy beanpole that I remembered from my teen years, and his dreadlocks and beard are going gray. He drives now (a hybrid Toyota Prius), and he talks. But the basic spirit was the one I remembered — affable and inquisitive. His laugh is an infectious, sputtering guffaw that seems to seize his entire body.
Still, much has changed. He is married now, with two sons, aged one and seven. (He also has a nine-year-old daughter who lives with her mother in Bolivia.) His book, Planetwalker: How to Change Your World One Step at a Time, which he self-published in 2005, was recently reissued by National Geographic Books. His Prius was a gift from producer/director Tom Shadyac (Evan Almighty, Liar Liar, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), who wants to turn the book into a movie. In the course of catching up, Francis mentioned canoeing one thousand miles down the Yukon River with Native Alaskans to highlight environmental and social concerns, speaking at an outdoor retailers convention, participating in a walk with the American Indian Movement’s Dennis Banks, and giving the closing address at the prestigious TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, right after Al Gore.
He’s also been an ethics adviser for Strong Angel, a national disaster relief initiative. And overseeing Planetwalk, a nonprofit organization that he founded to raise environmental awareness, keeps him busy developing environmental curricula for schools, as well as handling a number of related projects. It’s a diverse and wide-ranging resume, which Francis sums up in the broadest of terms.
“I’m a planetwalker,” he says. “A planetwalker is someone who realizes that we are on the planet with everybody else, and they’re just kind of walking around. It’s a metaphor for a lot of the problems we seem to be facing. They’re so huge, and we cannot imagine taking them on. But if we do it one step at a time, with a vision, I believe we can solve most of the problems that are facing us.”
Francis first had the idea of ending his collaboration with the oil economy after witnessing the oil spill on San Francisco Bay in 1971, but he didn’t act on it for several months. When he did, he found it immensely difficult. Traveling at three miles per hour while the rest of the world went sixty meant missing out on everything from impromptu volleyball games (by the time he got there, the games were over) to his job as a volunteer firefighter (he couldn’t ride in the fire truck). And he made people angry. His choice not to drive seemed an implicit criticism of their car dependence. People wanted to argue with him about the futility of his action, and being a twenty-seven-year-old man with passionate convictions, he found himself more than willing to oblige.
“I got to the place where I was arguing so much with people about it, that I came upon my birthday, and I decided I was just not going to speak for one day,” he recalls. “And that really changed my life. The first thing I learned was that I was not listening to anyone. I already knew what I thought was the answer.” Intrigued by what keeping silent was teaching him, he kept silent for another day, and then another, and then at last decided to remain silent for a year. Each year on his birthday, Francis would evaluate whether he wanted to continue his silence.
When Francis stopped talking, he discovered he could no longer lie, at least not without putting a great deal of effort into it. And he realized that he had been lying quite a bit, compensating for the low self-esteem that can be the legacy of growing up black in America. Being silent meant that not only could he no longer lie, but he had to allow himself to become something like a clown. He writes in the book about becoming a “colorful local character” — the black man with the banjo who neither drives nor talks. “I decided to embrace my condition, to grab the tail of the tiger and use the notoriety to further the cause of environmental protection,” he writes. “I decided to use my life for change.”
And so Francis set out walking, carrying with him newspaper clippings that explained why he was silent and on foot. He walked to Ashland, Oregon, a distance of five hundred miles. He got a college degree there, went north to Washington, and then set out for Montana, sometimes walking twenty-eight miles in a day. Reading about his journey, you keep thinking he’ll be arrested or beaten up; after all, he’s a black man who doesn’t talk, and he’s walking across middle America and camping out by railroad tracks and roadsides. It’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable position.
“Yeah,” he replied when I made this observation. “My parents were really frightened. At the same time, I have to say that we are all vulnerable. We travel along at sixty miles per hour in automobiles, pass each other by inches, and we don’t think we’re vulnerable. I think forty thousand people per year [the number of Americans who die in car accidents] would beg to differ.”
Once, early in his journey, he was walking on a country road in northern California when two white men in a pick-up truck pulled up. “Boy, are you lost or something?” one asked, and then placed the barrel of a .44 against Francis’s head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. There was no bullet in the chamber, and Francis found himself making the okay sign to his would-be murderers and continuing down the road.
But mostly, Francis seemed to encounter kindness rather than animosity. People offered him food, money, and shelter, or tracked him down just so they could tell him their problems. Newspapers wrote about him. Children followed him on their bicycles. The banjo helped — somehow people reacted differently to the sight of a stranger walking while playing the banjo than they did to the sight of a stranger walking in silence.
“I’d bring my banjo out, and it was like everything changed,” Francis recalls. “Instead of looking at me with suspicion, they would play an air banjo and smile and wave.”
Francis’s ability to disarm people who might be hostile or suspicious of him was crucial during his many years on the road. He knew that his choices would anger some people, but he no longer minded. “I just took that as the price of admission for what I was doing,” he says now. “There was a point when I wanted everyone to do what I did, and then early on, especially after I stopped talking, I realized that this was a journey I was on — I had to do it.”
Surprisingly, people were willing to join him on that journey, even if it meant changing the way they did things. While getting his master’s at the University of Montana’s graduate environmental
studies program in Missoula, his fellowship required him to be a teaching assistant. It was probably the first time anyone had taught a university class there without talking, and there were complaints from parents who felt their tuition payments entitled their children to a teacher who spoke. But the university backed him up, and it turned out that the misunderstandings that sometimes grew out of Francis’s pantomime engendered some of the most interesting discussions. In the end, he won a teaching award.
When Francis applied to Madison, the Nelson Institute’s Barbara Borns remembers thinking, “Oh boy, this is kind of a strange fellow.” Borns, who is now a board member of Planetwalk, called around to see if she could find someone to run interference for him. She found a willing partner in geology professor John Steinhart, who argued, “If you can’t do it at Madison, you can’t do it anywhere.”
And so Francis was admitted to Madison — on probation, so they could see whether or not he was up to the task of getting a PhD. “I knew to expect a guy with a banjo and kind of wild hair,” Borns recalls. “My whole staff was kind of uptight — ‘How are we going to communicate with him? How are we going to know what he wants?’ — but it only takes about five minutes of being with John to be comfortable.” Francis’s nonverbal communication methods slowed things down, but Borns says that the pace had its benefits, explaining, “It gave you a different level of communication.”
Francis proved his academic chops in his first semester. But there were times when he doubted he would get his degree. He remembers a point two years into his program when he was struggling with earth sciences and thought that perhaps he would just move on. “And then I realized, this is a PhD program, and you are a fellow here,“ he recalls.
“Yeah,” he replied when I made this observation. “My parents were really frightened. At the same time, I have to say that we are all vulnerable. We travel along at sixty miles per hour in automobiles, pass each other by inches, and we don’t think we’re vulnerable. I think forty thousand people per year [the number of Americans who die in car accidents] would beg to differ.”
Once, early in his journey, he was walking on a country road in northern California when two white men in a pick-up truck pulled up. “Boy, are you lost or something?” one asked, and then placed the barrel of a .44 against Francis’s head and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. There was no bullet in the chamber, and Francis found himself making the okay sign to his would-be murderers and continuing down the road.
But mostly, Francis seemed to encounter kindness rather than animosity. People offered him food, money, and shelter, or tracked him down just so they could tell him their problems. Newspapers wrote about him. Children followed him on their bicycles. The banjo helped — somehow people reacted differently to the sight of a stranger walking while playing the banjo than they did to the sight of a stranger walking in silence.
“I’d bring my banjo out, and it was like everything changed,” Francis recalls. “Instead of looking at me with suspicion, they would play an air banjo and smile and wave.”
Francis’s ability to disarm people who might be hostile or suspicious of him was crucial during his many years on the road. He knew that his choices would anger some people, but he no longer minded. “I just took that as the price of admission for what I was doing,” he says now. “There was a point when I wanted everyone to do what I did, and then early on, especially after I stopped talking, I realized that this was a journey I was on — I had to do it.”
Surprisingly, people were willing to join him on that journey, even if it meant changing the way they did things. While getting his master’s at the University of Montana’s graduate environmental
studies program in Missoula, his fellowship required him to be a teaching assistant. It was probably the first time anyone had taught a university class there without talking, and there were complaints from parents who felt their tuition payments entitled their children to a teacher who spoke. But the university backed him up, and it turned out that the misunderstandings that sometimes grew out of Francis’s pantomime engendered some of the most interesting discussions. In the end, he won a teaching award.
When Francis applied to Madison, the Nelson Institute’s Barbara Borns remembers thinking, “Oh boy, this is kind of a strange fellow.” Borns, who is now a board member of Planetwalk, called around to see if she could find someone to run interference for him. She found a willing partner in geology professor John Steinhart, who argued, “If you can’t do it at Madison, you can’t do it anywhere.”
And so Francis was admitted to Madison — on probation, so they could see whether or not he was up to the task of getting a PhD. “I knew to expect a guy with a banjo and kind of wild hair,” Borns recalls. “My whole staff was kind of uptight — ‘How are we going to communicate with him? How are we going to know what he wants?’ — but it only takes about five minutes of being with John to be comfortable.” Francis’s nonverbal communication methods slowed things down, but Borns says that the pace had its benefits, explaining, “It gave you a different level of communication.”
Francis proved his academic chops in his first semester. But there were times when he doubted he would get his degree. He remembers a point two years into his program when he was struggling with earth sciences and thought that perhaps he would just move on. “And then I realized, this is a PhD program, and you are a fellow here,“ he recalls.
“Obviously, there are people who believe that you can do this work. And it hit me how I would shoot myself in the foot as a black man, to say that I couldn’t do things because that’s what I got raised to think. From then on, I just went on and got my degree. And it was because I had professors there who took the work that I was doing as serious, important work. It was one of the better experiences of my life.”
Francis finished his course work, passed his preliminary exams, and began work on his dissertation on the costs and legal conventions of managing oil spills. The topic seemed obscure until March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons into Prince William Sound. Suddenly reporters were calling the Institute for Environmental Studies and asking to speak to an expert on oil spills. The only problem was that the expert didn’t speak. Francis’s major professor, John Steinhart, fielded the calls for him.
On Earth Day 1990, Francis gathered with friends and family at a hotel in Washington, D.C. His forty-fourth birthday had recently passed, and he had marked the occasion as he always did, by re-evaluating his vow of silence. Now, after playing a song on the banjo, he opened his mouth and spoke the words he would return to again and again in his later incarnation as a public speaker: “Thank you for being here.”
“Praise the Lord!” somebody shouted.
The very next day, as Francis was riding his bicycle to Gallaudet, the college for the deaf, he was hit by a car. Yet having cast aside one vow, he was not ready to dispense with the other, and he refused to ride in the ambulance, choosing instead to walk the fifteen blocks to the hospital, despite a badly injured shoulder. News of his decision made the Los Angeles Times.
Francis was in Washington to research his dissertation, and he ended up defending it by telephone so that he wouldn’t have to walk back to Madison. A year later, in 1991, he was with some friends in New York when he got a call from the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C. The agency was developing the regulations that would implement the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, which had been passed in the wake of the Valdez disaster. They needed a method for quantifying the economic value of natural resources damaged by oil spills, a topic that Francis had researched for his dissertation, and they hoped he could join them immediately. They would send him a plane ticket by overnight mail.
But Francis still didn’t ride in planes — or in trains or cars. Amazingly, the Coast Guard was willing to wait for him to arrive by bicycle. Since he wasn’t able to get back and forth quickly, he had to finish up some business in New York. By the time he was finally able to hit the road and bike to D.C., it was two months later.
Francis stayed at the Coast Guard for fourteen months, developing methods for measuring natural resource damage, and acting as project manager for a study on the oil spill risks of deep-water ports. He was given a civilian service award and, having made plenty of D.C. connections, he certainly could have continued working in environmental policy. Instead, Francis decided to continue walking. He sailed to the Caribbean aboard a seventy-two-foot wooden yawl, eventually walking across Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile as a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador.
It was while walking past a prison in Venezuela in 1994 that he had an epiphany. Confronted by a guard demanding identification, Francis found himself imagining that he was an escaped prisoner cleverly disguised as Dr. John Francis. As he thought about it during the next hundred miles of walking, he realized that he was a prisoner — a prisoner of his own decision not to use motorized vehicles. What if the Coast Guard hadn’t allowed him to take two months to get to Washington? Would it have been worth passing up the opportunity to resolve the very problem that had inspired him to stop driving in the first place?
Francis finished his course work, passed his preliminary exams, and began work on his dissertation on the costs and legal conventions of managing oil spills. The topic seemed obscure until March 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons into Prince William Sound. Suddenly reporters were calling the Institute for Environmental Studies and asking to speak to an expert on oil spills. The only problem was that the expert didn’t speak. Francis’s major professor, John Steinhart, fielded the calls for him.
On Earth Day 1990, Francis gathered with friends and family at a hotel in Washington, D.C. His forty-fourth birthday had recently passed, and he had marked the occasion as he always did, by re-evaluating his vow of silence. Now, after playing a song on the banjo, he opened his mouth and spoke the words he would return to again and again in his later incarnation as a public speaker: “Thank you for being here.”
“Praise the Lord!” somebody shouted.
The very next day, as Francis was riding his bicycle to Gallaudet, the college for the deaf, he was hit by a car. Yet having cast aside one vow, he was not ready to dispense with the other, and he refused to ride in the ambulance, choosing instead to walk the fifteen blocks to the hospital, despite a badly injured shoulder. News of his decision made the Los Angeles Times.
Francis was in Washington to research his dissertation, and he ended up defending it by telephone so that he wouldn’t have to walk back to Madison. A year later, in 1991, he was with some friends in New York when he got a call from the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C. The agency was developing the regulations that would implement the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, which had been passed in the wake of the Valdez disaster. They needed a method for quantifying the economic value of natural resources damaged by oil spills, a topic that Francis had researched for his dissertation, and they hoped he could join them immediately. They would send him a plane ticket by overnight mail.
But Francis still didn’t ride in planes — or in trains or cars. Amazingly, the Coast Guard was willing to wait for him to arrive by bicycle. Since he wasn’t able to get back and forth quickly, he had to finish up some business in New York. By the time he was finally able to hit the road and bike to D.C., it was two months later.
Francis stayed at the Coast Guard for fourteen months, developing methods for measuring natural resource damage, and acting as project manager for a study on the oil spill risks of deep-water ports. He was given a civilian service award and, having made plenty of D.C. connections, he certainly could have continued working in environmental policy. Instead, Francis decided to continue walking. He sailed to the Caribbean aboard a seventy-two-foot wooden yawl, eventually walking across Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile as a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador.
It was while walking past a prison in Venezuela in 1994 that he had an epiphany. Confronted by a guard demanding identification, Francis found himself imagining that he was an escaped prisoner cleverly disguised as Dr. John Francis. As he thought about it during the next hundred miles of walking, he realized that he was a prisoner — a prisoner of his own decision not to use motorized vehicles. What if the Coast Guard hadn’t allowed him to take two months to get to Washington? Would it have been worth passing up the opportunity to resolve the very problem that had inspired him to stop driving in the first place?
“The lesson for me was that I have to reassess wherever I am to get to the next place,” Francis told the students at UC-Berkeley. “I have to let go of the old self, which is very scary sometimes. Who am
I going to be after I start riding in cars?”
The John Francis of 2008 is a man who continues to devote his life to the environment, but whose definition of the environment is broader than most people’s — it includes civil rights, human rights, gender equality, and economic equity. “It’s really about how we treat each other,” he says. “Absolute bottom line. Because if we are part of the environment, and we treat ourselves so badly, what we do manifests in the physical environment.”
Starting on Earth Day each year, Francis spends several weeks walking, and then flies home from wherever he ends up. Since 2005, he has been retracing his journey across the country, moving from east to west. This year he walked through Pennsylvania and Ohio. “I have this dream to walk around the world, which I haven’t completed yet, although I’ve probably put that many miles in,” he explains. “The journey is really the process, and it’s not whether I get around the world, it’s the experience I have on that journey.”
And so he travels from place to place, giving lectures, joining environmental and community partnerships, and developing a curriculum called Planetlines that aims to use walking as a vehicle for studying science, social justice, and community service. Things seem to fall into place for him, and contacts lead to other contacts, all adding up to a life that continually surprises him.
“What I thought was going to happen was I was going to start walking and I would get a little cabin in Inverness, and I would spend the rest of my life just exploring around here, which wouldn’t be a bad life,” he says thoughtfully.
“Not a bad life,” he repeats, and smiles. “Instead, I’m all over the world.”
Dashka Slater writes about the environment for publications ranging from Sierra to The New York Times Magazine. She is also the author of three books for children and a novel for adults. Read more at www.dashkaslater.com.
I going to be after I start riding in cars?”
The John Francis of 2008 is a man who continues to devote his life to the environment, but whose definition of the environment is broader than most people’s — it includes civil rights, human rights, gender equality, and economic equity. “It’s really about how we treat each other,” he says. “Absolute bottom line. Because if we are part of the environment, and we treat ourselves so badly, what we do manifests in the physical environment.”
Starting on Earth Day each year, Francis spends several weeks walking, and then flies home from wherever he ends up. Since 2005, he has been retracing his journey across the country, moving from east to west. This year he walked through Pennsylvania and Ohio. “I have this dream to walk around the world, which I haven’t completed yet, although I’ve probably put that many miles in,” he explains. “The journey is really the process, and it’s not whether I get around the world, it’s the experience I have on that journey.”
And so he travels from place to place, giving lectures, joining environmental and community partnerships, and developing a curriculum called Planetlines that aims to use walking as a vehicle for studying science, social justice, and community service. Things seem to fall into place for him, and contacts lead to other contacts, all adding up to a life that continually surprises him.
“What I thought was going to happen was I was going to start walking and I would get a little cabin in Inverness, and I would spend the rest of my life just exploring around here, which wouldn’t be a bad life,” he says thoughtfully.
“Not a bad life,” he repeats, and smiles. “Instead, I’m all over the world.”
Dashka Slater writes about the environment for publications ranging from Sierra to The New York Times Magazine. She is also the author of three books for children and a novel for adults. Read more at www.dashkaslater.com.
Events
- Kilimanjaro Trekking & Safari - January 18
- Online Marathon Training - January 20
- Israel - January 24
- Panama Canal Cruise - January 25
