Why we should walk everywhere

Walking is humanity’s default mode of transportation. We walk to the fridge, to work, inside, outside, with or without shoes, one way or another, day after day.

We should do more of it, with an emphasis on the outdoors and on walking for practical purposes.

Cars encapsulate us with loud music and swinging pine tree air fresheners. Interactions seldom happen from car to car and typically only occur in warm weather, limited to a wave, smile or, at most, a rolled-down-window stop-light conversation.

In cars, we expect to be moving fast with little disturbance from the outside. Traffic produces an absurdly coarse group of people.

Inside our car capsules, we control our environment. We control the temperature, its movement and all other options with designated levers and buttons. 

American individualism contributes to and is represented by this car culture. We Americans are famous for large cars, expansive parking lots, drive-through restaurants and muscle cars.

The result is not one Steve McQueen per household or anything nearly so rugged and dramatic.

More accurately, the result is seen every day in the expansion of parking lots and suburban sprawl, in traffic jams and gas price rhetoric.

We drive miles to buy food that traveled hundreds of miles more. The pillars of our economy are oil dependent.

Yet few question the car culture, and many aim to expand the middle class in the present oil-driven economy.

Oil and American capitalism have accelerated consumption via personal vehicles without consideration of the consequences with the assumption that continuous economic growth is a worthy pursuit. 

Sustained economic growth is neither a worthy pursuit nor a reasonable one.

We travel long distances at great speeds using energy that was trapped in the earth for millions of years and only recently made accessible to us and our devices. We did not evolve with fossil fuels. We discovered them.

Perhaps the use of fossil fuels should be considered a developing group behavior that has yet to be tempered by the strains of time and changing environments.

The tradition of walking extends beyond recorded history but is now being abandoned for individualism and convenience.

Americans, spread across our expansive country, long ago ceased to value walking for what it is: an opportunity for connection.

Through walking we connect to season, to place and to people. Walking helps maintain a certain level of health both physically and mentally. Legs burn calories while the mind cultivates itself.

Poet Wallace Stevens used to walk alone to work or on the weekend for hours on end, composing poems and thinking. What if everyone took the time to do the same?

Our economy would localize. There would be fewer car accidents and less traffic. We would see each other face-to-face more. We might actually know our neighbors.

We would be in better tune with the world around us and recognize, perhaps, that we cannot continue to move so fast.

­— proren@indiana.edu