At sunset the gazelles came out.
We were camped on a plain of white thorns in the Ethiopian Rift when the horned deer bounced by within 20 meters of our campfire, remarkably unafraid in a landscape filled with guns. Around us there were killdeer keening in the sideways yellow light and flocks of African dove that hissed by at eye-level, like loads of buckshot. Later, hyenas moaned under 300 sextillion dusty stars, a count lately refined by astronomers. The man with me was sleeping. He will show me the way to the Red Sea.
It is the third day of the Out of Eden Walk, and my guide Ahmed Alema Hessan and I are leaving Africa the way our forebears did during the Pleistocene — on foot. We are recreating that ancient human journey out into the world, which may have triggered the greatest revolution in our consciousness since we stood upright. It was that primordial diaspora that made the world ours, that made us truly human. And we appear to be doing it once again, legions of us, setting out for new horizons of being — only digitally.
As we set out on this 7-year project, the lives of 2.3 billion people, a third of the world’s population, are potentially linked through electronic devices. By the time this walk ends at Tierra del Fuego in 2020, that global connectivity may very well be complete. (Here in Ethiopia, 450,000 people a month are signing up for cell service, outpacing the worldwide boom.) The long-term effects of this trend are impossible to predict. But as my friend Owen Gaffney at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme points out in his blog, it can be nothing less than transformational.
The Out of Eden Walk will move through this and other issues of our time at the pace we as a species have adapted to survive: step by step, three miles an hour, a distinctly human tempo. We’ll leave the nano-headlines to others. Our observations will be episodic, and will seek to uncover deeper truths hidden in the vast but often overlooked spaces in between. At the same time, this site, a digital narrative laboratory, will feature cutting-edge maps and other tools to help parse the stories collected along the slow road to our becoming.
We welcome your presence, your comments, your compass bearings.
Let’s walk.
