TED Radio Hour - A More Walkable World: Ideas to get us moving

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

We know walking is good for our bodies, our communities, and our planet. But our car-centric cities and screen-filled lives keep us sitting. Can we change? This hour, ideas to get us moving. Guests include author Vybarr Cregan-Reid, computer historian Laine Nooney, exercise physiologist Keith Diaz, urban planner Jeff Speck, activists John Francis and Vanessa Garrison. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manus Shumerode. And I am walking because today on the show, a more walkable world. Throughout the hour, ideas to get us moving more. From the latest in urban planning to walking as a form of protest and even as an act of kindness. But first, a story about the project we did last fall with a lot of listeners. It was called Body Electric, and it started with a little history lesson, because there was a time, long ago, when humans ran and walked everywhere.

Humans kind of had the body that they needed to be able to move, and the African savannah became a kind of perfect place in which the human body could flourish. Vibar Cregan Reed is the author of Primate Change, How the World We Made is Remaking Us. And he says back on the Savannah, humans had a few main postures, standing, walking, running, and resting in a deep squat. But sitting, not so much. It meant that we could hunt for much longer, much more sustained periods of time.

We could basically outrun any animal on the planet. So the human body was fantastic. on the savannah. We have approximately 49% of the bone density than that of hunter-gatherers. Wow. No amount of time at the gym is going to bring that back, right? Jumping forward, hundreds of thousands of years to the agricultural revolution, and access to food became easier.

We didn't need to run around as much to hunt. The biggest change that the human body undergoes, is when we decide to settle. The fact that your fruit tree is now in your garden as opposed to two miles away saves you a great deal of time. It also saves you calories. It means you don't need to find as much food

if you're using less food. And then, in the industrial era, the inventions of electricity and gas meant life became even more efficient and sedentary. The amount of time we spend indoors starts to have all kinds of effects on the human body. And from that moment, what we can see is a pull towards efficiency so that you're removing friction from your everyday life. In the 1840s, it was definitely less than 1% of the working population was doing sedentary work.

Fast forward to the 1980s and the digital age. In the beginning, the people who worked with computers were considered magicians. That's when the personal computer entered the scene. But digital took the mystery out of computers. Computing comes into the home pretty slowly, beginning in the late 70s, picks up a bit in the 1980s. This is computer historian Lane Nooney. Until the point that computers were so embedded in our workplaces, in our schools, and in our domestic lives that we couldn't get out of it. Looking for a powerful home computer?

Introducing the new personal system to Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. Lane studies the effects of the personal computer on our by. bodies. And they say that the digital age brought a world of pain to us. I think a lot of us don't realize how much pain we live in because of our interactions with computing. We don't remember a time before this kind of stress on the body. Aking backs, stiff necks, tired eyes, we're sapped of our energy. So the majority of our days spent consuming technology and what are we typically doing when we're consuming technology, most likely not moving.

Keith Diaz is an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and he says this can cause big problems in the long term. Sitting for long periods at a time increases your risk for many chronic diseases, including diabetes, many forms of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and ultimately decreases your longevity. Oof, yeah. So in Keith's lab at Columbia, they tested various ways to counteract all that time on our bums. And they found a relatively simple solution. So our research suggests that taking a walking break every half hour for five minutes can offset many of the harms from sitting all day. Keith and his colleagues found that leisurely walking for five minutes every half hour was the best way to reduce people's blood pressure, their glucose levels, and their stress.

So working out in the morning is great, but not if you're going to sit for the rest of the day. What I like to tell folks is that it's not enough to just check off that exercise box for your day and think that you're done and you don't have to move the rest of the day. And a standing desk, that doesn't count. because it all comes down to regularly moving our muscles. So our muscles are really important for regulating our blood sugar levels. They're really important for regulating our triglyceride levels, which is fat in your bloodstream. And for the muscles to regulate those levels, they have to be used. They have to be contracted. They have to be stimulated.

What happens is when the muscles are idle, when you're not moving and you're sitting for hours at a time, the muscle stop regulating and stop pulling blood sugar out of the bloodstream. They stopped pulling fat out of the bloodstream. And obviously that's harmful to have blood sugar levels rising, to have these triglystallide levels rising in your body. So what we're finding is that your body needs, we'll call them, activity snacks, that it just needs just regular stimulation activation use. For them to regulate your body's health,

you have to give your muscles the stimulation they need to do their jobs. At this point, maybe you've started walking while you're listening if you weren't already. And maybe you're also thinking walking every half hour, that's a lot of interruptions. Well, that's what I wondered too. Could people actually follow Keith's advice outside of the lab? And here's where Ted Radio Hour listeners came in. Over 20,000 of you signed up for an NPR study with Columbia. to try moving for five minutes every half hour, every hour, or every two hours.

Now, it did not work out for everyone. This is a hard ask. But a lot of people did make it happen. And they loved it for many different reasons. Hello! Today I got lots of friends on our five-minute walks. It's good to walk. It's good to be outside.

I have taken some of the breaks on my desk. marching and dancing. I'm a stay-at-home mom. While my kids are still sleeping, I've started implementing five-minute bike rides. 15 minutes of soccer drills outside. Five or ten minutes before a meeting starts, sweep the house, or swap out the laundry, or clean the bathroom.

My energy went way up. I feel so much better, can focus better, and I'm happier. I felt as if I could go for longer, and I felt the strain, the mental exhaustion dissipate. Now I'm moving more and life's great. Keith and his team are still parsing all the data that they collected from listeners and they're trying to understand more about what helped people succeed or fail at taking regular movement breaks. Because only half of the people who signed up were able to incorporate moving every half hour into their daily routine.

So, yeah, a lot of people dropped out. But for those who managed to consistently move, the preliminary findings are striking. Everybody improved. Everybody saw improvements in their fatigue levels, in their positive emotions, and they saw decreases in their negative emotions. But what we found was something we call a dose response relationship. And what that means is that the group that took the most breaks, every half hour had the greatest response. In other words, the more breaks people took, the better they reported feeling.

And those breaks didn't seem to hurt job performance. Folks had more energy reporting on average 25% less fatigue. Yeah. We go from this vicious cycle of like feeling fatigued and feeling more fatigued and just spiraling downwards to now we're flipping it. And we're changing the game here and we're getting people to move and they're feeling more energetic, and they're moving more, and they're building towards a more positive life.

I mean, that's amazing. And now, months later, for some, these new habits have just become their new way of living and working. And I want to share one story in particular from a listener named Zach in Maryland, who managed to use this body electric project to help him bounce back after a really tough year. Hey, Manus. This is Zach from Maryland. The last year has dealt me a major stroke at the ripe old age of 44. That was tough.

But having you guys in my corner made all the difference. My doctors didn't really lay out a recovery plan for someone in their 40s, trying to juggle a career and family life. With my job, video calls and Zoom are a big part of my day and contributed to the prolonged brain fog and just feeling like blah. But then I had some heart-stores. surgery to fix the root cause of my stroke. To my surprise, I found body electric about the same time. After that, I started taking these five-minute breaks every hour, or sometimes I'll just

take a walk outside if I need some sunshine. So guess what? The brain fog is finally lifted, and I'm feeling more optimistic that it's gone for good. My cognitive therapist, she's blown away by my progress. I feel like I've got my swagger back. Seriously, you guys have been a lifeline for me during this whole journey, and I'm so grateful for everything. Thanks a lot. Zach, thank you. And congrats. Yeah, our technology keeps a lot of us from doing what our bodies need.

For many of us, though, sitting doesn't have to be the norm if we experiment a little bit with our daily routine. But let's also acknowledge that easily adding movement to our lives, well, it's a lot of It often depends on who's in charge of our time. Yeah. Well, I mean, ultimately, what you're getting at is it's a culture change. You know, we spend our time trying to convince the workforce and employers that you should allow your employees to take breaks to move. A employee who's in a better mood, who's feeling less fatigued and feeling more energized,

is a more productive employee. My hope is that our findings kickstart a conversation among executives, health care professionals and tech designers to find more ways for more people to take their long-term physical and mental health into consideration every day. If you're curious and think you might want to take the Body Electric challenge, go to npr.org slash Body Electric. You can get a one-page guide to get you started. You can also listen to the series by searching for Body Electric wherever you listen to podcasts. When we come back, how our built environment makes us want to walk, or too often doesn't. Urban planner, Jeff Speck.

There are enough people who want to live car free that if given the choice to live car free, they would do so. Today on the show, a more walkable world. I'm Manus Zomerode, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about our next bonus episode. for TED Radio Hour Plus. It's a big question. How do you get kids to want to learn about science and the natural world?

Because a lot of them are on their screens a lot these days. So we called up mechanical engineer Saad Bamla. He's not just an engineer and TED speaker. He's also a dad who is obsessed with understanding how the natural world works. And he's got so many great ideas for getting the kid in your life into it too. You can hear them all next Wednesday. If you're not a plus supporter yet, please join your fellow listeners to get all kinds of bonus content and all our episodes sponsor free. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple

podcast app. And thank you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zomerode. and today on the show, a more walkable world. In 2020, Paris mayor and Hidalgo won re-election, in part by putting one particular idea at the heart of her campaign. The idea? To transform Paris into a 15-minute city, meaning make it possible for Parisians to live, work by groceries, play in the park, all within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their front

door. Her plans included removing 60,000 parking spots, adding bike lanes, urban forests, and more local businesses, all to make the city more climate conscious and give its citizens a better quality of life. And Paris isn't alone. Imagine a Cleveland where everything you need is less than 15 minutes away. Regardless to where you live, she has access. to a good grocery store, vibrant parks, and a job you can get to. Yes, Cleveland hopes to give it a try. Dublin is the latest to embrace it. But while the term is new, the concept itself is not.

Yeah, it's the old meal and a new wrapper. This is urban planner Jeff Speck. He's been talking about 15-minute cities for over a decade, but he's been using a different name for it, the walkable city. Yeah, it's the same concept. is just another way of describing this idea that most of your daily needs are at arm's length. Jeff's 2012 book, Walkable City, how downtown can save America one step at a time, became kind of an urban planning Bible.

And he says that since then, many cities have followed the playbook to get their citizens, out of the car, and onto their feet or bike. Almost everywhere I work understands the value of becoming a place where the car is an instrument of freedom rather than a prosthetic device that you need to live your daily life. And now all these years later, the data show that walkability improves so many things for city dwellers. Traffic safety, community identity, tourism, stormwater management, transit effectiveness, urban competitiveness. It reduces obesity, other chronic diseases, health care costs, crime, Traffic congestion, maintenance costs, fossil fuel dependence, air pollution, ambient noise. And it increases lifespan, neighborhood vitality, worker creativity, social interaction, intergenerational connectedness,

community inclusivity, employment rates, economic productivity, local investment, property value, efficiency of land, public engagement, responsibility, urban resiliency, beauty, and happiness. Yeah, clearly the list goes on and on. And to experience it, Jeff says go visit Portland, Oregon, and then go visit Salt Lake City, Utah. Those are two cities from the same era, just design based on different. Approaches, walking around Portland is so much more pleasant than walking around Salt Lake City. Part of the reason Portland has shorter street blocks. You can fit nine Portland blocks inside a Salt Lake City block.

Those blocks have more things to look at, places to run into people. What's amazing when you walk down a street in Portland is that you're presented with so many different choices. You're also presented with a ton of corners, right? And every corner is showing you at least four different shops. but imagine the choices that you have. One morning on your way to work, you may need to pass the dry cleaner. Another morning you may be dropping your kid off at school. Traffic is not the focus.

The typical street in Salt Lake, to carry the traffic that serves all that real estate, has five or six lanes in it, whereas the typical street in Portland has two lanes in it. Jeff's back continues from the TED stage. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways,

they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent $60 million on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so $2 million a year, not that much, and half the price of the one clover leaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. These changes, and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20% less than the rest of the country. So Portland has been this shining example of walkability for a while now.

But where have you been working more recently? What cities are now trying to become more walkable and to catch up? And how hard is it? Well, I would say the real challenge is the many really small communities that don't have the wherewithal, the budget, the leadership to change themselves. And that's something you find in both well-off and less well-off communities. I work mostly in mid-sized cities. Interestingly, I work in a lot of red cities, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, where local business

leaders understand that being a place where people want to be is the key to driving their economic growth forward. That's been a new development in how cities view their future, that they realize now that the workforce is mobile and that people will locate in places that are more desirable. So a lot of cities who might otherwise have been resistant to change are saying, geez, how can we become more walkable so that we become more desirable? Oh, interesting. So you're hearing from more places who are like, okay, yes, we're ready to pull the trigger on this.

We need to get going with turning our city into a walkable one. Yeah. So what that means at a deeper level is to create an environment in which people will make the choice to walk or to bike or to use some other form of micromobility rather than driving. And to do that, according to my general theory of walkability, the walk has to be as good as the drive, which means it has to satisfy four basic criteria. It needs to be useful. It needs to be safe. It needs to be comfortable and it needs to be interesting.

And each one of those criteria then places upon us a series of mandates that surround urban design and city planning, my profession, to create that environment for the potential. potential pedestrian or cyclist. Okay, so to be walkable, the city needs to do those four things. They need these attributes for every walk a person takes. Let's start with the first. The walk needs to be useful. What do you mean by that? So useful has to do with the proper mix of uses.

So places to live, workshop, recreate all within walking distance. It typically means having more housing in your downtown, which would balance the uses in your downtown and have it be active around the clock. I think that it's important to go back to Jane Jacobs, who wrote the most important planning book of our era, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She said a great place has to have people in it around the clock, and you can't have a great restaurant or a great gym without a dinner crowd as well as a lunchtime crowd, that when a neighborhood, which is principally a business district, becomes a truly mixed-use district with the proper balance of jobs and housing, it then comes to life. and that's a strange benefit of COVID that we've seen in a number of our communities

is that more people are living and working in the same place. Yeah. But a lot of suburban areas that were just bedroom communities are now places where people are also working. And the downtowns have actually gotten a real shot in the arm as a function of that. Okay, so we've made our city, we've made our walk useful. Now we need to make walking safe. How? So the typical American street is designed for speeds well over the posted limit.

And it's designed to encourage antisocial and quite dangerous driving. I mean, I was once working in a project in Alabama where we wanted the speed limit to be 25. And the engineer, the local engineer, made us engineer the streets for 35 because that's how the rules work. And that's the exact opposite of what they do in the Netherlands, for example, where you make the streets as a lot. as tight as they need to be to cause the drivers to go the speed that is safe for the community. The resistance that you find to accomplishing this typically lies in public works departments and engineering departments, which are led by engineers who haven't been back to school in the last 20 years and who still embrace the older concept of traffic safety, which in America

grew out of highway safety. And an important thing to clarify is that what makes you safe on a highway is the exact opposite of what makes you safe in the downtown. So if you think about yourself when you're driving on a highway where your speed is a constant, anything you can do to reduce opportunities for conflict to increase elbow room is going to make that street safer. So wider lanes, one-way traffic, no parallel parking, no trees, and that's the clear zone, you know, big swooping curves, right? All those things make a highway safer. but it's precisely the opposite that makes a downtown safe. You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, you want to have two-way traffic,

you want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on. Trees actually make streets safer. The studies show that very clearly. And so the biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who is trained on highway design and has brought it into city design. Okay. Our walk is useful. Our walk is safe. How do we make it, number three, comfortable for walking? So comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion because, and it's a little counterintuitive, we like to be in places that have spatial definition. All animals, humans among them, are seeking two things, according to evolutionary biologists. They're seeking prospect and refuge.

You want to be able to see your predators before they attack you, and you want to feel that your flanks are covered from attack. And that's in our bones, and we can't help it. So if you can picture lower Manhattan or the cranky parts of our oldest cities, those have the smallest blocks of all. And if you think about most European cities, they have a medieval core, which is the most delightful place to spend time. But not only are the blocks small, but of course the street spaces are very tight. And that gets us into the comfortable walk, and that delight. delightful feeling of being embraced by buildings on both sides. Yeah.

So that idea of spatial definition and creating outdoor living rooms is central to making walkable places. And we, you know, our favorite streets tend to be quite narrow. And then the buildings aren't that tall, but they're conservatively taller than the streets are wide. And that brings us to the fourth and final principle of making a city walkable, which is that the walk. needs to be interesting. Yeah, so the final category of interesting is basically not having blank walls, not having parking structures,

having lots of eyes on the street in the form of doors and windows and signs of human activity. You know, we humans are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other humans. And that's what causes us to walk. So when you arrive at a city to work with them, do you find that you need to first sort of change,

their cultural outlook on how to provide the best thing for their citizens? Is there a mind shift that you have to get them to do before you actually start talking about the details? Well, I think what's different now as opposed to 10 years ago, or even certainly 30 years ago when I started doing this work, is that there's now an openness within public works departments and engineering departments to this information. And the thing that has evolved the fastest is bicycle infrastructure. And when we're building, new projects now, we're mandated by the city to not have the bike lane in the street. The new standard is to put it up on the sidewalk edge.

I mean, you're speaking to number two, a safe walk or a safe ride in this case on a bicycle. But we've been hearing so many headlines about the rise in pedestrian and, I believe, biker deaths. So if more cities are becoming more welcoming, to walking and riding bikes. Why is this happening? So more cities are getting more serious about improving pedestrian safety,

but that's really just starting to kick in at volume now. And it used to be that, you know, the poor people lived in the inner city and the wealthy people were suburbanizing now. Many more of America's poor are living in these places where you have to get further and further from the city center in order to afford a mortgage.

That's where a lot of people are stuck now. And sadly, they're stuck there without cars, many of them. So you have the kind of the double whammy of people living without cars in an environment that was designed without ever imagining people living there, using it without cars. And cities that want to see themselves thrive in the long term have been even actively subsidizing the creation of housing in their downtown course. And that's even before we acknowledged that we had a national housing crisis. That's one condition. I think the larger factor is the rise of the SUV and the pickup truck as the standard vehicle for getting around our cities.

They're heavier, they have more momentum, they're harder to break, but more importantly, the hoods are very high. So instead of being hit in the legs and landing on the hood, you're hitting the torso and you're under the vehicle. You're likely to being killed by an SUV when you're hit versus a car is about two to one. But we haven't gotten to the point where we are giving up our cars, right? I mean, there's a lot of talk right now about climate change and that one of the solutions is to, if you can, buy an electric car. Why aren't we talking about giving up our cars yet?

I mean, it feels un-American to even say that, but I live in a town, Brooklyn, where I can walk everywhere, but to get out of New York City to go anywhere remotely rural, is not easy with public transportation. So there's a couple things to unpack there. The first is that everyone who can get an electric car should get an electric car. That's very clear.

The main answer to your question, though, is that so much of the American landscape has been built to mandate automobile use. And there are a large number of Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, who, through no fault of their own and often through no choice of their own, live in a place where the automobile is this prosthetic device that they need to get around.

In those conditions, then, the question is what can you do to improve their quality of life, to lighten their carbon footprint, to make them safer? A number of suburbs have managed to consolidate enough property, like a dead mall or a dead office park, that they could create a new little town center. You find that in a place called Avalon in Alpharetta, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, or a place called city center, Houston, where it was maybe 25 acres, and they put everything there. They put places to live, work, shop, recreate.

And now it's becoming a real community, even though it's just a smallish property in the heart of suburbia. But in terms of my own experience, I'm, I actually, I grew up loving cars. What? And that's kind of the big, my big, dark secret. But it just gets to the larger issue of cars in the right number in the right place. You know, cars aren't the problem.

They become the problem because we've allowed ourselves to design our society around them. So, I don't know, should we just give up on ending sprawl, Jeff, and accept that we'll need to create cities that continue to turn into suburbs that go on for miles and that people will continue to need cars, even if small pockets of the city. these places are walkable? So when I joined this movement in the 80s, I really thought we could stop sprawl. I've pretty much given up on that goal after what, after 40 years. But I've replaced it with a new goal, which is essentially to offer the walkable quality of life, you know, the walking lifestyle to as many more Americans as possible. And that's why, you know, I'm going where the people are

and doing much more downtown work. And most of my work is for cities who call me in and say, you know, we realize that we could be so much better if we made our downtown more walkable. And what are the steps to getting there? That's city planner Jeff Speck. His book is called Walkable City, how downtown can save America one step at a time.

You can see both of his talks at TED.com. On the show today, a more walkable world. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. Don't walk away. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anish Zamoroti. On the show today, a more walkable world. Ideas to get us all.

We are currently in the mall, Manassas, Virginia, Manassas Mall. We're walking with a crew of women out here. This is Vanessa Garrison. Because it's raining and we are a rain or shine. organization. So we weren't going to cancel. We were just like we're going inside. Vanessa is the co-founder of Girl Trek, an organization founded in 2010. It now has over 50 chapters of black women and girls across the country who walk regularly together. It's an effort to combat the high rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and diabetes that black women have

faced for generations. Here are co-founders, Vanessa Garrison, and Team Morgan Dixon on the TED stage. Why are black women dying faster and at higher rates than any other group of people in America from preventable obesity-related diseases? We asked ourselves that same question. Why is what's out there not working for them, private weight loss companies, government interventions, public health campaigns? I'm going to tell you why. Because they focus on weight loss. They're looking good in skinny jeans without acknowledging the trauma that black women hold in our bellies and bones that has been embedded in our very DNA. The best advice from hospitals and doctors, the best medications from pharmaceutical companies to treat the congested heart failure of my grandmother didn't work because they didn't acknowledge the systemic racism that she had dealt with since birth. And it's why we say that 30 minutes a day of walking is radical self-care.

For these women, the most immediate solution was to start walking. Walking is a way that social change has always been created in the world. It's also the single most powerful thing a person can do for their health. It reduces your risk of almost all chronic diseases by over 50%. It improves your mental health. And then for us, there's a powerful impact of collective action and activism, where when we are walking in our neighborhoods, We are walking, talking, and solving the problems of those neighborhoods together.

So for all of those reasons, walking. Walking next to Vanessa is Kimberly Powell. I am Kimberly Powell from Centerville, Virginia. So I first heard about Girl Trek when I saw the TED Talk a couple years ago. And I was just blown away. So they got my attention with that. And then last year I lost one of my best friends. She was a neighbor.

And she and I would sometimes walk together and do a lot of things. together and so I decided to look into Girl Track. Came here my first group in August, and I've been walking with us ever since. We hug, we hug each other, we pray for each other. Also walking is Charmaine done. When someone's sick, when someone's going through something, we're there to empower and encourage.

You don't find that everywhere and every day. And so when you find it, you just say, wow, these are my people. I'm a caregiver. I'm a caregiver. I'm a, and I take care of family and family members. Have three grandsons. One of my middle grandsons is autistic. Have a 91-year-old father, and I also have a 91-year-old aunt.

So these moments and these times are important. It's extremely important for me. And believe it or not, for the day, Believe it or not for them. Because if I'm not whole, how can I support someone else who needs me? At the end of their walk, the chapter's organizer, Yvonne Rice, checked her phone. Oh, the step count. We did 7,051 steps this morning.

And I know that the goal is 10, but, hey, whatever we can get in, we're happy. because, you know, the day is still young. That was Vanessa Garrison, Kimberly Powell, Charmaine Dunn, and Yvonne Rice. Many thanks to all of them for including us on their walk. You can watch Vanessa Garrison and T. Morgan Dixon's Talk at TED.com, and you can find GirlTrek at girltrak.org. On the show today, a more walkable world. So we've talked about moving throughout the workday,

making our cities more walkable, walking for our health and as a form of activism. And now, a story about a man who walks because he just can't stop. I guess my own journey, it's a pilgrimage that I've been on for all these years. I grab my banjo and I walk. I think walking is essential. And for me, it's a sacred journey. Walking is sacred. This is John Francis.

He calls himself the planet walker because he's been, well, walking the planet for the last 50 years. Because I like walking, I guess. We caught up with him near Cape Town, South Africa at the start of a long trip. My plan is to turn north and go through Natal. John's goal is to walk the entire length of the African continent. into Egypt. It will take him months, but that's okay. I'm like 78 now, so I'm just not the spry young fellow that, you know, threw on a backpack

and just kind of walked out the door and when I got tired, I put a tent up or throw my sleeping bag down under a bridge or those kinds of things. because I try to walk about 15 to 20 miles a day. All this walking started as a protest in 1971, when John happened to witness a massive oil spill not far from his home in California. Yeah, maybe a million gallons spilled into the San Francisco Bay and was taken out by the tide and then flooded back on to, Marin County and parts of the Bay.

Here's John Francis on the TED stage. I witnessed that two oil tankers collide beneath the Golden Gate. And it disturbed me so much that I decided that I was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles. That's a big thing in California. And it was a big thing in my little community of point raise. station in Inverness, California, because there was only about maybe 350 people there in the winter. This was back in 71 now. And so when I started walking around, people would drive up next to me and say,

John, what are you doing? And I'd say, well, I'm walking for the environment. And they said, no, you're walking to make us look bad, right? You're walking to make us feel bad. And maybe there was some truth of that because I thought that if I started walking, everyone would, you know, follow. Sadly, that didn't happen. But other wonderful and strange things did as John walked and walked.

For instance, one day he decided not to talk. And so on my 27th birthday, I decided not to speak just for one day. Just give my community the gift of my silence because I just talked so much and thought I knew everything. This vow of silence ended up lasting 17 years. And regardless, John made friends. He learned to build boats. He also got an education. I was able to go to school without speaking.

And in two years, earned my bachelor's degree in science and mathematics. But my dad was really concerned. He said, we're so proud of you. But what are you going to do with a bachelor's degree if you don't ride in cars and talk? John wasn't sure. So he walked to another university where he got his master's in environmental sciences. Of course, my dad showed up again, and he was, you know, just awestruck that I had graduated with a master's degree, not speaking. John went on to get his Ph.D. very quietly. And then he kept walking. But this time, he decided to head south. through the Caribbean, to Barbados, to Venezuela, to Brazil, and Brazil to Bolivia, to Bolivia, to Argentina.

And I spent a month in Antarctica, then came across from Antarctica to Ushuaia. He did take one big break from walking, several years, in fact, at the request of his fiancé. We'd been dating for 10 years. And she said, John, no, it's time for us to get married and raise a family. So I did that. I returned home and I got married. We had two boys. They're 23 and 17 now.

And she said, okay, you can go walk again. So I'm here in South Africa beginning that walk. If someone says, well, I understand you love to walk, it's very important to you, but what do you think the purpose is of it for other people? Is there a, are you drawing attention to a cause? Are you talking to people as you go? Tell me what it's why, that why. Yeah. I realized that how we treated each other was really a very important part of being an environmentalists because if we oppressed each other or exploited each other, all those things were going to manifest in the physical environment around us. And then I realized that the reason that me as an African American made it across the United States not speaking, just playing a banjo,

and was able to go to school and get my degrees, end up with a PhD, is because of people's kindness. It was like human kindness. And without that, I don't think that I would have made it across America. I think there's some people listening with whom that story really will resonate. But there probably are other people who are like, this guy's an old hippie. He's walking around with a band. Joe, and then spreading kindness? How does that work? How do you explain it? How do you know if you're

spreading kindness? What's it like on a day-to-day basis? Well, you know, I mean, if there are people that I I'm certain I just can't explain it to, I just try to live it. And in living it, I think that is that essential part of what we do is. living what we believe. This is just what I believe and this is how I express it in my life. So that's very high level. Do you mind if we go very micro and detailed? Would you mind taking me through a day in the life of you walking? Okay, in Africa. I'm leaving from a place called Gordon's Bay and I'm trying to get to Mosul Bay and we got to a place where we stopped for lunch and there's a gentleman who is sitting at a table with another gentleman and he sees the banjo and he goes,

what? Did I miss the concert? And I turned and looked at him and I said, well, I know I have some music for you. And so I played something for him and I explained to him the walk and I was heading to Betty's Bay. And he said, you know, I live in Betty's Bay. When are you going to start walking tomorrow? And I said, 7 o'clock, I'm going to start walking. He says, I'm going to be here with a friend and we're going to walk with you. And the next morning, there I was at 7 o'clock and there he was with his friend, Mike. And they're two South Africans, and, you know, they're speaking Afrikaans to everyone around them and English to me.

We all take off. And the next day, someone else wanted to walk with me. So it was kind of like that for the first week of walking that people just wanted to walk with me. I had some company and places to stay. I went. I mean, you're connecting people as you go. What do you talk about when people join you on a walk? Because they're usually strangers, it sounds like. Sometimes people have questions about, you know, how I got there. But more often than not, people just want to be silent and walk with me silently. Hmm. Why do you think that is?

I think they want to experience what it's like walking without having to say anything. And just feeling the earth and each other. And there's a, you know, kind of a magnetism or electric field that surrounds us and connects us to the planet. and we just become part of that. And probably that's the most fulfilling times when we're all just walking together and not having to say very much about anything except just being where we are.

Do you go through different mental stages or physical discomfort at various points that you've come to recognize over the now 50 years that you've been doing this? Well, yes. I mean, still takes me a little while to start off. But once I get going, then I just get into this place. It's like a mantra. And I'm just walking and just walking and just walking.

It's not that I love it. It's not that I hate it. It's just this place where I am and it's just who I am. And I'm walking. And I'm walking. Often there's a hill. So climbing up the hill is just, it's one step after the other, one step after the other. And then at some point you're at the top.

And I love that to look out. over the landscape and see another hill and see another hill. And you would think that I would get tired of that. But I don't. I just, it's just part of being on the earth and being together with the planet, being part of the planet. That's John Francis, the planet Walker. You can learn more about his latest journey and all the climate data he's correct. along the way for the Globe Science Education Program at planetwalk.org. You can also watch his full talk at TED.com. Many thanks to him for playing his banjo for us, too.

And thank you so much for listening to our show, A More Walkable World. This episode was produced by Katie Montalione, Fiona Gehran, and James Delahousie. It was edited by Sanaz Mashkinpur and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, and Harsha Nihada. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Margaret Luthar, Ted Mebain, and Gilly Moon. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balezzo.

I'm Manusse Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour. from NPR.