Walking changes the world

Walking changes the world. Protesters in the 21st century asking a turn of climate change or demanding racial justice are walking in the footsteps of great walkers. From Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian independence movement to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, walking and protest went closely together.

Gandhi’s Salt March, also known as the Salt Satyagraha, was an act of nonviolent civil disobedience in colonial India, led by Mahatma Gandhi. The twenty-four day march was a direct action of tax resistance against the British salt monopoly. Gandhi started this march with 78 of his trusted volunteers and ended 387 kilometres with thousands, and sparked large-scale acts of civil disobedience against the salt laws by millions of Indians, marking a turning point on the road to independence.

Years later, King, an admirer of Gandhi who had traveled to India, also used nonviolent resistance and the walking protest. The Birmingham campaign of early 1963 began with a series of marches, culminating in the historic march on Washington in August of that year. These marches were peaceful, but directly paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring practices and public services throughout the United States.

Walking is democratic and one of the last non consumist activities left, even if safe walking isn’t always guaranteed, and that is why voices raise to include safe walking as a human right. Freedom is where walking is essentially about, and everyone should be able to experience the freedom to depart and return when they wish, to meander, to drift, and to make their own path.

Above all, walking changes ideas and changes the world. Great writers and philosophers could not separate their work from walking. Nietzsche walked fervently in the Swiss Alps. “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement,” he said.

The novelist Louisa May Alcott regularly embarked on long walks through the countryside near her Concord home. Sometimes she was joined by her fellow author, Henry David Thoreau. They’d spend hours sauntering in rural Massachusetts, partaking in their “portion of the infinite,” as Thoreau put it.

Writer Raja Shehadeh started his hillwalking in Palestine in the late 1970s, at first not aware that he was traveling through a vanishing landscape, but over the years the walking in Ramallah and the Palestinian West Bank became more and more dangerous in an ever changing territory. Raja Shehadeh's writings and walks are an elegy for the lost footpaths and represent the deprivations of an entire people.

Change and new possibilities, that is what walking is eventually about. Even more valid today, on Global Human Rights Day.

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