by Rebecca Solnit,
reviewed by Cheryl Hammond
Ozark Chapter Webmaster
Many Sierra Club members will appreciate this remarkable and original account of the activity of walking that helps us understand the relationship of walking to our culture. The book itself is like a meander that walks us from topic to topic, yet clearly shows us the direction we are going.
Historically, walking for esthetic and recreational reasons is a new development. Walking has often had political or religious dimensions. Long before the poet William Wordsworth helped popularize walking for walking’s sake in the early nineteenth century, pilgrims walked to distant places to expiate their sins and to tangibly move toward intangible goals through movement of the body.
When the Sierra Club was founded on June 4, 1892, it joined a number of walking clubs which had been proliferating across Europe and North America. However, the Sierra Club was different because it was founded not only to bring people together to walk in the landscape, but also to defend that landscape. Sierra Club members can also be proud of the fact that the Sierra Club always made women welcome at a time when walking clubs excluded women altogether and women in major cities could hardly walk anyplace unchaperoned.
Women and Walking
The subject of women walking is particularly explored in Solnit’s history and the author includes a chapter called “Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space.” The twentieth century writer and poet Sylvia Plath wrote at the age of nineteen: “Being born a woman is an awful tragedy... Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars – to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl....I want to be able to ... walk freely at night.” High heels, fragile shoes, very full or narrow skirts, were all part of the life that effectively handicapped Sylvia and other women. However, more than social mores kept women off of streets and roads. To skip back in time a little to 1870 England, any woman found walking about in the wrong time or place could be arrested under suspicion of prostitution. She could be sentenced to months in jail if she failed to undergo a humiliating examination.
Public Access
As Sierra Club members, we find our outings confined to publicly owned lands. No club outings would be planned to walk across landowners’ private woods or pasture. The situation is very different in England where very little land is publicly owned. Traditionally, public rights of way have existed across privately held lands. For centuries, only the nobility owned land, but the landless classes walked across the land. As England became more industrialized and more people chose to spend their free time walking in the countryside, Parliament passed laws allowing landowners to close off paths to the public. As more landowners began to fence off land, public revolt grew with societies formed to fight these laws and acts of civil disobedience committed to fight against these new boundaries to what were once freely accessible paths. We can draw inspiration from these defenders of the human right to public space.
Suburban sprawl
Solnit also includes a treatment of the assault on public space that has resulted from suburbia and shopping malls. Suburban shopping malls are inherently different from downtown shopping districts. Malls are private property and stepping into the mall is not a constitutionally guaranteed right. With less available public space, it becomes increasingly difficult for citizens to exercise their constitutional right to public assembly. Solnit calls for civil liberties activists to remember this right, as well as to our right to free speech and our right to bear arms.
Solnit continues an indictment of suburbs. Suburbs make walking an ineffective means of transportation. Even when it is possible to walk to a destination, suburbia and automobile transportation have introduced a different consciousness so that suburbanites drive remarkably short distances rather than walk.
Can we recover our spaces for walking? The Sierra Club must continue to support the best uses of the land and space available to us. After all, we deserve a habitable place to live and walk.