At sunset the gazelles came out.
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.
We welcome your presence, your comments, your compass bearings.
