by Raye Hodgson

Created on: October 31, 2008

Walking and the Environment

In the U.S., walking and the environment have changed since the arrival of Europeans a few hundred years ago. Of course, we still put one foot in front of the other when we walk, but the frequency and necessity of walking have changed drastically. As walking has been replaced with other forms of travel, the environment has correspondingly been degraded. Environmental degradation has in turn made walking more difficult.

Before European culture was carried to this continent, the people here traveled on their own two feet most of the time. Travel by canoe was also an option, but for upland travel, walking was the only way.

In New England, where families and villages moved from the hills in the wintertime to the coast in the summer, households were small enough that everything needed could be carried on one's back or strapped to long poles that would be pulled along the footpaths and sometimes loaded onto canoes to go from one home site to the next.

This system worked for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Its impact on the environment was minimal. Long footpaths through the woods and meadows, connected to rivers and coastlines created a very effective travel network. People were able to gather materials, manage large woodland areas and open fields for food and hunting, trade, visit and communicate with others thanks to this network.

But walking and the environment changed with the arrival of European culture. More accustomed to densely populated areas and animal-drawn wagons, carts and coaches, new immigrants began changing the land to accommodate more familiar modes of transportation. Footpaths were widened into roads by cutting down trees. More trees were cut to provide lumber for building permanent, much larger structures. These larger buildings required even more trees to be cut for firewood to heat them.

These changes in the landscape increased soil erosion and air pollution (due to smoke from fireplaces, and fewer trees to absorb the pollutants). But because they did not know better, and because initially the changes were made to a fraction of the landscape, there was no cry of alarm among the new settlers, who were thrilled about the wonderful air, soil, and water quality of this new world.

There was still plenty of walking to be done, and ways to walk from where one was to where one wanted to be. Not everyone had a horse- or ox-drawn cart or buggy to ride, and walking was still largely the standard operating procedure for local

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