Will Self is a walker. In documenting his long-distance journeys, he explores the impact of place on the human condition. Spencer Wells travels to remote areas of the world to genetically reconstruct the migratory patterns of early humans. They recently made their way to New York where Seed asked them to consider: Will a global monoculture erase evidence of our diverse histories? What is the evolutionary consequence of urbanization? What, ultimately, does it mean to be human?
Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon.
WILL SELF: I once walked from London to Harwich, along the Essex Way.
SPENCER WELLS: Ah, wow. How many days did it take?
WS: Three-and-a-half days. It was a beautiful long‑distance path, the Essex Way, that avoids all urban centers. The bizarre thing about a walk like that—through one of the most densely inhabited countries in the world—is that I didn't meet a soul.
SW: Ha—no kidding.
WS: Just the act of becoming ambulatory cuts you out of contemporary culture.
SW: So you can become more of an observer, I guess?
WS: Completely. Or a Viet Cong insurgent from the past, creeping through the tunnels.
SW: Ha—right, complete with rights of way.
WS: But yeah, I've always walked. My father was an academic who specialized in urban region development, and he was a walker. It's partly a connection with him. He died about 10 years ago. And I think it's also bound up with psycho-geographic concerns, with mapping these unrecorded places, in a sense.
SW: Your personal dérive.
WS: It is a personal dérive. Though my dérive is quite purposive in a way, unlike the Situationists' dérive, which was, of course, random. They "drifted" and wanted people to become aware of their surroundings. But it has some of the same things associated with it—a way of hitting against what I call the man/machine matrix, and against the way globalized travel destabilizes us and alienates us from our own environment.
SW: It does, it does. I mean, you know, because you go on these sorts of book tours often enough, that you fly into a city and you could be anywhere.
WS: Yeah. On this swing through North America in particular, having done book tours now for 15 years, I was particularly concerned to redeem that. So I've been doing these airport walks, walking from airports, or taking long walks in every city I visit. And doing some strange walks, too.
I was very struck by the final chapters of your book where you discuss the way in which globalization is essentially erasing—
SW: —the history of our species, yes.
WS: Yes, and I wonder whether or not my impulse to walk were not part of a...
SW: Luddite response?
WS: Well, a conservatism, at an unconscious level, to retain that, and to somehow get across to people that that's what we're losing. In my own way I'm perhaps chiming in with that.
SW: I think there's something inherent in humans that, yes, makes us want to migrate, but also to have that connection to place, even though we're moving. I think there is something of a wanderlust in our DNA, something that makes us want to explore a little bit further, but at the same time we want to actually be in the place. The way we travel today, you're not in the place. There's never any "there" there.
