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One Man’s Stand
AFTER 22 YEARS OF WALKING THE PLANET AND 17 YEARS OF SILENCE, JOHN FRANCIS LEARNED THAT THE BEST WAY FOR US TO SAVE MOTHER EARTH IS SIMPLY TO CARE FOR ONE ANOTHER. NOW HE’S SPREADING THE WORD. >BY STEVE DAVIS >PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEAN MCCORMICK
JOHN FRANCIS is a sponge when it comes to environmental education. Armed with knowledge to spare, he could talk all day about the scourge of forest burning in Brazil, the mercury in our fish, the pollution in our water, and the lead in our paint.
But, ironically, he’s not one to go on about these things. An earth-friendly, full-court press just isn’t the way to go for this contemplative and unorthodox environmental crusader. In fact, he believes we’re missing something by chewing aggressively on the media-fueled touchstones of planetary concern.
Yes, these issues require addressing, but Francis believes the starting point to environmental rescue is less directly tethered to gas-hogging SUVs, reusable shopping bags, and the like than you might think.
Says Francis, “When people ask me, ‘What’s the bottom line? Where do we go from here?’ I tell them it’s about how we all treat each other.”
Emotionally gutted by the destruction caused by a 1971 oil spill in the San Francisco Bay, Francis swore off motorized transportation for 22 years, walking as a form of protest and to raise awareness. During those two decades, he logged more than 20,000 miles, walking across the United States and Central and South America. And two years after he started walking, he stopped speaking. (Along the way, he also educated himself, formally and informally, collecting a master’s degree and a PhD -- not an easy feat even under the most normal of circumstances.)
Launched as a tiny, personal stand, Francis’s journey evolved into what would become an important environmental pilgrimage. He may not have known it at the time, but his lamenting that filthy beach would eventually turn him into an environmental folk hero who would successfully elevate eco-awareness through books, speeches, radio and TV interviews, and magazine articles.
Today, Francis, 62, has an office above the old Western Saloon in the scenic town of Point Reyes Station, next to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. As the founder and director of Planetwalk, a nonprofit environmental-education program, he still busily travels the continents, cultivating his latest mission: helping people connect the dots, demonstrating that how we treat the environment is inextricably linked to how we care for one another.
Francis believes that individuals -- following their own conscience and at their own personal velocity -- can inspire change. “Each person has tremendous capability to make a difference,” he says with pleasant assurance.
This past April saw the release of his second book, Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence. His newest endeavor is Planetlines -- an environmental-studies curriculum for grade schools, high schools, and colleges that’s based on his amazing and extensive walking expeditions.
Even if Francis’s ideas on an environment under stress don’t align directly with mainstream thinking, we should probably pay attention to them anyway. After all, he’s spent more than 35 years in studious contemplation of it all.
>FRANCIS BEGAN HIS soul-searching journey at the age of 24, after he witnessed the collision of two oil tankers that resulted in 840,000 gallons of sludge being spilled into the San Francisco Bay. Saddened and disgusted, Francis joined other locals in the grim cleanup efforts.
It was an epochal moment for the hippie-dippie student working odd jobs while stationed at ground zero of America’s counterculture revolution; he was suddenly forced to measure his own complicity in the expanding environmental duress. He attempted to assuage his sadness through a deeply personal commitment to abandon motorized transportation.
The decision was born of impulse, but he stuck with it doggedly even as the broader ramifications became clear. For instance, how in the world would he visit his family in Philadelphia? There were also the quarrels and quibbles with friends and townsfolk. One man can’t make a difference, they insisted, so what’s the point of this mad mission?
Then, about two years later, Francis woke up on his 27th birthday and decided to give a “gift” to himself and to the townspeople: He quit talking for the day.
And he liked it. So he stretched the silence to a week, and he found that he learned more through the benevolent filters of silence. Ultimately, he remained quiet for 17 years. He says words slipped only three times during the entire period.
His vow of silence led Francis to a meaningful discovery: For most of his adult life, he had not been listening.
“I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker’s ideas matched my own,” Francis tells me.
In 1974, as Francis, already a local celebrity and increasingly receiving regional acclaim, was returning from a five-day hike to Sacramento, an epiphany overwhelmed him, and he decided to take his stand a step further. He describes the experience in Planetwalker: “I decide to embrace my condition, to grab the tail of the tiger and use the notoriety to further the cause of environmental protection. In this moment, I am transformed from a man expecting to live a quiet and idyllic life on the shores of Tomales Bay into an activist. I decide to use my life for change and to learn what this means.”
Soon after making that decision, in an effort to better understand nature’s ways and to begin his self-described “environmental education,” Francis embarked on the first of his many travels, a 500-mile hike up the coast to Oregon.
In 1983, driven partially by the desire to visit his aging parents in Philadelphia and partially by a hunger for still more environmental education and stewardship, he decided to walk across the country.
Armed with a banjo (he taught himself to play), a big backpack, a few note cards to help explain his mission, and a substantial arsenal of hand signals, Francis wandered eastward for six years, mostly on foot but sometimes by bicycle. Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in environmental studies at the University of Montana (from 1984 to 1986) and a PhD at the University of Wisconsin (1987 to 1989), where he studied the societal costs of oil spills and clean-ups. He paid for it all through grants that he solicited the old-fashioned way: through hand-written letters. He also worked odd jobs, once as a printer and another time as a boat builder, and he sold his paintings and drawings -- not that he needed much money, as he was living cheaply and limiting his carbon footprint (and this was before most people had heard the term). He also taught a few classes, though he stayed ever true to his stubborn vow of silence. It all took patience and creativity, along with a lot of pantomime, eye contact, gestures, nods, banjo tunes, and, when all else failed, written notes.
“Here I am, at this place where I’m walking and I’m not speaking, and it’s such an education,” Francis tells me of his journey. His words are steady, slow, and considered. His voice sounds remarkably young for a 62-year-old man -- although I suppose that shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering his vocal cords had a 17-year break. “So, I’m walking all over creation, in the wilderness areas, in the cities, and I’m looking for my own answers [about life]. What I’m holding on to is that it’s something about environment, and it’s something about pollution.”
During this time, Francis became the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles; sometimes he even became fast friends with the journalists. Silent TV interviews, like the one Francis did with Charlie Rose for PBS ( just before he resumed speaking), proved unique but effective. Eventually, his burgeoning fame and formal education paid off handsomely. First, in 1990, he was named a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme. And soon after that, the United States Coast Guard came calling. Having learned of Francis’s work at the University of Wisconsin and from fellow environmentalists, they wanted Francis’s help in writing new oil-spill regulations. They were working on a new Oil Pollution Act (OPA).
In New Jersey at the time, Francis assured his new employer that he would hurry and start on this important endeavor as soon as he could get to Washington, D.C. -- by bicycle.
>FRANCIS RECOMMITED TO renew his vow of silence annually on his birthday. In 1990, though, basing his decision solely on intuition, he began speaking again -- on Earth Day. Francis selected that date as a self-reminder that, going forward, he would always be speaking for the environment. (The very next day, he was struck by a car near the Washington, D.C., hotel from where his first words in 17 years had been heard the day before. The following morning’s Los Angeles Times included a story about the environmentalist who, even though he was injured, refused ambulance transport and instead walked the 15 blocks to the hospital.)
Following completion of the OPA staff gig with the Coast Guard, Francis sailed to Antigua and then on to South America. After spending six months in Barbados to attend a UN conference, he arrived in Venezuela in September 1994. It was there that Francis had another life-changing experience. While walking in Venezuela one day, he found himself on the business end of an M16 assault rifle held by a nervous prison guard who couldn’t understand him. At that moment, on a dusty road in South America, Francis realized that his decision to abandon motorized transportation “had become a prison, and only I could set myself free,” he says.
It was time, once again, to adjust. A few days later, for the first time in more than two decades, Francis squeezed his tall frame into a car. (Today, he drives a Toyota Prius.)
His years on foot had served a purpose, though: They had helped him to reconnect with the rhythms of nature.
Francis now looks back and laughs at how he had to figure things out for himself. In a country where so many of us circle the store parking lot twice to subtract a few footsteps, he had limited options for counsel and advice on his unconventional tactics.
As I talk with Francis, the irony of my reporting process hits me full force: I traveled across the country, at a severe carbon penalty, I assume, to spend just a few hours with a man who dotes on the environment. (I comfort myself by noting that I did, at least, rent a compact car for the drive out to Point Reyes Station.)
I share the irony of the moment with Francis while we sit at a little café across from his office. But a conversation with him is quickly relieving. There’s not a shred of preachiness, not an inkling of righteous judgment during any part of it. In his mind, Francis is just like the rest of us -- somebody who is always trying to sort things out.
“So you can look at it all and laugh at yourself,” Francis says. “You can laugh at the idea of your own purity. The reason all this works, the reason I’m able to do what I’m doing, is that everybody else is still doing what they are doing. … But that doesn’t mean that it can’t change. I can see there are more and more people all the time thinking green, [thinking about] how we can do things differently.”
Francis came to understand that his actions never occur in a vacuum: A letter he mails won’t summon a time-travel visit from the Pony Express; it will be ferried by mail, truck, or plane. Humble shoe leather can carry him 20 miles to a restaurant, but food on the plate has likely arrived via truck.
Part of his journey was about attaining a balance, patiently figuring out where his part fits in with the bigger picture.
“I really understand that environment is about pollution, it’s about loss of species, loss of habitat, overpopulation,” he says. “And … it’s about climate change and nuclear proliferation. It’s about all these things.
“But now there’s another element. And that element is about us being part of the environment. It’s about human rights and civil rights. It’s about economic equality and gender equality. It’s about how we treat each other when we meet each other.”
Maybe that should be a no-brainer. But it took years of being on the road and hundreds of worn-out shoes for Francis to truly achieve clarity on how it all intersects. If we truly care for one another, he explains, then leaving Mother Earth a better place for the next fellow will be as natural as saying hi to each other. “Our first opportunity to treat the environment well,” he says, “is with the next person we see.” Ironically, the man who’s spent a lifetime developing these concepts is never quite convinced that he’s right -- about anything. Years of silence taught him the value of patiently hearing the viewpoint of the other side. Francis never wants to sound like he has all the answers.
“Based on my own experience, my own life, I can say that it may all look like a sacrifice,” he says. “It may look like you’re suffering when it’s raining and you are walking. But look what you can get from all that. Look where you can take yourself from that.”
Francis took himself all across America, across the world, and back. And he took himself to a place where one man could truly and remarkably make a mighty difference.
STEVE DAVIS is a freelance writer who lives in Dallas.
Port Townsend, Washington
November 1983
Stays in Port Townsend until July 1984; sets up a boatbuilding shop and spends the winter building a dory-skiff.
Missoula, Montana
October 1984–86
Enrolls in and completes a master’s program in environmental studies at the University of Montana.
Kalmiopsis Wilderness Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon
August 1983
John walks across the wilderness alone, revisiting the site of the solitary winter he spent in a cabin at Copper Creek several years before.
Arco, Idaho
August 1986
Endures a parching walk across the desert, surviving thanks to some good Samaritans who leave him water.
Inverness, California
April 1972
John stops using motorized vehicles. In February 1973, still in Inverness, he stops speaking.
Point Reyes National Seashore, California
January 1983
John begins his cross-country trek with a 12-mile walk to Point Reyes Station.
Point Reyes Station, California
April 1983
Leaves Point Reyes to walk to Port Townsend, Washington, crossing over the Golden Gate Bridge for the last time for 12 years.
Yellowstone National Park
August–September, 1986
Walks through Yellowstone National Park, treading lightly amid the ever-present threat of grizzlies.
Watertown, South Dakota
November 1986–April 1987
Forced to stop by a storm, John takes up residence in Watertown for the winter and uses the time to master printmaking and apply to doctoral programs.
Forestville, Minnesota
May 1987
Meets the lieutenant governor of Minnesota and learns the snake dance of the native people.
Madison, Wisconsin
June 1987–October 1989
John attends a PhD program at the University of Wisconsin; he writes his dissertation on oil spills.
Devon, Pennsylvania
November 1989
Closing in on the East Coast at last, John meets his father for lunch, the first time he’s been met by a family member since he began his trek six years earlier.
Atlantic City, New Jersey
January 1990
Touches the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
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