Paul’s Pit Crew – Center for Civic Media Supports Out of Eden Walk

Paul Salopek is a journalist, a storyteller and an explorer. As a foreign correspondent, he covered stories in fifty countries and won two Pulitzer prizes, one for his reporting on conflicts on the African continent, one for explanatory reporting on the Human Genome Diversity Project, which seeks to explain the history and the diversity of the human species.

Paul’s reporting has often placed him in difficult and dangerous circumstances. In 2006, while reporting on the unfolding crisis in Darfur, he was held for a month in a prison cell in El Fasher, Sudan, accused of espionage and writing “false news”. (He was released thanks to interventions by The Chicago Tribune, National Geographic, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and members of Congress.)

While Paul has done extraordinary work giving readers access to the challenges, struggles and triumphs of people around the globe, he often felt that his journalism was proceeding at too fast a pace to understand what life was really like in the places he visited. Paul first explored the idea of “slow journalism”, journalism at a walking pace, in a 2012 article on famine — walking with nomads in Kenya’s Turkana Basin to understand the experience of deprivation in the horn of Africa.

This year, Paul started walking one of the greatest stories imaginable: the spread of the human race from the Rift Valley of east Africa across the globe.

Paul will walk from Ethiopia to Patagonia, his journey paralleling human migration from Africa, through the Middle East, through Asia, across a land bridge to North America and eventually to South America. This journey took humankind about 45,000 years. Paul’s walk will take seven years. He started this January, and November finds him on the shores of the Red Sea, walking through Saudi Arabia to the Jordanian border.

In the spring of 2012, Paul came to Cambridge, MA for a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard to prepare for his trip. He became a regular at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, sitting in on my class on News and Participatory Media and spending time with me and my students to brainstorm ways he could share his journey with an internet audience without losing the meditative, contemplative nature of the trip.

Our team at Center for Civic Media has become part of Paul’s global pit crew. Nathan Matias helped Paul debug his power problems, matching Paul with Richard Smith, a power expert with the One Laptop Per Child project. Richard discovered that Paul was using a power inverter suited for use with a car battery, not Paul’s lightweight solar panels. A “solar camel” named Fares now powers Paul’s laptop and cellphone, with only the minor inconvenience that the shiny panels sometimes scare other camels at oases.

Most of our consulting has been more mundane, helping Paul and his team think about how they could use social media. In following our friend’s journey, Nathan, Matt and I have become Salopek superfans, awaiting his dispatches and exploring the leads, references and ideas Paul shares.

Tomorrow, Paul’s journey is on the cover of National Geographic. To celebrate that launch, Center for Civic Media is guest curating the Out of Eden twitter feed for the next two weeks. We will share some of the highlights of the journey Paul has taken thus far, previews on what is to come, and details about what Paul is reading, thinking about and referencing. While we are in touch with Paul periodically, we are mostly exploring ideas he has put forward in his dispatches, tracking down references and following links, engaging in a digital exploration in parallel to Paul’s physical travels.

We see Paul’s trip as a vast, spreading tree – Paul’s steps form the trunk, and we are exploring some of the more distant spreading branches. Inspired by Maria Popova’s Brainpickings, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, and the rambling curiosity of early visions for the web, Nathan, Matt and I will be taking turns monitoring the Out of Eden feed and exploring the topics we’ve found most interesting in Paul’s journey. Please feel free to ask us questions, suggest topics we should explore, and point us to local voices we should feature. We are watching Paul’s journey with admiration and fascination and look forward to walking a few miles with you.