JOHN FRANCIS (PhD) is a writer, artist, U.N. and Goodwill Ambassador. "He has spent most of his adult life traveling the hemisphere, picking up university degrees and promoting environmental awareness. For 22 years he demonstrated his conviction by eschewing all forms of motorized conveyance. And for 17 of those years he didn't speak a word, communicating with gestures and in writing." Francis founded Planetwalk in 1982 when he began his walking and sailing pilgrimage around the world. To date, Dr. Francis has walked across the U.S., sailed and walked through the Caribbean, and South America from Venezuela to Argentina.
"To condense the odyssey of anybody's life into a few paragraphs seems mildly criminal, and in the case of Francis it seems positively felonious. A book would hardly catch the details. (Actually, we'll see about this: Francis has just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write the story of his adventures.) Anything shorter runs the risk of begging more questions than it answers. Caveats aside, here goes: The year was 1971. Two oil tankers collided in the waters off the Golden Gate, spilling 440,000 gallons of crude, catalyzing one man's troubled mind into a whirl of questions: What is my part in this? Why are we living our lives at 60 miles per hour? How can one person make a difference? Then a friend of his died shortly after the spill. Francis commemorated the man's life with a memorial walk from his home in Inverness to San Anselmo and back. In hindsight you could call it a spiritual crisis, some kind of grief that was pushing Francis to break out of the boundaries of his life."
"He decided to see what would happen if he stopped traveling in cars. After a few months of walking, his world view was starting to polarize: the elation he felt at his newfound freedom, the despair he felt watching the world pass him by. He could see that if he continued his decision was going to transform his entire life. And yet, so threatened were people by the statement he was making that he found himself embroiled in many a pointless argument. On his 27th birthday he decided to treat himself to a break from all the noise by spending the day in silence. And in the bizarre, inconceivable way that time accretes, that day turned into two, and those two into a week, a month, a year. Before it ended, Francis' birthday gift turned into 17 years of silence. "You have to experience it," he says, looking back on those years, "You can't explain silence by saying something." But for those of us who are more inclined to view such behavior as an aberration, he will point to its virtues: It quieted his mind, it gave him the opportunity to really listen to others, and it kept his intentions from getting diffused in chatter."
"Compelling, and well precedented, is the narrative of the sadhu, the silent, wandering holy man who lives completely on the margins of society. Certainly Francis has been no stranger to the margins. Over the years of his pilgrimage he has spent plenty of time painting in the wilderness or strumming his banjo along the side of some blue highway. But what makes Francis' life so remarkable is the extent to which he continued to work within the mainstream. For in those years of silence he earned a B.A. in Oregon, an M.A. in Montana, and got his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin."
Visit John Francis' website Planetwalk
"The Silent Type, Environmental Activist John Francis" by Larry Gallagher
"Walking His Talk" by April Thompson
John Francis Audio Interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge
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