A Walking Life

Sitting is the new smoking. We're sitting longer than we ever have before: adults average nine hours of sitting a day, while children spend almost as much time sitting in front of a screen and in school. Driven by a combination of a car-centric culture and an insatiable thirst for productivity and efficiency, we have been designing walking out of our lives for nearly a hundred years--and there's an ever-growing concern and national conversation about our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. But here's the quandary--and it's a big one: If bipedal walking is truly what makes our species human, as paleoanthropologists claim, what does it mean that we no longer walk as much as we used to-that we are designing walking right out of our lives? Delving into a wealth of science, history, and anecdote--from our deepest origins as hominims to our first steps as babies, to universal design and social capital, to walking as protest (from medieval England to Black Lives Matter), to