Inside the ‘factory of the world,’ old ways still linger

Viewed at the intimate pace of three miles an hour, for instance, I can confirm that Homo sapiens has altered our planet’s ecology to such a radical degree that we should be suffering from mass sleeplessness—not just from bad consciences but from genuine dread. (In more than 3,500 days and nights spent trekking from Africa to East Asia, I can tally, depressingly, the number of meaningful wildlife encounters on my fingers and toes.) The most corrosive injustice encountered, up close, in every single human culture I’ve walked through? That’s easy: the shackles that men lock, cruelly, arbitrarily, on the potential of women. (Who’s always underpaid? Who’s typically undereducated? Who wakes up first to a morning of toil? Who’s the last to rest?) Meanwhile, climate worries haunt trailside chats with everyone from grandmotherly Kazakh farmers to gun-toting Kurdish guerrillas.