Paul Salopek

Paul Salopek
Paul Salopek
	Paul Salopek in New Delhi, India
Born	February 9, 1962 (age 62); Barstow, California
Nationality	American

Paul Salopek (born February 9, 1962, in Barstow, California)^[1] is a journalist and writer from the United States.^[2]^[3]^[4] He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was raised in central Mexico.^[5] Salopek has reported globally for the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, National Geographic Magazine and many other publications.^[6] In January 2013, Salopek founded the IRS-classified nonprofit organization "Out of Eden Walk,"^[7] originally projected to be a seven-year walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa. As of June 2024^[update], the project is ongoing.^[8] The transcontinental foot journey plans to cover 24,000 miles. In addition to public donations, Out of Eden Walk is partially funded by the National Geographic Society, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and the Abundance Foundation.

Life

Salopek received a degree in environmental biology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984.^[1]^[9]^[10] Salopek has worked intermittently as a commercial fisherman, shrimp-fishing out of Carnarvon, and most recently with the scallop fleet out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1991. His career in journalism began in 1985 when his motorcycle broke in Roswell, New Mexico, and he took a police-reporting job at the local newspaper to earn repair money.^[1]

Career

Salopek reported for the Chicago Tribune from 1996 until April 30, 2009, writing about Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He worked for National Geographic from 1992–1995, visiting Chad, Sudan, Senegal, Niger, Mali, and Nigeria.^[9] The October 1995 cover story for National Geographic was Salopek's piece on Africa's mountain gorillas. He reported on U.S.-Mexico border issues for the El Paso Times. In 1990, he was Gannett News Service's bureau chief in Mexico City.^[11]

In 1998 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for two articles profiling the Human Genome Diversity Project.^[1]^[5]^[10] In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for work covering Africa.^[1]^[5]^[10] Columbia University President George Rupp presented Salopek with the prize, "for his reporting on the political strife and disease epidemics ravaging Africa, witnessed firsthand as he traveled, sometimes by canoe, through rebel-controlled regions of the Congo."^[11]

Salopek was a general assignment reporter on the Tribune's Metropolitan staff, reporting on immigration, the environment and urban affairs. He spent several years as the Tribune's bureau chief in Johannesburg. Salopek reported from Sudan for a 2003 National Geographic story, "Shattered Sudan: Drilling for Oil, Hoping for Peace." He wrote "Who Rules the Forest?" from Africa for National Geographic in September 2005, examining the effects of war in Central Africa.^[11] While on freelance assignment for National Geographic in Darfur, Sudan, he was ambushed and imprisoned for more than a month in 2006 by pro-government military forces.^[5]

In the fall of 2009, Salopek taught an undergraduate seminar on reporting from the developing world at Princeton University as part of Princeton's Journalism Program.

Out of Eden Walk

In January 2013, Salopek embarked on a walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa, initially scheduled to take seven years. The transcontinental foot journey will cover 24,000 miles, beginning in Africa, in Ethiopia, across the Middle East and through Asia, via Alaska and down the western edge of the Americas to the southern tip of Chile.^[12] The project, entitled Out of Eden Walk, is an independent IRS-classified 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization.^[13] Media and funding partners include the nonprofit's primary sponsor, National Geographic Society, as well as the Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and the Abundance Foundation. As a nonprofit, the Out of Eden Walk project relies on public support and donations to survive.^[14] Out of Eden Walk is a laboratory of slow journalism that engages with the major stories of our time—from climate change to technological innovation, from mass migration to cultural survival—by walking alongside the populations who inhabit such headlines every day. The mission is connecting humanity through three pillars: journalism, education, and a unique storytelling archive of multimedia and text content. In addition to immersing readers in the lives of people encountered en route—the nomads, villagers, traders, farmers, and fishermen who rarely make the news—the walk is growing a global community of readers and storytellers focused on the power of people-to-people connectivity and meaningful reportage as an antidote to misinformation, polarization, and fear.^[15] When the trek ends, the walk will have generated a global mosaic of stories, faces, sounds, and landscapes highlighting the pathways that connect us to each other—a mostly digital archive of our shared humanity at the start of a new millennium.^[16] ^[17] ^[18] ^[19] He has walked with hundreds of local people along the route thus far, who are hired not as guides but as Walking Partners,^[20] and was accompanied by Arati Kumar-Rao in India, among others.^[21] In October 2021, after a 20-month hiatus in Myanmar along the Out of Eden Walk route due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he made it to China and is continuing the walk. ^[22]