ON TRAILS: An Exploration

While hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2009, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths that lie beneath our feet. How do they form? Why do some improve over time while others devolve? What makes us follow or strike off on our own? Travelling the globe, he explored trails of all kinds and learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks and the Internet. With an environmental eye, he looks at wagon trails, elephant and American bison searching for grass, water and minerals, buffalo which created graded trails down hillsides and riverbanks, shepherds' trails and how the world's oldest trails were discovered one afternoon in 2008 by an Oxford researcher named Alex Liu. They were scouting for new fossil sites overlooking the North Atlantic and discovered a series of sinuous traces thought to be left behind by organisms of the Ediacaran biota, the planet's earliest known forms of animal life. "One unfortunate type is often described as looking like a bag of mud." Observant, packed with knowledge about how animals first crawled from the sea and spread across continents to our relationship with nature and technology, the author has a philosopher's knack for asking big questions on our world, history, species and our ways of life anew. 340pp.