Mark Baumer Wanted To Change The World. He Died Trying

Five years ago, Mark Baumer, an environmental activist and author who walked across America one and a half times, was struck and killed by an SUV. He was in the middle of trying to change the world.

Baumer had spent most of his adult life committed to this process of improvement. It mattered to him that we live better; that we accord more with nature. He had grown frustrated with what he saw as a vast system of apathy, a quiet cruelty that manifested itself in a myriad of little ways, some of them not entirely perceptible.

He was, like author David Foster Wallace before him, committed to making a thousand little unsexy choices, every single day, to get closer to a kinder, freer future. Then, on January 21, walking down a Florida road, wearing a hi-vis vest, shoes off, he died.

The Art Of Subtle Weirdness

Mark Baumer grew up in Maine, the only son of Jim and Mary Baumer. Throughout his teenage years, he was an accomplished athlete — he headed a hockey team, and then a baseball team. But though he was a prolific writer and vlogger, chronicling his life in the hundreds of videos he uploaded to his YouTube channel, he rarely spoke about his childhood, or his family. His website, still active five years after his death, offers little in the way of biographical information, save for a single, blunt note: “I live in Providence Rhode Island. I work in a library”.

Baumer had drifted through different jobs before settling at the library. For a while, he was homeless. After graduating from the MFA program at Brown University, he taught a class on “the art of subtle weirdness”. Students were baffled by it, and by him. Baumer, with his long hair and drawling voice, resembled David Foster Wallace, and matched that author’s tendency to gravitate to the dense and the discomforting. He consumed content voraciously: his website has a reading list, filled with hundreds of titles, all reflecting his skewed, obscure way of looking at the world. He read the poet Pablo Neruda; self-help guides by Eckart Tolle; complex science fiction. The last book listed, added in 2017, the year he died, is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.

He was also an author, self-publishing a number of quietly strange, lopsided works of poetry and auto-fiction. The best thing he ever wrote is a short, Richard Brautigan-esque tome called Fifty Books. It is a collection of short stories, some of them just a page long. “The day before I was officially homeless, I asked the internet for fifty thousand dollars so I could write fifty novels and live the rest of my life for free, but not enough people on the internet wanted to give me money,” Baumer wrote in the introduction. “They all knew I just wanted to use it to live for free. I didn’t get any money.”

One of the books is made up of images that don’t exist. “[insert an image of an idea that will exist tomorrow but not the day after tomorrow],” reads one section. “[insert images of an abundance of spiritual thoughts that were turned into crabs who didn’t know how to breathe underwater so they bought houses in the suburbs and dressed up like mommies],” reads another.

When he wasn’t reading, or writing, or passing time at the library front desk, Baumer was a committed environmental activist. “After grad school, I started working at an environmental nonprofit,” he told Vice. “I had always liked the idea of saving the environment, but I hadn’t ever really done anything, and I started to learn about all the different things that are wreaking havoc on the earth. I think the first big one was these plastic islands in the ocean.”

He was arrested in 2016 during a demonstration against Textron, an American industrial conglomerate that was in the process of making cluster bombs. Later, he protested the construction of a fossil fuel plant. And in 2010, Baumer decided to walk across America, to protest the horrors committed against the environment in the name of capitalism.

He completed the trip in 81 days. He wrote a book about it, the slim, tender volume I Am A Road. You can’t read it anymore. The link to the work on his website is dead. It is, like Baumer, a ghost, tantalisingly close, but gone, disappeared into the echoing recesses of the internet.

The Second Time Mark Baumer Walked Across America

The second time Mark Baumer walked across America, he did it barefoot. He once read a book called Born To Run, which extolled the virtues of barefoot running. He liked it. Being barefoot seemed sensible to him. And anyway, the first time that Mark Baumer walked across America, his shoes hurt. He wore holes in them, and his feet began to ache. In the vlogs that he uploaded to YouTube, obsessively chronicling his trip, he complained frequently about the pain. So, he ditched the shoes.

The second time Mark Baumer walked across America he took with him, amongst other things, a pen, a comb, some underwear, a can opener, a flashlight, sunglasses, a headlamp, a backpack, toilet paper, some vitamins, a poncho, fingernail clippers, a GoPro, a selfie stick, headphones, one (1) book, and a pair of thongs for when he needed to go to the store. In a video announcing the trip, Baumer laid out each item on a white piece of paper. These were some of the things that were on him when he was killed.

What Mark Baumer hoped to achieve by walking across America was to change the world. Baumer wanted to bring awareness to the destructive ways that human beings interact with the planet. He thought that a kind of apathy had slipped over people, that they had lost any kind of connection with themselves and their surroundings. The cruelty that he saw around him wasn’t monumental; it was unpleasantly mundane, a kind of slow drip of immorality that manifested in the food that people ate and the miniature ways that they decided to spend each next second. It frustrated him to the point of despair. He was, he knew, only one person. There was nothing that made him different or special. He had merely decided to do something, instead of doing nothing.

What Mark Baumer hoped to achieve by walking across America was to change the world.

Baumer liked to eat fruit. In his vlogs, of which there are hundreds on YouTube, Baumer extolled the virtues of being vegan. It was, it seemed, one of the ways that he thought he could take control over the vast mechanisms of horror that comprise what we mean when we use the word “capitalism.” It frustrated Baumer that other people weren’t vegan. He had the intensity and passion of a revivalist preacher, the belief that everything should be a sermon.

These sermons were, mind you, frequently silly. Baumer had a singular taste for the ridiculous, a kind of self-reflexive winking that told the audience that he understood that changing the world was a faintly ridiculous thing to want to do. In a YouTube video titled, ‘In a world where everything is destroying something…’, Baumer decided that he wanted to eat all the money in the world so that nobody need ever suffer for money again. In ‘Don’t let the advertisements control your mouth’, Baumer urged for independence in his rambly, drawling way. “This is your life,” he said. “You gotta do it. Or else someone else will control your life and use you, and then you don’t got a life anymore.”

It is interesting to ask what Baumer saw in the world, if he cared about it so much. A lot of what he saw made him sad. He was not successful, and he knew that. In a multi-part series uploaded to his YouTube channel, he called literary agents, hoping to get representation. These conversations are often painful to watch. Baumer thought that other people should care about the things that he cared about. They frequently did not. The only time a major news publication wrote about him and his life and his art was in the days after he was struck and killed by a car. Most of his YouTube videos have less than two thousand views.

The author Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote of a curious psychological phenomenon, the sense of having “hope against hope.” For Mandelstam, hope and despair need not be separate affects, distinct from one another. We can despair at the immense ambivalence of the world, its disregard for our dreams, and also believe, somehow, that things will improve. This belief expresses itself in the fact that we wake up each day, even when we would prefer not to. This belief expresses itself in the fact that we do things to try and improve the world around us, even when we know that they will make no difference. This belief expresses itself in the fact that we leave our house, one muggy Summer, and walk barefoot across America, to try and make people see things our way, even when we are just one person, and the work that we have to do requires many.

We Are Haunted By The Ways We Could Be Better

The possible world theory was developed by the philosopher David Lewis, a bearded, friendly looking man who took the idea that there exist other alternative universes very seriously. For Lewis, every sentence that expresses a possibility — “it might rain tomorrow”, “people might care if I walk barefoot across America”, “my lover might call me on the telephone” — expresses the existence of a possible world. There are infinite numbers of possible worlds; any way that you think things could be, exists, not in some abstract sense, but in a deeply real one.

These possible worlds can be more or less similar to the actual one. There can be a possible world where everyone walks on their hands. There can be a possible world where everyone but you continues to exist, and you flicker out, into the ether. When a possible world is similar to ours, we say it is “close” to us. When it is dissimilar to ours, we say it is far away.

Some people are more alive to possible worlds than others.

Often, I think, this closeness can be haunting. It is a kind of ghost. If there is a possible world much like our own, it feels actualisable. But just because it could be actualised, it doesn’t mean that it will be. These possible worlds can feel tantalisingly close, but still far away. We could choose to stop propping up the systematic cruelty that is known as the factory farming industry. We could choose to move away from coal-mining, and burning the fuel that will put an end date on human existence. That is not outside the realm of possibility. But it is not our world.

Some people are more alive to possible worlds than others. Mark Baumer, I think, was someone who was very alive to possible worlds. He understood that everything about the way we choose to live is contingent — that we could, at any point, upend our existences and live better, more in accordance with the natural world, less greedily. These possible worlds seemed to him to be very close; close enough that one man walking across America could bring them into being.

One of the ways that we can choose to live is either by re-asserting the actual world, or by striving towards a possible one. We can either take the way things are, or we can act as though we are already living in the world in which what we want to pass has passed. Baumer lived between these two worlds. He was both acutely aware of human horror, how real it was, and convinced that one could live as though that horror doesn’t exist. “I Guess I Just Want Something,” one of Baumer’s poems reads. “I Don’t Know It’s An Abstract Feeling.”

Mark Baumer Did Something When He Could Have Done Nothing

The last vlog that Mark Baumer uploaded to his YouTube channel is a chronicle of his hundredth day spent walking across America barefoot. It is, like all of Baumer’s blogs, a freewheeling, absurdist deconstruction of the world around him. “Taco World is closed today!” Baumer bellows at one point. In another, he harangues a bunch of golfers. “Come on,” he says. “Do some sports. Do your sports.” He stops by a gas pipeline. “The language of capitalism,” he says, quietly, mostly to himself.

Baumer had an unnaturally good eye for the little things. He noticed parts of the world that other people did not notice. If he had a worldview, it was disseminated like this: in miniature beauties, in almost imperceptible torments. His poetry, like his vlogs, makes the ordinary feel imbued with something special, something potent. “People Will Always Still Yell,” he wrote. “Earth Is Probably More Crowded Than It Was Earlier When We Were Here.”

His philosophy was simple — pay attention, leave no trace, move slowly. He was the living embodiment of that Philip Larkin verse, ‘The Mower’, in which the poet accidentally kills a hedgehog. “I had seen it before, and even fed it, once,” Larkin laments. “Burial was no help. Next morning I got up and it did not. / The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same; we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.”

Baumer was painfully aware that there was not much time. He wanted to do everything, to taste it all, to fashion the world into a happier, better shape. But he had to make decisions, every single day, about how he would spend that time. When he spent time on himself, when he wrote his books, or spent a day in a motel, soothing his pained feet, he had the distinct sense that he was wasting his life. He wanted change, even when he knew that change was not possible; that the world was immovable, that his desires were tiny compared to the vast weight of a system that kept people in bondage.

In the final seconds of Baumer’s last vlog, he walks down the road, wearing a hi-vis vest, the pitch-black night soaking around him. “Your ignorance is killing people,” he shouts. He is not shouting to anyone. There is no one around. He is just shouting. The next day, just after noon, an SUV veered off the road and struck him dead.

Following his passing, Baumer’s life was memorialised in a handful of tributes, scattered across the internet. His friend, Blake Butler, quoted by The New Yorker, heralded Mark’s unserious, joyously ridiculous form of advocacy. “Activism can be so self-serious,” Butler said. “But Mark had no fear, and he pushed everything toward ridiculousness.” There is a film about Baumer, Barefoot, a documentary cut together from his vlogs, and featuring loving tributes from those who knew him best. His family started a charity in his name, The Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund, committed to carrying out his work. “The Mark Baumer Sustainability Fund will honour Mark and help cultivate traits that were part of Mark’s philosophy of life — love, kindness, and taking a direct role in building a better world,” reads the charity’s website.

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer has a theory known as “the most good you can do.” None of us are saints. We will not be able to live our values out perfectly. The world gets in the way. There is too much complexity in the human heart; too much noise. The best we can hope for is to strive towards a goal of total kindness, total care. We will never reach it. But we can try. Time and time again, we can try.

And Then?

What is perhaps most important of all is what happens next. Mark Baumer knew that. You read the news. Things look bad out there. Maybe you have a coffee next to you. You take a sip of it. “Oh,” you think to yourself. On the street, it is raining. The weather is getting wilder these days. You know that it will get wilder still. What is required of you? Maybe nothing. Maybe, even still, you should try. Maybe you should walk across America barefoot. Maybe you should self-publish many books.

I wrote this article sitting on my balcony. It was raining. I had one of Baumer’s YouTube videos open. My neighbour, who is friendly, crossed the street with her dogs. “What are you watching?” she called up. “Mark Baumer,” I said. “He was this guy who wanted to change the world.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “Did he?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Tall order, perhaps.” And then she turned away and started walking up the street.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.