Ronnie Polaneczky: A Goodman hikes for our sins, and future

WHEN I TALK to Ray Goodman, I realize what a piddling environmentalist I am.

Yeah, I recycle paper and plastic, and I try not to drive more than I should.

But my carbon footprint - the environmental impact that each of us makes upon the world - is still Sasquatch-sized and damaging to Earth's ozone layer.

Ray, on the other hand, is on a quest to diminish his footprint to an imperceptible depression.

He got rid of his Pontiac Grand-Am, his Nissan pickup and his Grady-White fishing boat. He has given away all but a backpack's worth of his material possessions to a charity.

And today he will stride toward the horizon on a two-year, 10,000-mile walk around America, to visit our homeland's more glorious, fascinating and environmentally vulnerable sites.

In the process, he wants to raise $2 million for the Sierra Club and to put Philly on the map as being serious about green issues.

The Daily News aims to give him some help.

Here's a little background about Ray, 38. He lives in Lansdowne. He's single, childless and a rabid Philly sports fan.

Oh, and he's spent much of his adult life playing a professional form of "Gotcha!"

"I was a repo man for Wells Fargo, and I did judgment enforcement for an attorney," he said. "I spent a lot of time taking stuff from people."

He felt bad about that, and saddened by the view it gave him into America's obsession with material acquisitions, an obsession he shared: You don't own a car, a truck and a boat unless you like your things.

Gradually, he realized that he needed a reboot about what matters. He took a leave from his job and set off, 14 months ago, on a seven-month, 2,300-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail.

He was going to travel light, and he wanted his life to be light when he returned. So he gave away his vehicles and other weighty possessions in preparation for the pared-down life to which he hoped to return.

The trip, through a landscape of rough and breathtaking beauty, was a revelation. He marveled at how little he needed to survive and by how abundantly the wilderness accommodated those needs.

And, wonderfully, he found that the kindness of strangers more than filled the human need for meaning that many of us fill with stuff - stuff that ravages the land in its making and only ends up in landfills, anyway.

He returned to Philly hell-bent on having us experience the life-altering revelations he'd had.

But how?

"Not everyone can leave their life the way I did," he said. "But unless you see the natural beauty of this country, you don't know what's at stake if we don't take care of the environment."

If he wanted us to go where he'd been, he'd have to figure out how to take us there himself.
 
Thus begins "Ray's Hike for the Sierra Club" - a 10,000-mile trek to 20 national landmarks. Ray will chronicle his sojourn in journal entries and photographs that he'll upload to his Facebook page every few days at public libraries whose locations he has meticulously plotted in his itinerary.

Along his self-funded trip, he will urge those he meets to support the Sierra Club and its philosophy that great change comes from incremental steps:

If we all reduce our carbon footprint by 2 percent per year, over time we'll reverse the damage we've done to the planet.

Among the places that Ray will hunker down in and explore are the Yellowstone, Death Valley and Bryce Canyon National Parks. And the Great Smokies, Mount Rushmore and the Columbia River Gorge.

I've asked Ray to post entries on the Daily News' green blog, "Earth to Philly." The one I can't wait to read will be about the Havasupai, a Native American tribe and the only permanent inhabitants in the Grand Canyon, where they've lived for more than 800 years - and where the mail still arrives by mule.

"This is the most exciting thing I've ever done in my lfie," said Ray yesterday, hours before departing on a 500-mile hike down the Appalachian Trail to Damascus, Va., where his trek officially begins on May 18.

"People have said this hike will be a sacrifice. It doesn't feel like a sacrifice. This is the foundation of who I am."

Bon voyage, Ray. Stay safe, and help get us green. *

Look for posts from Ray Goodman on "Earth to Philly" starting May 18.

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217.

For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/polaneczky.

Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ronnieblog.