We Chat With Explorer Alastair Humphreys About How Adventure & Purpose Collide

The man, the myth, the microadventure founder. Explorer Bea Jeavons recently sat down with Alastair Humphreys, to unpick how adventure and purpose intersect in his life, and how we can bring it into our own.

Global Explorer, Alastair Humphreys, has travelled far away from home for most of his adventuring career – from riding his bike around the world to rowing across the Atlantic. He was even gloried as National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year in 2012.

But as he learnt more about the climate crisis and the impact of travelling far afield, Alastair changed how he adventures.

Alastair has traded sailing across oceans, and biking across deserts for microadventures closer to home

In an effort to protect the very places he loves to explore, and in an effort to cut down on foreign travel, Alastair spent a year exploring the Ordnance Survey map around his home in the southeast corner of England. One grid square at a time. It’s an unassuming landscape, but Alastair finds being relentlessly curious teaches him more about the natural world than all his years in remote environments.

Despite being in boggy old England, this adventure provided one of the most exciting and mind-opening years of his life. His brilliant book Local, is his journal, blending lyrical writing, factoids, and passionate argument, as well as a call to readers to do the same where they live.

I caught up with Alastair to chat about how adventure meets purpose and how our greatest adventure yet might be right on our doorstep.

Taking a break on a Greenland ice cap, training for a Polar expedition

BJ: I want to start with a life-changing moment – you in a red tent on a mountain somewhere in Greenland.  Can you tell us more about that pivotal moment and how it changed the way you explore? 

AH: For years, I had an energetic and enthusiastic appetite to go everywhere, see everything, do everything, and to fill every single minute of my life with stuff that felt exciting and meaningful for me. It was brilliant fun and a very privileged lifestyle, and I absolutely loved it.

But it’s a pretty selfish and solo lifestyle too.

Out on the ice cap in Greenland, training for a South Pole expedition with two friends, I realised the incompatibility, for me, of continuing this brilliantly exciting existence whilst also trying to be a good and present husband and father.

I realised then that it was time to pivot to microadventures, to start seeking short, simple, local, affordable adventures close to home that were compatible with real life.

Adventure can be just as isolating as it is inspiring

BJ: What do you think are the key ingredients to a great outdoor experience or adventure?

AH: Well, camping on a glorious ice cap in Greenland with two fantastic friends on an epic adventure certainly contains the ingredients of a great outdoor experience.

But we can’t all be doing that sort of stuff every day.

And to be frank, if we do all keep flying off to enjoy Greenland ice caps for our adventures, then there aren’t going to be any ice caps left.

Alastair’s route around the world | While Alastair has ridden across the world, he acknowledges it’s not the size, distance, or location of the adventure that counts

A lot of time has passed since then, and my opinions on outdoor experiences have evolved and broadened, so I now think a great experience is more about your attitude than your geography. It’s about curiosity, enthusiasm, and gratitude for the experience you’re having, rather than jealousy if someone on Instagram seems to be having a ‘better’ experience than you.

Toss in a little bit of discomfort, uncertainty about the outcome, and the need to work hard to get to the finish line, and you’re turning an outdoor experience into a nice adventure. Chuck in a bit of purpose to make it a project that actually has meaning and use to the universe, rather than just yourself, and you’ve ticked all the boxes, I think.

BJ – What’s a microadventure, and how do they make the outdoors more accessible?

AH: Once I pivoted from trying to do the biggest, toughest, hardest expeditions out there, I started trying to find ways to get my adventurous kicks, my time in the outdoors, and my fresh air in ways that were much more compatible with real life. And of course, this applies to 99% of us. We all have constraints on our time, on our money, on our expertise, on our equipment, and on our geography. We don’t all get to live in a log cabin in the Alaskan wilderness.

What I’ve been trying to do with microadventures is to encourage people to look for the opportunities for adventure all around them, rather than being limited by the constraints. If you’ve only got 48 hours free, go and do something in that time. But if you’ve only got 24 hours or 12 hours, then you can still find something exciting, challenging, invigorating, or relaxing to do.

Look for the opportunities. For example, if you’re tied down by your nine-to-five job, don’t think that there’s no potential to have any adventures. Instead, ask yourself, what can you do from the five-to-nine? When you finish work at five o’clock in the evening, why don’t you head out of town, sleep on a hill for the night underneath the stars, turn off your phone, listen to the owls hooting, and then wake up in the morning when the sun is just rising and the birds are singing.

It’s amazing how quickly you’ll switch into adventure mode

You run down the hill, jump in a river – because jumping in a river is good for the soul – and get back ready for work at nine o’clock in the morning. You’ve squeezed a tiny burst of adventure and wildness into a working night. That’s the essence of a microadventure.

BJ: In the world we live in, it’s easy to feel the pull to explore ‘out there’. The temptations to travel away to far-off places to find adventure. Especially with social media feeding comparison.

You’ve written a whole book about staying ‘here’. Local (which has just been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize – congrats!) tells the story of how you fell in love with adventures right in your backyard. Can you tell us more about what you discovered during the year or exploring your local grid square? 

AH: Having spent so long travelling the world – literally travelling the world; I once spent four years cycling a lap of the planet – it felt quite a challenge to me to commit to spending a whole year exploring only the single map that I live on.

It was a lot less pressure than the round the world bike trip

The whole of Britain is covered by detailed maps, the kind of maps you’d use for a hiking expedition. Each one covers an area of about 20km by 20km, divided into individual 1km grid squares. I committed to spending a whole year exploring only this map by going out once a week to a randomly chosen single-kilometre grid square and attempting to see everything in that square – every patch of woodland, every footpath, every street, every road, every hill, every factory yard.

Whatever my random grid square offered, I was going to explore it with as much curiosity and enthusiasm as I could, searching for nearby nature and wildness and interesting, curious stuff.

As it turns out, there’s a lot to see

I was worried at the start that it was going to be claustrophobic, restrictive, limiting, and boring. But I soon realised that it’s very hard to see everything in a 1km square – I mean literally everything. If I explored one square each week for a year, I’d explore 52 squares. And yet my map has 20 by 20, equaling 400 grid squares. It would take me years to begin to see everything on my local map.

What this taught me was that you don’t need to travel all the way around the world to have an adventure. You just need to pay attention to what’s in your backyard, to focus again on the attitude of adventure rather than the geography.

If you pay enough attention, and you’re curious and enthusiastic enough, then perhaps a single map can become enough exploration for an entire lifetime.

And that’s not factoring in the special spots that you want to visit over and over again

BJ: Exploring your local map also opened your eyes to all sorts of amazing local initiatives focused on caring for people and the planet.  One of them was Knepp, the world-leading rewilding site in Sussex. What did you learn about rewilding? And where can rewilding and adventure come together? 

AH: During my year exploring my local surroundings – which are pretty unexciting, unremarkable fields, towns, highways, motorways, and railways just outside the big city of London – I became quite alarmed and depressed at the terrible state of the British countryside. But I also got enthusiastic and reassured by the potential and power of rewilding.

The best example for that in England is a place called Knepp, which is just an ordinary British farm. Twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t making any money, so the owners decided to just let it rewild, to go back to nature. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to do nothing for nature.

Twenty-five years later, it’s an extraordinary place filled with the sound of birdsong and the return of nature and wildness. It’s a really uplifting place.

There’s so much beauty out there, all we have to do is open our eyes and appreciate it

What this year of exploring my local map and also my microadventures has shown me is that you don’t need to jump on an airplane and fly across the world for a week-long exciting expedition.

I even spent four years cycling around the world, which was a brilliant adventure and very low-carbon – although we didn’t think of adventures in such terms back then; it just seemed good fun. But I suppose it’s proof that you can have an enormous and life-changing journey without having to wreck the wild places we love through endless flying around.

BJ: Your writing also focuses on advocating for stronger action on the climate and biodiversity crisis. What are your top tips for outdoorsy folk to reduce their impact on the environment and take broader climate action to protect the places we love to explore?  

AH: We great outdoors folk have a strong responsibility to share stories of our adventures in order to encourage other people to spend time in the outdoors, become connected to nature, and be inspired to take action.

Adventures are brilliant fun, of course, and I’ve been very lucky to enjoy so many. Although this sounds hypocritical of me to say, I feel now that adventures on their own are not enough.

This planet we love exploring so much needs our help so that future generations get to enjoy it too

If you’re a person who’s motivated and driven enough to plan and get out on adventures, you’re exactly the sort of person the planet needs to be motivated and driven enough to get on and fix the mess that we have sleepwalked into.

I really encourage anyone interested in the outdoors to try to add some purpose to their adventures as well. This can be as simple as leaving a positive trace when you go camping. We all think about leaving no trace, taking all our rubbish with us when we go home. But leaving a positive trace is a step further than that. It means that every time you go outdoors, you leave it a little bit better than you found it. You pick up litter and take it home. Making small positive changes like that’s important.

There’s a really good website called Take The Jump, which I encourage anyone to check out. It’s very applicable to those of us who love travel and adventure. It talks about ending clutter, flying less, and taking action to nudge the system.

Because that’s an important thing to remember: whilst it’s great if you don’t buy some superfluous gear or don’t go on one flight somewhere, it’s not going to fix the planet overall. That needs to happen at a higher policy level. So we should all pay attention to the proximity to power that we have. In what ways can we, as individuals, reach out to more important, powerful people or groups? The obvious way, of course, is to vote according to environmental conscience but also to write to your officials, talk to your bosses at work, and try to bring about change from the top down.

Helping the planet can feel like an uphill battle but every little bit counts

BJ:  What’s next for you, Alastair?

AH: I’m very much motivated to continue exploring locally and close to home. The two issues that really struck me from writing the book Local were shifting baseline syndrome and nature disconnection.

These sound a bit dry and academic, but I believe they’re vital to the problems we face. Shifting baseline syndrome is the way that, when you’re outdoors, you look around and it all looks nice and wild, and you don’t realise that when your parents or grandparents stood here as young people, it looked much wilder.

We accept a slowly degrading landscape.

Is this what it’s always looked like?

Nature disconnection is the problem of society being separated from wild places and therefore not caring or not realising how bad the situation is.

My challenge is to try to turn these fairly dry terms into an interesting book. Wish me luck.

What did I learn from Alastair Humphreys?

Catching up with Alastair provided a boost of inspiration to start looking for more bite-sized, light touch adventures everywhere, from boosting up a hill when I knock off from work to sleep under the stars, to being more curious to explore my local surroundings.

I highly recommend reading Alistair’s book Local (or one of his many other great books). I’ll leave you with a quote Alistair highlights from biologist and author David George Haskell that really stuck with me.

Next time you’re planning a trip, remember this and consider exploring your local surroundings. Make your focus attention fuelled by constant curiosity, rather than about the location. This kind of local microadventure won’t only be better for the planet but might just open up your mind, change your perspective, and have you falling in love with your own backyard and ways to protect it.

Go on, get on ya bike and see what’s around the corner

More Explorers Helping Our Planet

• WATCH: Meet the Woman Who Ran 150 Marathons in 150 Days To Protect Australia’s Wildlife
• WATCH: Tim Jarvis’ Largest Expedition Yet: Rewilding Australian Farmland
• This Surfer Turned Her Love of the Ocean into a Conservation Mission
• How Costa Del Mar Are Tackling Ocean Pollution