It wasn’t too many years ago that a children’s book publisher, who shall rename nameless in order to protect her and her company, said to me in her office “kids today just aren’t into adventure.” To which I, having written a book for her for young adults about a very amazing adventure, took umbrage.

“I couldn’t disagree more,” I said. “It’s not that they are not ‘into’ adventure. It’s that you don’t know how to get it in front of them.” What she was responding to, I think, was that when you go into the big chain bookstores there is no “Adventure” section, unless it’s something spilled over from the sci-fi aisles. But that doesn’t mean kids aren’t into adventure, not at all.

My experience, as a National Geographic-funded writer, filmmaker and adventurer, is that when I show kids K-12 my images from around the world — snowcapped volcanoes afloat on the Bering Sea, tens of thousands of penguins running along Antarctic beaches, sea kayaks ducking into nooks and crannies on coastlines around the world — they sit up. And ask questions long past the time their teachers would like them to move on. Contrary to my book publisher friend, I think real adventure turns kids on. Granted, they most often want to know how you go to the bathroom in polar weather, if we’ve ever had run-ins with sharks or how often we end up tipped over and outside of our kayaks, but they pay attention.

When I was growing up my favorite readings were “Boys Life” magazine, the Hardy Boy’s book series and anything, everything by Jack London. It was very interesting as my passion for reading and writing — which I picked up young, I somehow knew at fifteen that I wanted to be a writer — turned into an adventuring career how many men I met around the world had read exactly the same. In the late 1980s I was involved in an international dog-sledding expedition across Antarctica. The team members were from Japan, China, Russia, France, England and the United States. And each one of them had been intense Jack London fans when they were young. The Japanese and Russian men said they had specifically chosen lives of polar exploration because of London and his tough, romantic stories of cold and survival.

Today it’s true that a lot of young boys and girls have less access to nature, thus maybe less familiarity with lives lead in the great outdoors. But I am convinced that if you take any young person into nature, even the biggest young couch potato you can imagine, they will come away with stories for life.

Which is why I keep bringing my stories of modern-day adventure into classrooms around the country. As a way to show kids the world, but also as a living, breathing example of someone who has a made a life choice or career our of adventure. I don’t do what I do because I’m good at starting fires out of rotting leaves; I have created this life because I’m a skilled story teller, happy to share and able to inspire by example.