Mark Evans, MBE, is a British explorer, field guide, author, and wilderness advocate whose work has taken him to the Arctic and the desert but has recently focused on Oman and the Arabian Peninsula. From camel trekking across the desert to kayaking the Omani coast, Evans’ work highlights building cultural bridges and advocating for the oceans, ecosystems, and planet. We spoke with Evans before his visit to Penn State on Oct. 6-8, 2025, which included a Sustainability Showcase keynote talk. Evans’ visit was sponsored by Sustain Penn State; the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Management (RPTM); College of Health and Human Development; Cooke Endowment; and Penn State Global.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your work expands the understanding of two regions that are often misrepresented: the desert and the Middle East. What sort of perceptual shifts have people revealed to you after encountering your work?

The thing that really springs to mind is a journey we made 10 years ago, when we retraced the first ever crossing of the biggest sand desert on Earth. In English language, we call it the empty quarter. In Arabic, it’s called the Rubʿ al-Khali. It hadn’t been crossed for 85 years, and one reason why I wanted to do that journey was not just to retrace someone’s 85-year-old footsteps, but also to spotlight a part of the world that has meant so much to me, and that I have felt is so desperately misunderstood.

We were followed quite closely by The Times newspaper in London. And when it came to producing our book “Crossing the Empty Quarter: In the Footsteps of Bertram Thomas,” we managed to get King Charles to write a forward. When The Times wrote about the book, it said that the news is full of stories of adventures involving mountains, oceans, and jungle, but we hear very little of the desert. And also, that they particularly enjoyed following our journey across the desert in that it showed there is more to the Middle East than blood, sweat, and oil. I liked that.

I’d lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 90s, when it was quite a tough place to live, socially, especially for single women. It’s a total 180-degree change today. It’s just extraordinary, the transformation. But even then, I really loved it, because I made an effort to get out of the city on weekends and meet the real people, meet the Bedouin people, and the hospitality was just incredible.

When I came back to the UK, I saw a letter from Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London that was published in all the big national daily newspapers in Britain: The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times. Saudi was taking a real bashing at the time in the media, and the ambassador in London was an extraordinary man, absolutely lovely and so smart.

And he said, please stop bashing us over our heads. We are moving forward at a pace that is respectful to our culture.

I wrote him a letter to say, Your Royal Highness, I thought your letter was absolutely fantastic. By the way, not everyone in Britain has a negative viewpoint of Arabia. I’ve just come back from four very happy years in your country.

And he made the mistake of inviting me for coffee at the embassy whenever I visited London. [laughs] So I took him up on that. About a month later, I was having coffee with this extraordinary man, and he said, what can we do to change people’s misperceptions of Arabia? And we came up with the idea of the University of the Desert: groups of young people sitting around the fire, as people had done for thousands of years.

It’s hard to measure changes in people’s thinking. All I can do is be the vehicle to try and share what I think is the most magical part of the world.

How do you think that some of the tenets of the University of the Desert could be integrated into current education?

I think that’s where the outdoor element comes in. I spoke at a school called Gordonstoun last week. Kurt Hahn, Gordonstoun’s founder, died about 40 years ago. But what a legacy he left, because 40 years after his death, there are more than 1 million young people around the world every year benefiting from his vision and other educational institutions he founded like Outward Bound.

He spoke about the ails of youth, and the social challenges that young people faced in the late 1930s and early 1940s. One of those was something he called spectatoritis, which I’d never heard of. But I love it, because I think there’s even more spectatoritis today than there’s ever been—people sitting down, just watching other people do things. And that is the challenge.

Another thing that Hahn concluded in his educational musings was the need for reflection—the need to take time out to make sense of everything.

The last day of the five-day University of the Desert course is all about how participants will use the experience to step up and make a difference. Because if all they do is go back and show images on their Facebook page or Instagram, we chose the wrong person. We want future opinion formers, which is why selecting the young people who participate is the most critical point of the whole process.

What would your message be for the student who is deeply inspired by you, who really wants to work toward building a more sustainable world, and then wonders, well, how do I get started? These days, you are having conversations with leaders of countries. What were you doing when you were 19 or 20 to put you on the path that led you here?

I didn’t dream I’d be doing what I’m doing right now. But my message would be that it’s all about seeing the opportunity that’s around you.

There’s nothing special about me. I just scraped through school. I would get on the school bus in sight of my parents, and as soon as it was around the corner, I would get off the bus, go climbing in the hills all day, and get back on when it came back to the village. I was a teacher’s worst nightmare, but I was just about smart enough to sail through by the seat of my pants. I didn’t go to a very good university, but eventually, I found a career that I liked, which was teaching. I went into that for all the wrong reasons—it gave me a reasonable salary, but also lots of time off, so I could continue my exploring and expeditions. Because that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to be outdoors.

When I was a young boy, I was rudderless, really, without any direction. But when I was 17, I remember sitting in the back row at a school assembly, probably doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, and I just happened to hear one of the teachers speak about a small charity in London going to the Arctic for six weeks that summer to do scientific research. The sun will never set, you’ll be sharing a tent with two people you’ve never met, you’ll be walking on glaciers … Suddenly, a light bulb came on. For the first time, really, I thought, “Whoa, I want to do that.” So I went to London—first time I’d ever been to London in my life, when I was 17, in my brother’s suit, which didn’t fit particularly well.

They asked me questions, none of which I could answer. So I went home on the train, convinced that I wasn’t going to get the opportunity to go on this expedition. But they saw someone who couldn’t contribute very much, but who could benefit hugely.

And boy, did I benefit hugely. And again: it was about opportunity. There were 200 boys in that assembly, but not many of us grabbed one of the information sheets at the end.

It’s the same as the letter to the ambassador—there’s a thread of seeing the opportunity and just having the determination to make something happen. And we’ve all got it in us; we just need to have a bit of self-confidence to take that step.

It’s just like climbing Everest. I might be hanging out with ambassadors and world leaders today, but it certainly hasn’t always been that way. And you don’t climb Everest tomorrow. You go to the Alps or the Rockies first, then you go to Denali, or to Kilimanjaro, and then you might have a go at Everest. It’s the same in my world, too. That learning by apprenticeship.

Much of how you share your experiences with the world involves being connected in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even 15 years ago. How do you feel about podcasting and social media when you are in remote areas that might otherwise lend themselves well to solitude? How do you create boundaries that allow you to reflect, despite a very public persona?

You can always find time in your day, if you want to. I try and start every day with a stomp up the local hill. I’m 30 minutes up and 30 minutes down, and that’s my thinking time. And there are always gaps. You don’t need to go to the desert to find space to reflect. At Penn State, you have Shavers Creek. You can just sit by a tree, listening to nature for 10 or 15 minutes. It’s good for the soul.

There’s a great book on the bookshelf behind me that I really love, written by an American guy called Sam Wright. Sam was very successful in California. He went to the Brooks Range in Alaska, built himself a log cabin, and lived there. And he would periodically travel back to California and lecture about his time living in the wilderness of Alaska.

People would ask, “Gosh, Sam, isn’t it dangerous?” And he’d say, “Well, no. But I got in a taxi today in LA, and I couldn’t speak to the driver because he was behind two panes of bulletproof glass, and then I got on a bus, and I couldn’t push my money through because the driver was sealed off, and …”

Then they would ask where, exactly, he lived in the Brooks Range. And he’d reply, “I live in a place called Koviashuvik.” They’d ask whereabouts in Alaska it was, and he’d say, “Well, it was here yesterday.”

And you could see the journalists in the front row chewing their pencils, thinking, What? I thought he said he lived in Alaska. And he’d continue, “And this morning, it was in the park, just outside where we’re speaking right now.”

This was totally beyond your average journalist, and they’d say, “Sam, what are you talking about?” And he’d reply, “Well, Koviashuvik is Inuktut for living in the present moment with quiet joy and happiness.”

So Koviashuvik is a concept, and we all carry it with us. And I would say, if you are in a life where you can’t have at least one little moment—and it might only need to last for 60 seconds a day—then you need to change direction, because it’s not difficult to find that.

I’m a great believer in making the most of where you are, because we’re surrounded by magical places and people. For me today, Koviashuvik was in a coffee shop with an incredible person who I find amazingly inspiring. It doesn’t always have to be outdoors.

What do you love about being an explorer at this point in human history? What excites you about the moment we’re in right now?

We just followed a journey this year that I’ll be speaking about at Penn State. That original journey happened 93 years ago. No one knew where this man was for 47 days. He had no way of communicating with the outside world. It’s very different today.

What excites me about the changing role of explorers is that increasingly, they have a really important role to play in communication. Most of us accept that climate change is happening, so the challenge is not to gather more data to prove what we know. The challenge is trying to change people’s behavior.

That is where I think there’s such value in unique projects like ours. And I use unique, not in the sense of better, but just different. It catches the attention of people, and young people in particular. So what excites me about expeditions and exploration today is that ability to communicate—to get an idea inside the mind of young people, and to engage and inspire.

And again, you could let that need to be communicating dominate your whole day when you’re trying to ride your camel and walk, but you don’t. During the day, I want to be clinging to the back of my camel to make sure I don’t fall off. I want to enjoy the landscape that I’m passing through. I want to talk to the people that I meet that I’ve never met in my life.

But as soon as we finish, just when that sun’s about to go down, that is the communications hour. We’ll upload the image of the day and record a quick podcast, and that only takes 15 or 16 minutes. We’ll do our social media posts, and sometimes, if we can get a signal, we’ll go to the top of the nearest hill to talk to several sustainability students at Penn State on Zoom from the middle of the desert. And that’s it.

You can control it, and it’s a great tool. There are many negatives to social media and all that stuff, no doubt about it. But there are huge positives as well.

It’s refreshing that you don’t seem to have a sense of perfectionism about it. That approach could also be freeing for a lot of students who long to share their experiences but feel like they need to cultivate this perfect identity.

Sometimes the best you can do is good enough. I wasted so many years of my school life trying to be like other people. And eventually, the penny dropped that, you know what, you are who you are. So just get on with it—flaws and good bits and bad bits and all. Just live your life and do the best you can.

In the high-pressure, fast-track world that we have, perfection is harder and harder to find, and if you chase it, you’ll just grind yourself into the ground.

I asked [British author and leadership expert] Jo Owen a question recently about resilience. In my naivete, I felt that people of the era that I read about—Captain Scott and Shackleton and all these great explorers, these indestructible people—surely they were more resilient than you and me today, and this so-called “snowflake” generation.

And Jo said absolutely not. In their era, they lived in a world of certainty. In the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, you had a job for life, you went to church on a Sunday, it was fish and chips on a Friday, that was it. You were surrounded by security and constancy.

Today, we live in a world of absolute dynamism. It never stops, and yet young people have to navigate a way through this. So, Jo’s argument is that young people are so much better at being aware of and adapting to what’s going on around them. If you were to take Shackleton from the 1920s and plonk him into today’s world, he’d be an abject failure.

That’s a compelling thought. It can be quite tiresome to hear negative generalizations about younger generations.

I sat in a brilliant lecture in London recently, and Prince William said that the generation born today is the first one born with not just the knowledge of the issues, but also the tools to solve them. It’s just a matter of will to take that step forward. And this is the first generation to be born into a world where the solutions are there to address the problems.

Which means that people my age, we can just put our feet up and leave it. [laughs] Everything’s under control.

As part of their participation in the University of the Desert, you have asked students what three things are most important to them. So, Mark, what are the three things that are most important to you?

Blimey. That’s a good question. Well, I’m just going to buy myself a bit of thinking time here by talking about the things they came up with. Their only rule was, forget about your flat-screen TV, your car, etc. What are the things that are really most important to you as an individual?

Eighteen people from 17 different nations—Iran, Iraq, Yemen, the U.S., Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, South Africa, and others—were asked to come up with three things. So, you could have 54 different responses.

But the list ended up really only being education, health, family, friendship, and happiness.

And for me, I can whittle it down to one. During one of my favorite projects, we spent an entire year living in a Lappish reindeer tent. That year included four months of total darkness, because we were only 500 miles from the North Pole, off the north coast of Norway. For the first four months, we had a group of young people with us. They left just before Christmas, and then there were just two of us and two dogs to protect us from polar bears for three months of total darkness. And then another group of students came out in March when the sun had reappeared.

During those three months of total darkness, my buddy and I slept in this wigwam tent, and whatever temperature it was outside, it was inside. It was freezing cold, and every night we had a little pressure lamp that would burn for about 40 minutes. So every night, one of us would read a chapter of a book, and the other could lie in their sleeping bag, nice and warm, and just listen.

But there came a point when we ran out of books. So we had to start having deep and meaningful conversations in this total darkness.

And I remember one night, this voice came out of the darkness. He said, “Well, what’s life all about, then?”

And I thought, Oh, blimey. So I pondered for a minute, and then I said, “It’s about contentment. Just being happy with your lot. That, for me, is what life is all about.”

I am reasonably content. I would never say I’m totally content, because I always want to do stuff to make people think a bit more about things that matter to me. But the fact that I’m able to do that gives me great contentment.