Though he’s often found far from his Toronto home, enjoying—or enduring— hyperbolic outdoor adventures, today, Mario Rigby is excited about what happened right nearby, at the harbourfront.

Rigby, a world-renowned eco-explorer, was about to take an afternoon kayak trip when he was approached by a young Black man, he explains. Baggy clothes, hip-hop style, inquisitive look on his face. Rigby explained what he was doing and watched the man’s face light up. “The dude looks at me and says, Are you serious: whenever you want, you just ride your bike to the dock, get your kayak, and go for a little ride?” recalls Rigby. “‘You just wake up and decide to go off on an adventure? Wow, mad respect for you, bro!”

And that’s his off-day. Raised in Germany, Rigby competed in track and field for his native Turks and Caicos after moving to Ontario at 16. Recently, he’s made a name for himself with stunt-worthy, single-man voyages such as Crossing Africa, his two-year, 12,000km trip (by foot and kayak) from Cape Town to Cairo, and cycling from Victoria, BC, to St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The journeys aren’t driven by ego, but by Rigby’s twin desires to promote the inclusion of BIPOC individuals in the outdoors and to call attention to environmental and sustainability issues.

Rigby considers himself “the face of a new kind of explorer,” and compared to the rugged, white, beaded explorers of yore, he doesn’t look the part. He looks better. With a superhero’s build, an unstoppably charismatic smile, and elegant ideas, eloquently put, there’s a reason brands are lining up to outfit him.

“I keep it simple because I’m focusing on the adventure, but style is important to me. I wear a lot of organic materials, things that are versatile enough to wear out or relax in,” he says. “To me it’s the small, subtle things that make it fashionable.”

Getting more people of colour outdoors, as Rigby sees it, is essential to making climate change action. “There’s no social justice without environmental justice,” he explains, citing the taking of land from indigenous peoples, to deforest it, thereby exacerbating the effects of climate change—and its impacts on displaced communities. “The more we diversify outdoor space, the more people collectively around the world will be interested in becoming caretakers of our planet,” he says.

In a few weeks he leaves for Durban to dive into an enormous yearly sardine migration that attracts bigger fish, birds, and, yes, sharks in the world’s most extraordinary feeding frenzy. You’ll find Rigby and a female filmmaker friend in the water, too.