Jon Turk describes his message as “simple to express and difficult, maybe impossible, to realize”. But he wants to lay it on you anyway.

The 74-year-old adventurer-author arrives at the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival on Tuesday (February 26) with a presentation, Deep Wild and Modern Tribalism. His event examines how the innate human orientation toward storytelling and myth, which he observed among the Samburu people of Kenya—“relatively as close to Stone Age tribalism as you can get,” he tells the Georgia Straight during a boisterous call from his winter home in Fernie, B.C.—has been seized and used against us, saddling 21st-century humanity with the foundational delusions of infinite growth and technological and civilizational progress.

“We see 5,000 ads per day, 300 an hour, five a minute,” Turk says. “Each of those is a story. My point is that storytelling is so deeply ingrained in our DNA that we can’t get rid of it. But if we recognize who’s trying to manipulate us and why, we have then, maybe, a chance of not being manipulated.”

In short, Turk’s position sounds like Roland Barthes jumbled together with Joseph Campbell, Eckhart Tolle (whom Turk admires very much), and maybe a touch of George Carlin, although none of those guys ever mountain-biked across the Gobi Desert, paddled solo around Cape Horn, circumnavigated Ellesmere Island by kayak and ski, or visited “the otherworld” with a Siberian shaman—experiences described in a series of books Turk began publishing in the late ’90s. He’s certainly the only one of them ever recognized as one of National Geographic’s top 10 adventurers of the year, as Turk was in 2012.

His entire back story is remarkable, in fact. Born into the dawn of American postwar prosperity in 1945, Turk attended prep school in Connecticut with a certain George W. Bush—“I went as a scholarship kid; he went in as a privileged elite. We weren’t exactly buddies,” he deadpans—and hit New York’s folk-rock scene in the mid-’60s, where he ended up managing the band Spoken Word.

Turk laments not taking the Spoken Word to Monterey for the historic 1968 festival, although not too much. His path instead detoured to the University of Colorado, where he trained as an organic chemist before making the choice that would come to define his future.

“I was doing theoretical work in chemistry, in the quantum mechanical nature of molecules, very theoretical stuff, when I decided I wanted to spend my life outdoors and do high-end adventuring,” he says. “I could have followed the [Grateful] Dead or I could have jumped in a canoe and floated down the Mackenzie River and turned left and on into the mountains. And I picked the canoe.”

He’s still in the canoe. Even on the phone, he projects the playful demeanour of a hippie-era boomer who took the fashionable route back to the land but never left. And that still wasn’t enough.

“I took the mindset that I grew up with into my adventuring: strive, succeed, beat the odds, be smarter than the next guy, run farther, jump higher. ‘If I succeed at this, North Face will pick me up as an adventure athlete.’ And I very much lived that, even when I recognized I was going down the wrong path.”

Enter Moolynaut, the 96-year-old Koryak healer who reoriented Turk once again when a storm blew his kayak off course and into Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula in 1999. After some six years (on and off) chewing amanita mushrooms with his new guide, and the spirit raven she summoned for him—all of it described in his 2010 book, The Raven’s Gift—Turk was transformed. He was already in his 50s at that point.

When the Straight reaches him, Turk has just finished a day of backcountry exploration. “I’m getting old and the big adventures aren’t an option anymore,” he offers, “but my love of the wilderness is an option.” This niftily brings us to the profoundly simple yet very difficult solve that Turk proposes for the discontents we face as a species—a message that VIMFF’s audience is uniquely primed to hear.

“The wilderness is devoid of stories. It’s complex, it’s chaotic, it could kill you today. It’s beautiful, it touches your soul in a special way, and it brings you into the now. Even if you’re grumpy and in a bad mood and mad at your wife, mad at the Mexicans, mad at whoever, the wilderness will clean all that out of you. Wilderness is one way out of the storytelling world that is embracing but also dangerous. So one way of getting into the now is getting into the wilderness. That’s the message, plain and simple.”

Plain and simple, but also essential. And it probably couldn’t come in a more compelling, beguiling, or experienced package. Still, Turk says, “You’re not gonna get everybody to agree. Ultimately, a lot of it is: if you’re gonna reduce growth, which is the one central mythology, then you have to want less stuff. And people will agree with that in theory, but, ya know, the next sale at Walmart might change their minds.”

The Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival presents Jon Turk at the Rio Theatre on Tuesday (February 26)