It’s hard to keep track of Geoff Wilson’s “how I cheated death” stories for the simple fact there are so many.

There was the murderous, rampaging bull elephant that cornered him after he stumbled on the bleached bones of an elephant graveyard in Kenya.

There was the 300kg grizzly bear that chased down his inflatable kayak in Alaska as he fumbled for the flare gun strapped to his chest. The frothing, salivating beast got so close he copped a face full of its fetid breath.

He still has no idea why the animal abruptly halted its charge, stood upright in the river and let its dinner get away on the current.

There was the time Wilson took a wrong turn while traversing Antarctica and wound up on dangerously thin, unmapped ice, praying he wouldn’t be swallowed by one of the yawning crevasses all around him.

The catalogue of close calls goes on and on.

Life-threatening polar storms. Running out of water halfway through one of three attempts to cross the punishing parallel dunes of Australia’s Simpson Desert.

Fatigue so crippling he feared he would perish after summitting Dome Argus – the highest point of the Antarctic plateau. That time he even called his wife Sarah on a satellite phone, telling her: “I’m going to die of exposure out here.

“I said ‘I can’t go forward, I can’t go back, I’m out of range for retrieval.”

She gently challenged him: “So, what are you telling me? You’re not coming home? You’ve given up?” She firmly told him to double his calories and get some sleep to reset his nervous system.

Wilson is sure her words saved him.

“I had broken down physically, mentally, emotionally. It was the closest to the flame that I’d ever flown. I don’t want to do that again.”

With that in mind, Wilson’s next adventure – a two-year, seven-leg odyssey focused on climate change – will be relatively sedate, at least by his standards.

He and his adult son Kitale will be green-powering their way into some of the world’s most hostile places: the Arctic Circle, the South Pole, Patagonia’s melting icefields and the remote Norwegian archipelago with the world’s highest density of polar bears.

They’ll be getting there the hard way, under sail, on foot, on skis and via kite-power.

But in Wilson’s world, that adds up to more of “an uncomfortable journey, rather than a horrendously, difficult, dangerous one”.

World-class, remote communications systems are part of the safety net aboard the Nanook X, the steel-hulled sailing vessel Wilson says is literally the flagship for a new era of net-zero adventure and exploration.

It has wind, solar and hydro power generators and three Tesla’s worth of lithium batteries under the floorboards.

And if all goes according to plan, Project Zero odyssey will be live-streamed, as Wilson, Kitale, first mate Alistair Burton and drone pilot and sailor Jordy Pearson make their way around the world.

Kitale is a filmmaker and photographer and the 22-year-old will document how climate change is damaging the planet’s wildest places.

Project Zero is far from his first adventure with his father, who presents as equal parts Ernest Shackleton, Alby Mangels and the unkillable John McClane from the Die Hard movies.

Kitale was also on the Koyukuk River in Alaska when that grizzly bear decided his dad looked tasty. And he was there, as a young boy, to observe the first unsuccessful crack at the Simpson Desert.

He says his father’s extraordinary pursuits have taught him many things, including to be infinitely curious and to never take no for an answer.

In the climate change context, that means fighting against any sense of doom and powerlessness, by sharing stories that will mobilise the kind of dramatic action the world needs to take.

Project Zero begins on August 13, when the Nanook X leaves the Gold Coast bound for Patagonia at the southern tip of South America.

With a live-stream camera fixed to the mast and another in the galley, followers will be along for the ride.

“I just hope the boys can remember to put pants on,” Wilson laughs.

Wilson and his son will officially launch the expedition at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney on Thursday.

– AAP