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Eco-activists and other crusaders often rely on high-profile stunts to generate funds and media buzz for their causes: dangling from smokestacks, chaining themselves to trees, dressing up as fuzzy mascots for “die-ins.”

Few campaigns, however, have been as oddball or as daring as the Above + Beyond expedition. This summer, Benjamin Jordan and Leonardo Silveira strapped lawnmower engines to their backs, leapt skyward and began to traverse British Columbia in flying machines that would've made the Wright brothers nervous. Their goal: to highlight the damage inflicted by loggers and mountain pine beetles.

The expedition is part of a trend among outdoor adventurers, who often devise and tackle epic challenges to promote a greater cause. Other Canadians who have taken their charity into the wild include Rob Dyke, who swam around Vancouver Island to raise money for water-safety programs; Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison, who have documented North America's endangered places and species on long-distance treks; and Greg Kolodziejzyk, who plans to “cycle” across the Atlantic in a pedal boat in 2009 to inspire kids to be more active.

The brainstorm for Above + Beyond came when Mr. Jordan, a 27-year-old Toronto-born commercial photographer now based in Nelson, B.C., was arguing about forestry issues with friends and realized he had little first-hand knowledge. Two summers earlier, he had skateboarded across the country with three buddies and raised more than $70,000 for breast cancer research. (One of the boarders' mothers had died of the disease.) The charitable focus of the journey, Mr. Jordan realized, deepened the entire experience.

“You've got to pick something you're passionate about,” he said on a recent stop in Williams Lake, B.C. “You need that to get through the hard times.” That's why the idea of an ultra-ultralight flight over British Columbia's beleaguered forests seemed a perfect marriage of personal adventure and public education.

Mr. Jordan teamed up with Mr. Silveira, a 30-year-old paraglider from Brazil and the founder of the sleep-for-free networking website CouchSurfing.com. On July 12, the two friends launched “paramotors” on loan from Nirvana, a Czech glider company, and began their journey, supported by a two-person ground crew who stay in touch using helmet radios. Each powered paraglider uses a two-stroke, 110 cc engine that rotates a metre-long, cage-encased carbon fibre propeller, can cruise at 50 kilometres an hour and makes the pilots look, in Mr. Jordan's words, like “mutated hornets.”

Mr. Jordan and Mr. Silveira have already been forced to downgrade their original goals several times. They ditched the idea of flying from Dawson City, Yukon, to Salmo, B.C., when liability concerns made outdoor festival organizers in both communities balk. On a scouting trip, the two fliers realized that safe landing spots were scarce in northern B.C., so they swapped the top-to-bottom route for a 2,000-kilometre dog-leg from Prince Rupert to Nelson.

Their original plan to scatter seeds – native, non-invasive alpine flowers, they insisted – didn't sit well with local ecologists, so they nixed the Johnny Appleseed shtick, too. Finally, the logistical challenge of the whole enterprise has waylaid any fundraising – they've been doing cross-promotion with the Sierra Club of B.C. – until after the final stop in early August. Instead, the high fliers are focusing on producing a bird's-eye documentary of the province's devastated forests and finessing the logistics for a cross-Canada flight next summer.

Mr. Jordan and Mr. Silveira's unusual mode of travel has at least made them celebrities wherever they've touched down. “Everybody loves these flying contraptions – it's right up there with UFOs,” Mr. Jordan said. “You definitely raise an eyebrow.”

The same can't be said for all charitable adventures. Fundraising peak-baggers and continent-crossers often discover that a trudge up Everest or an epic road trip is no longer enough to convince people to open their pocketbooks or reporters their steno pads.

In 1999, Kevin Thomson ran unsupported from his home in Vancouver to St. John's, pulling a rickshaw of supplies, purely for the adventure of it. Along the way, he encountered more than 100 people cycling coast to coast. Many were toughing it out for charity.

“Some of them were very upset that they weren't getting more exposure,” Mr. Thomson recalled. He even learned that one Prairie newspaper had a policy not to cover trans-Canada sojourners, no matter how noble the cause, because so many knocked at the newsroom door.

In 2001, Mr. Thomson tried (and failed) to row from Halifax to Vancouver with four fellow athletes in a vehicle whose unique design, he admitted, “is now laughable.” That summer, he also helped with the logistics of an inline skater who was crossing the country for muscular dystrophy – a trip that cost more money than it raised. As the principal behind the Creative Crossings Society of Canada, Mr. Thomson often advises continent-traversing philanthropists to chase their personal dreams but lower their fundraising expectations.

“It is an excellent way of understanding our diversity of terrain, climate, economies, people and culture,” he tells them. “It is, however, not a very powerful or effective way of raising money or media interest without some sort of hook or angle.”

The sky-high duo behind Above + Beyond definitely have a hook. And they've started to acquire sponsorship. (Earth Givers, a U.S. organization that arranges carbon offsets for football games, donated $4,000 to the B.C. trip.) Once this summer's flight is over, the two paramotorists hope to identify the ideal nationwide cause to motivate next summer's even bigger adventure.

“There's a lot of accountability and pressure when you're representing a charity. There's a lot of eyes on you,” Mr. Jordan said. “But I absolutely believe that without putting some meaning behind it, these things are not worth doing – it's just too darn selfish.”

Special to The Globe and Mail

David Leach is the author of Fatal Tide: When the Race of a Lifetime Goes Wrong (Viking Canada).

BIG TRIPS FOR BIG CHANGE

The men from Above + Beyond aren't the only Canadians taking on adventures with a philanthropic twist.

Rob Dyke: The former pro triathlete raised $150,000 for the Canadian Red Cross's water-safety programs by swimming 1,400 kilometres around Vancouver Island in 2005, after separating a shoulder in four-metre waves during an earlier attempt. Next up, he hopes to negotiate permission for the first swim of the Panama Canal in 50 years. islandaquathon.ca

Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison: To highlight threats to Canada's wild places through “necessary journeys,” this book-writing and filmmaking couple hiked the length of the Rockies, trailed the Porcupine caribou herd through Yukon and Alaska and most recently canoed across Canada with their two-year-old son to meet enviro-hero Farley Mowat. beingcaribou.com

Sébastien Sasseville: In May, the 28-year-old Vancouver mountaineer became the first Canadian with Type 1 diabetes to summit Mount Everest, part of a multipeak campaign to raise $100,000 for research into the disease. sebinspires.com

Greg Kolodziejzyk: The Alberta-based software entrepreneur and multiple Ironman finisher has set two human-powered vehicle records and plans to cycle 4,500 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, in a torpedo-shaped pedal boat to combat childhood obesity.pedaltheocean.com

Ray Zahab: The uber-marathoner from Ottawa has knocked off almost every long-distance race on the planet. Future projects include treks to the South Pole this November and to the North Pole in 2010 to raise funds for the One X One foundation and his own non-profit, impossible2Possible, which promotes sustainable living through adventure travel. rayzahab.com