A Farmer’s World of Wise Risk-Taking
Farmers are passionate, stubborn people. They have to be, as they are engaged every single day in a struggle to extract life from a planet that loves to give life, but is just as passionate and stubborn about it as the farmer. It is this tug-of-war that allows the mysterious process known as growth to occur in spite of the vast, cold emptiness of much of the universe around us.
One such passionate worker of the land was a man named Alfred Russell Wallace, an adventurer who embarked upon a dangerous sea voyage in 1848 to seek out new plant specimens and make his fortune. (For a more thorough account of Wallace’s adventures, see Bill Bryson’s excellent book, “At Home.”)
It is safe to say that things did not go smoothly. He wasn’t ready for the maddening insects of the Amazon, for one thing, and they made his life miserable his entire time in the jungle. He also somehow broke his much-needed glasses early in the trip, and locals stole the alcohol-laced mixture he used for preserving the plant specimens. Having had no previous experience exploring anything more adventurous than his own backyard, it is a wonder that Wallace did not give up after a few days of this.
But he didn’t. He spent four years in the jungle, collecting and storing dozens of rare new samples under these conditions. Excited and exhausted, he boarded a ship for home…only to have it catch fire beneath him and sink into the dark water while Wallace watched, knowing his hard work had been, in essence, for nothing.
A person can only take so much, and no one would have blamed Wallace for sagging into despair and disappearing forever.
But he didn’t. Bravely, he boarded another ship, this time for the other end of the earth, where he toiled for 8 more years before finally returning home.
The result: 127,000 new specimens, including 1,000 insects and 200 species of birds never before recorded. And, of course, the riches Wallace deposited into his bank accounts before kicking back and enjoying a life free of rampant insects.
The lessons we can learn from people like Wallace are not the lessons of hard work and perseverance. Those who wrestle with nature already know those lessons like a schoolboy knows his ABCs.
No, the lesson here is that sometimes a man must step out to meet the future rather than waiting for it to come to him, even when there is risk involved. Wallace, and a few others like him, *made* botany what it is in the world.
This is not about blind risk, of course — we live in a different age from Wallace, and risk for us doesn’t have to mean disappearing into the jungle. There is very little geography left to discover, after all.
No, the kind of risk required of the modern-day pioneering spirit is not quite as perilous; but it can lead to the same sort of life-changing results. Risk for the farmer of today is made up of decisions that to the outside world may seem dull and unimportant, but which affect all our lives in ways most people can’t even imagine.
It is because of the farmer’s inherent love of wise risk-taking that we are here, that our society has endured and even flourished. So ironically, it does not really qualify as risk at all. As Wallace would no doubt have affirmed, it only seems like risk until you take step out into it…and then it reveals itself as wisdom.
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