There have been other times in the history of our country when we have taken risks in the face of huge uncertainty. The Space Race is one such moment and I have written about this in an earlier article where I suggested that tackling climate change and resilience could do for Obama what the Moon Mission did for Kennedy.
Individuals and corporations take such risks on a regular basis. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have all stepped out into the unknown, motivated by the personal belief that their idea was something that could change the way we live and work for the better. Yes, they made lots of money doing it, but I doubt that was their primary motivation. Many, many others have stepped out with the same personal grit and determination and known spectacular failure. The best of them have got up, dusted themselves off and tried again. This time armed with the knowledge of what doesn’t work.
Some of them have not lived long enough to know what they achieved. We are all familiar with the stories of musical and artistic geniuses dying in penury and of posthumous Nobel Prize awards. Just this morning I was listening to the story of Homero Castro, an Ecuadorian plant scientist who dedicated 20 years of his life to breeding a hyper-productive cocoa tree immune to the witch’s broom fungus that had devastated Ecuador’s cocoa farms. After 51 attempts he created a tree immune to the disease that produced 10 times more cocoa beans than any other – only to be told by the chocolate manufacturers that its beans tasted like rusty nails and they would never buy them. Homero Castro died in a car accident and will never know that five years ago the Ecuadorian cocoa farmers found a way of removing the bad taste by fermenting the beans in burlap sacks for a few days. Castro’s cocoa trees, some now 46 years old and still producing, are the future of cocoa farming in Ecuador.
There is an old expression – I don’t know the source – that if one is not failing then one is not trying. It is essential that we make progress on addressing the probable causes and consequences of a warming planet. However, we have to be constantly alert to indications that we have gotten things wrong. There are just too few resources and too little trust to go around to squander it on ego rather than outcome based pursuits.
