Slow Money: Reconnecting the Economy to Soil, Biodiversity and Food Quality

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Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live? Such questions — at the heart of “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money” — represent the first steps on our path to a new economy. 
Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small and local? Could a million American families get their food from CSAs? What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live? Such questions — at the heart of “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money” — represent the first steps on our path to a new economy. 
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We have slipped during the past half century — as if pulled by the gravitational or centripetal forces of population growth, technological innovation, consumerism and free markets — into a food system that treats the soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so that they can be force-fed a chemical diet.
We have slipped during the past half century — as if pulled by the gravitational or centripetal forces of population growth, technological innovation, consumerism and free markets — into a food system that treats the soil as if it were nothing more than a medium for holding plant roots so that they can be force-fed a chemical diet.

The following is an excerpt from Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch (Chelsea Green, 2008). Tasch presents an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should replace the outdated concepts of industrial finance and industrial agriculture. This excerpt is from the prologue.

Civilization is a big idea. So is the idea that as soil goes, so goes civilization. So is the idea that as money goes, so goes the soil. We don’t need any more big ideas.

We need small ideas. Beautiful ideas. Beautiful because they lead to a large number of beautiful, small actions — the kind alluded to by Wendell Berry: “Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.”

There is another kind of erosion at work, just as surely, here: erosion of social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our place in the scheme of things.

Peak Soil

  • Published on Dec 2, 2010
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