Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered [Hardcover]

Woody Tasch (Author), Carlo Petrini (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 12, 2008

We must bring money back down to earth.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money presents the path for bringing money back down to earth--philosophically, strategically and pragmatically, and with an entrepreneurial spirit that is informed by decades of work by the thousands of CEOs, investors, grant-makers, food producers and consumers who are seeding the restorative economy.

The months and years ahead will surely see a flood of books proposing micro- and macro-economic fixes to the financial crises of the day. Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different vision--a meta-economic vision, looking above the top tine and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy.

The soil of the economy? Bringing money back down to earth?

This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path, and to begin to walk down it, is the mission of Slow Money.

This mission emerges from decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur by Woody Tasch, whose explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century.

These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.

Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money investigates an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations.

• 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 Slow Money--are the first step on our path to a new economy and a new culture. Inquiries into Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built around--not extraction and consumption but--preservation and restoration.

Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.


Editorial Reviews

Review

"Woody Tasch has one of those fast minds that always seems to ask the right slow questions. He is on to something: a new vision of deploying capital in a way that might offer a true alternative to faster and faster, bigger and bigger, more and more global."--Eliot Coleman, farmer and author of The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest

"An essential read for anyone who is concerned about the human condition and our planet."--Mark Finser, Chair of the Board, RSF Social Finance

"Every once in a while, an idea comes around that you immediately know is not only a good one, but in fact is an absolutely necessary one. Slow Money is such an idea. Money is a powerful thing and whatever we collectively put our money into goes a long way toward creating the world that we live in. So far, those choices have led to many things, including a broken world food system, where nobody knows where their food comes from or what it takes to grow it. To become so divorced from something as essential as our food has had many disastrous consequences. I have great hope that sustainable, locally based food systems will help us all in more ways than we imagine. Slow Money can play a huge role in doing this and Woody's book is an inspiration to all of us working in sustainable agriculture. I can't wait to live in a world supported by Slow Money."--Tom Stearns, President, High Mowing Organic Seeds

"Indispensable reading, to be placed on the same shelf as Berry and Schumacher."--Gregory Whitehead, Treasurer, The Whitehead Foundation

About the Author

Woody Tasch is Chairman Emeritus of Investors' Circle, a

nonprofit network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations,

and family offices that, since 1992, has facilitated the flow of

$130 million to 200 early-stage companies and venture funds dedicated

to sustainability. He is president of the newly formed NGO

Slow Money. Woody was formerly treasurer of the Jessie Smith

Noyes Foundation. He is an experienced venture capital investor

and entrepreneur and has served on numerous for-profit and

nonprofit boards. He was founding chairman of the Community

Development Venture Capital Alliance, which supports venture

investing in economically disadvantaged regions. He lives in

northern New Mexico. For information about Slow Money please

visit www.slowmoneyalliance.org.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing; 1 edition (November 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603580069
• ISBN-13: 978-1603580069
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Woody Tasch is Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, a 501(c)3 non-profit formed in 2008 to catalyze the flow of investment capital to small food enterprises and to promote new principles of fiduciary responsibility to support sustainable agriculture and the emergence of a restorative economy. Tasch is Chairman Emeritus of Investors' Circle, a nonprofit network of investors that has facilitated the flow of $150 million to 230 sustainability minded, early stage companies and venture funds. He is an experienced venture-capital investor and entrepreneur, he has served on numerous for-profit and non-profit boards, and was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance, which supports venture investing in economically disadvantaged regions. In 2010, Utne Reader named Woody one of "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book is the Start of a Movement January 28, 2010

By L. Brunjes

Format:Hardcover

Every once in a while, you come upon a book that impresses you with the feeling that you are watching history unfold with each page--you find yourself daydreaming mid-read about telling your children and your children's children about who you were when you first read that book, and how you had the kernel of foresight that it would be the start of something that would influence our world and our relationship to it. For better, forever.

This is one of those books.

Slow Money is medicine for our diseased relationship with money and the tangible resources that it was originally intended to represent. It is a poetic, profound de-conditioning of our standard, abstracted views of economics. Woody Tasch's background in traditional venture capital investing allows him to speak the lingo we all know with aplomb, while also breaking ground for the new languaging that is needed to start this critical conversation. It represents the transition from money as depleting to repleting, from money as numbers to money as what has stood the test of time as the apotheosis of human culture and survival: food.

As a leader in the biochar field, I am intimately familiar with the catastrophic dangers inherent in eroding our soil health, and work daily to help us avoid them. Enter Slow Money: I am floored. I am inspired. I am rejoicing. Slow Money is exactly what our soils and the people that depend on them (read: ALL OF US) need, and it brings poetry to economics in a way that is deeply and unexpectedly healing to our collective psyche.

This book is so riddled with gems that I realized immediately that underlining key phrases would be pointless, because I would be underlining the whole book. I am going to read it several times so that I can systematically adopt the healthy mental gestalt that Slow Money brilliantly expounds.

May all who read Slow Money be agents of this meme, which promises to change the way we view money, forever.

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful vision January 13, 2009

By Mark Mills VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The vision, goal and poetry of this book are beyond reproach. Unfortunately, it is written to fellow true-believers. The average reader will find it difficult to translate into action or new insight.

For example, the book suggests more money should be invested in corporations with very long term plans. The author points out that top-soil takes hundreds of years to become a mature ecosystem, so we need companies with similar outlooks. Of course, that is a great goal, but most readers will wonder how such an organization could survive when government policy currently promotes mad consumerism as a sort of patriotism. The author regularly points out the absurdity of this 'pro-growth' religion, but never investigates its history, institutional power base nor weaknesses. The new comer to 'slow money' will find the omission frustrating.

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bringint it all together December 25, 2008

By SunshineGirl

Format:Hardcover

Disgusted with the garbage we call food and the markets and government that subsidize it? Impatient with politicians who refuse to connect the dots between ag subsidies, obesity, childhood diabetes, shriveling family farms and an environment poisoned by ag chemicals? If you found Michael Pollan's works provocative and insightful, you'll recognize this book as the next "ah ha" moment on the path to food and farms that nurture rather than weaken our communities. "Slow Money" is a way to fight back. It has a message of hope and empowerment like the one that propelled Obama to victory: together we build momentum for change. We pool our money and invest it in a food system that builds instead of harms environmental and human health. I invested in three copies of this book: one for me and two for friends, who will tell their friends. The movement begins.