Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Sometimes books come along at exactly the right time to help us understand where we were headed just before we crashed. Slow Money does that and more. And now that business as usual has publicly tanked, there's no one I'd rather follow into the fields of food and finance than former financier Woody Tasch who trails everyone from Icarus to Rod Serling in his wake. Here is his basket of exclamations, explorations, exhortations and explanations of how frantic capital might be slowed so as to support instead of destroying--as it now does--soil fertility, biodiversity, food quality and local economies. Reflect for a moment on Tasch's idea that we need to learn to make a living rather than a killing in the market and then get this book. It will turn your head around and make you laugh at the same time. It goes along with Small is Beautiful on my "books that matter" shelf.

I really loved this book. I completely agree with the ideas presented by the author. This book, along with Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" have completely changed my views on economics and sustainability. The key now for me is how do I go forward after reading this book? If you are looking for a book on making money in socially responsible funds, this is not for you. It is about investing in sustainable practices, that do no harm to the earth, soil and all living things. When you invest in these things, abundance is sure to come for all (better health, sustainability, etc.). It is long term thinking and not about quick fixes. The author does not discourage innovation, but encourages us to re-think what we are innovating. It is very basic in that it all starts with fertile soil. Fertile soil is teaming with life that we don't even understand. Everything we do has a consequence. In this recession, we think we have run out of opportunities to add value to society and be employed. This book showed me that the opportunities to do good are endless. I am starting with an organic garden in my yard. As Geoff Lawton says, "All of the world's problems can be solved with a garden.."

I had been greatly looking forward to this book, and I actually found it to be a huge let-down. I am a huge fan of the slow food movement, and I think the analogy between slow food and the economic system is a rich and valid one.

When it comes to values, economics, and goals, I am nearly 100% on the same page with Tasch. When it comes to the shortcoming of mainstream economics, the problems facing our global economic system, and the way these relate to the environment and other issues of sustainability, Tasch gets it. But I have three really harsh criticisms of this book that, in my opinion, make it not worth reading.

My first criticism is that this book is written in such a way that it is highly unlikely to persuade anyone who does not already believe the premises of the book. I don't know about Tasch's motivation, but I am strongly committed to sustainability, and I care deeply about building a consensus to move towards a sustainable society--not just a consensus among liberal people or educated people, but among all people, including people of a more conservative or libertarian persuasion. There are ways to successfully broach the subjects of sustainability and economic reform with people of all political views -- in fact, there are ways in which conservatives and libertarians are leading the way in their criticisms of the mainstream global economy. However...this book would be unlikely to appeal to these people; it's not written in their language, and indeed, not in a language that an overwhelming majority of Americans could understand or relate to, which leads into my next point.

My second comment is that on tone...it's absolutely off-the-wall. Tasch seems like he's tooting his own horn more often than not; his play on words, literary references, and the like, are at times artful, but the topic is one on which I want a more substantive, direct work. The tone, in many places, strikes me as intellectual masturbation, a sort of self-indulgent act that, while beautiful in its own right, doesn't really communicate much of anything to anyone. I also think that at times, the flowery language, unnecessarily rich in big words, is used to mask a lack of a deeper scholarly rigor. Which leads into my last and most scathing criticism.

Third, this book is mostly hot air. It's a lot of talking about the problem, and a lot of extremely general, painfully vague talking about solutions, but in the end, there's little concrete. This book, although non-fiction, and for all its intellectual language, is remarkably non-scholarly. It is loaded with highly subjective statements, and it does very little to cite or connect with any more concrete work of others.

If you want to get concrete, a really great text that I would recommend is Local Money, by Peter North, or the older (soon to become classic?) Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, by Thomas H. Greco. Greco's book in particular is accessible to a broader audience and is more of a consensus-building book; North's book is more thorough and has very rigorous scholarship. Both provide a more concrete, more direct solution to the problems this book is hoping to address.

I expected much more from this book - possibly because I'm a trained economist. The argument is both important and intriguing: the book is worth reading just for that reason.

Unfortunately, the evidence, the whole structure to sustain the argument, is not strong enough nor well-researched. This is more an ideological tract than an objective essay. Don't misunderstand me: the ideology promoted is one with which I happen to have much sympathy: I'm all for investing in local food systems and going local.

It's a pity the book doesn't work better because it is largely a missed opportunity to make a strong statement in favour of all the values Mr. Tasch supports and win over new adherents.

Paul Hawken's "The Ecology of Commerce" was a game-changer, helping us re-imagine a new, healthy relationship between business and the environment. Woody Tasch's new book, "Slow Money" carries this process forward, fundamentally altering our understanding of money and showing the role it can play in building restorative economies in communities around the globe. "Slow Money" sounds a powerful call for real investment made in real businesses producing real goods like food for our tables and soil fertility for our shared future. It evokes a new way of thinking about money that is the key to making sustainable development and restorative economics real. This is a life changing book.

Amidst my frantic preparations for departure on a trip to Chile, I
eagerly stole the time to finish this book. It is an absolutely
beautiful, visionary work. Tasch is a poet who also knows money and his
metaphors are full of meaning and power. I can't list all the things I
loved about this book (its smallness is one - I wonder if Schumacher's
Small is Beautiful kept him on track...). I hope millions of people (or
thousands of the right people) read this book and are moved to start
making the shift that is so necessary.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered Consuelo Luz, Santa Fe, NM

Woody Tasch put down on paper what has been knocking around in me for years. I was so inspired, I joined the Slow Money Alliance and put some of my retirement money into businesses that serve a local, organic, face-to-face economy. Take money out of the Shock Market and put it in service of people and land you can see. He talks about food, so, I put my money where my mouth is. Simple.