Product Description

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.


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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #202594 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781603580069
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

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Customer Reviews

Beautiful vision
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.

Bringint it all together
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.

Where your money went
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.