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A book excerpt from Slow Money, by Woody Tasch

Excerpts from "Reconnoitering" in Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing.

We find ourselves, now, between the Scylla of finance and the Charybdis of fertilizer. We are presiding over the unprecedented accumulation of financial capital, on the one hand, and the continuing erosion of social and natural capital, on the other.

We need the kind of reconnoitering that no expert can provide. We need to reconnoiter outside the realms of market share and shareholder, above the top line and below the bottom line, away from soil war and toward soil peace. We need to reconnoiter between our hearts and our minds.

No economist, no soil scientist, no investigative journalist, can show us the way. There is no GPS that will guide the bees back to the hive. There is no price/earnings ratio, no SROI that will show us the way back home. Do we reckon our whereabouts with economic statistics or earthworm sensibilities? Do we believe more in ownership or usufruct? Chrematistics or oikonomia? Lowest price or highest quality? Profitability or fertility? Thomas Malthus or Milton Friedman? How do we make our way between these possibilities?

* * *

When John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking,” and James Joyce wrote, deep in the innards of Ulysses, “that the language question should take precedence of the economic question,” they put their fingers on one of the great wounds of the modern era: We need to discover ways of thinking and speaking that can put economics in its place.

In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations.

What is, in the farmer’s field, a struggle between economics and ecology becomes, in the investor’s mind, a struggle between quantity and quality, portfolios and possibilities, numbers and words.

* * *

Asserting a connection between such luminaries as Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi and a bunch of early-stage companies in the first decade of the twenty-first century runs the risk of seeming na•ve, as well-intentioned but ineffectual as an old hippy at an annual shareholders meeting of Intel.

Yet social investing can best be understood, with its historical roots in Quakerism and anti-apartheid divestitures, as an expression of a centuries-old ethos of nonviolence in the context of modern fiduciary capitalism. Of necessity, this expression manifests itself in partial adaptations, pragmatic mutations, and imperfect applications. Lots and lots of half steps. After all, who can ignore how daunting it is to look at the Fortune 500 or the Russell 5000 and think: What would I invest in if I really wanted to do no harm?

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