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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.

Our “inescapable duty,” to use Wendell Berry’s words, is to avoid acting like deer in the headlights, and to move forward, undeterred by ambiguity. Our success in moving beyond half steps, in finally defining a new destination and taking the first full steps in its direction, depends on acknowledging, without scapegoats and without undue recrimination, the violence of the modern economy.

By prioritizing markets over households, community, place, and land, the modern economy does violence to the relationships that underpin health and that give life-sustaining meaning—family relationships, community relationships, relationships between consumers and producers and between investors and the enterprises in which they invest, relationships between companies and the places in which they do business, relationships to the land and in the soil. Such relationships are attenuated, or, in the extreme, deracinated, by the modern, global economy.

The extent to which the modern economy depends on broken relationships was revealed by a story told a few years ago during a small retreat of business leaders. Going around the table to introduce one another, a young entrepreneur of Middle Eastern descent told a tale of broken relationships:

My most recent software company had its offices in the World Trade Center. On 9/11, we were pretty much wiped out, most of our records gone. When we started trying to put some of the pieces back together, I made the rounds to my directors. These were many of the leading investment bankers on Wall Street, individuals with whom and for whom I had made many, many millions of dollars in my previous ventures.

One of them said to me, “Why don’t you have Osama fund your re-start?”

At that moment, I realized that I had no relationships with these people. I realized that there had been nothing but commercial ties between us. The money connections were not real relationships.

As he spoke, it became clear that while many of us had been aware for some time of the manner in which the modern economy depends on and produces broken ecological relationships, we had not been fully cognizant of the corollary damage done to social relationships. Although we understood the concept of ecological footprint, we did not fully understand the footprint of broken social relationships.

It is no accident that an economy based on broken relationships would find it easy to support, and to depend on, the building of nuclear weapons, the waging of wars in distant lands, the selling of cigarettes, the flying of trillions of air miles, the commodification of leisure, urban and suburban sprawl, gated communities and favelas, toxins in the food and water, and kids who watch an average of four hours per day of TV, paying more attention to it and to instant messaging than to people in the room. Much of this violence is overt. Much of it is implicit, indirect, made palatable by the fundamentals of consumerism and made invisible by veils of intermediation.

As it has been practiced and understood, socially responsible investing can do little to address root issues of consumerism and intermediation. SRI is confined largely to damage control: an exercise in improving corporate governance and minimizing damaging “externalities,” while not affecting core elements of a company’s activities, culture, or mission. At its worst, SRI seems an exercise of fueling a bulldozer with biodiesel: We are greening our fuel, but are we preventing subdivision of the farm?

Despite successes of shareholder-advocacy campaigns and occasional spikes in public awareness, there is little in the nature of fundamental systemic change that can be accomplished via broadly diversified portfolios of mature public companies, managed by SRI brokers and advisors who compete with the financial returns and performance benchmarks defined by the very same extractive or destructive economic activities that are the objects of SRI reform.

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