Email   Print

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.

If there had been a manual of civilization way back when, it might have read: Never start a ten-thousand-year epoch of agriculture-dependent civilization without first understanding soil fertility, biodiversity, carrying capacity, and the relationship between economics and ecology.

Which is to say: We could not, in those early days of Mesopotamia, or even much later, in the early days of the steam engine and the joint stock corporation, have anticipated the limits of agriculture or the limits of economics. We could not have been expected to understand, when the first clay tablets were being scribed with shepherd’s inventories and the first wheat fields were being cultivated, how agriculture would pave the way from hunter-gathererdom all the way to Wall Street. Any more than Descartes could have been expected to anticipate Thoreau or Einstein. Any more than the Wright Brothers could have been expected to anticipate the bombing of Dresden or the advent of the stealth bomber. Any more than Henry Ford, exuberant with the opportunities of mechanical horsepower and the prospects of manureless cities, could have been expected to anticipate, a scant one hundred years hence, the 405 in Los Angeles during rush hour or suburban sprawl or the aggregate particulate emissions of 500 million tailpipes.

And it would have taken an oracle of Delphic capabilities to have foreseen that as the whole planet geared up and heated up and sped up in the twentieth century, responding to the triple-threat explosions of population growth, technological innovation, and financial markets, the future would hinge in such significant measure on a very different triple threat: the small, the local, and the slow.

* * *

In relation to a tree or a mountain or a river or a valley or a phalanx of armored vehicles, a person is small. In relation to the night sky and the universe of which it is a part, the earth is very, very small. In relation to history, a footnote is small. In relation to Wal-Mart, which has $350 billion in sales, Patagonia and Stonyfield Farm, each with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues, are small. Butterworks Farm, with a $1 million yogurt business operated sustainably from one 325-acre farm and a herd of fifty cows, is very much smaller yet, but is large compared to many of its neighboring farms, for whom such revenues or branded-product success are enviable.

This is the beauty of the word small. You cannot use it absolutely. It only exists in relation. It forces qualitative judgment. It implies appropriate scale and challenges the intelligence to figure out just what in the world that means.

Similarly with the word local. Is local a specific number of miles from Point A to Point B? Is it a specific political or contractual designation? How does it relate to a bioregion or a watershed? In the word local are connotations of rapport, relationship, rootedness, and the kind of responsibility that is the reciprocal of anonymity and absentee ownership. In the word local is a hint of the possibility of localization, that which is bubbling up in the wake of globalization. The quantitative imprecision of the term does not diminish its importance. As with the word small, its importance lies precisely in a reliance on qualitative distinctions:

Most of the “conspicuous developments of economics in the last quarter of a century” (referred to by Professor Phelps Brown) are in the direction of quantification, at the expense of the understanding of qualitative differences. . . . For example, having established by his purely quantitative methods that the Gross National Product of a country has risen by, say, five percent, the economist-turned-econometrician is unwilling, and generally unable, to face the question of whether this is to be taken as a good thing or a bad thing. He would lose all his certainties if he even entertained such a question: Growth of GNP must be a good thing, irrespective of what has grown and who, if anyone, has benefited. The idea that there could be pathological growth, unhealthy growth, disruptive or destructive growth is to him a perverse idea which must not be allowed to surface. A small minority of economists is at present beginning to question how much further “growth” will be possible, since infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility; but even they cannot get away from the purely quantitative growth concept. Instead of insisting on the primacy of qualitative distinctions, they simply substitute non-growth for growth, that is to say, one emptiness for another.

Which brings us around to that all-important, qualitative-distinction-laden word slow.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NEXT >>
view as a single page