We must “bring money back down to Earth” in order to enhance food security, food safety and food access, and to improve nutrition and health, says the author of Slow Money, Woody Tasch. He says that we need to learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered and to connect investors to the places where we live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.
This would promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption, to one based on preservation and restoration.
“There is such a thing as money that is too fast,” he says, “and companies that are too big; finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down – not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.” For instance, he asks: “What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?”
If the 20th century was the era of buy low/sell high and wealth now/philanthropy later — what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history”- Woody wants to see the 21st century becoming the era of nature capital.
Above all he would like to see us celebrate a new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from ‘making a killing’ to making a living.