3c hapter - Index of

Slow Money 149
like the nearly 8,000- square- mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
There are now 400 identifi ed dead zones worldwide, up from 49
in the 1960s. 3
Tasch sees a direct connection between the speed of capital
and the fertility of soil. Indeed, his description of our “ technologyheavy,
extractive, intermediation laden food system” could just as
easily describe our fi nancial system.
It was against this backdrop that the idea for Slow Money
began to take hold in Tasch’s overactive brain. Over 2008 and
early 2009, he convened several regional gatherings that brought
farmers, entrepreneurs, and investors together to discuss local
needs. Along the way, he published Inquiries into the Nature of Slow
Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea
Green, 2008), a meandering manifesto of sorts. He might have
continued at this leisurely pace, had the fi nancial world not begun
to unravel in 2008. Tasch decided to launch his not-yet-fully-baked
concept. Slow Money could not wait.
So, in September 2009, almost a year to the day of the Lehman
Brothers collapse, more than 400 people from all over the country
gathered in a farmers market building in Santa Fe for the inaugural
Slow Money gathering. The crowd, a mix of New Age hippies,
professional investors, entrepreneurs, and farmers, noshed
on locally sourced frittatas as Tasch opened the conference with
a rambling but rousing speech. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever
done,” he began.
Tasch, a tall, angular man with an unruly puff of salt- andpepper
hair, is prone to digressions and asides, quoting Thoreau
one minute and Tom Robbins the next. We live in an age where barriers
are being shattered—the 6 billion population barrier, the billions of
instructions per second barrier, the billions of shares per day barrier. We are
disoriented and seduced by speed. Our profi t- at- any- cost system has risen to
the level of economic violence. We’ve got to slow money down. And did you
know there are billions of organisms in a single gram of topsoil?
It was a kaleidoscope tour of fi nance and fertility. In a way, it
was hardly necessary. The fi nancial crisis had set the stage more
eloquently than words ever could. And Tasch was preaching to the
choir.