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<em>
Woody Tasch is the founder and chairman of <a target=”_blank” title=”Slow Money” href=”http://slowmoney.org/”>Slow Money</a>, an organization that urges Americans to invest in small, sustainable, and local food systems. The Slow Money alliance doesn’t maximize investors’ profits regardless of environmental and human costs–which is exactly the point. Instead,</em>
<em> profits are centered around stronger, more stable and sustainable communities. Tasch is the author of</em> Inquiries in the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. H<em>e was recognized as an </em>Utne Reader <em>Visionary in 2010.</em>
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<br />A few years ago, in Mark Anielski’s book <em>The Economics of Happiness</em>,
I came across the words of Robert F. Kennedy, from the 1968
Presidential campaign. After recovering from the chagrin of not having
heard these words previously, it became my pleasure to share them
occasionally during public events. It was surprising to learn just how
many folks have never heard them and wonderful to see how deeply
audiences resonated with them. </p>
<blockquote>
<p style=”padding-left: 60px;”>We will find neither national purpose nor
personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in
an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit
by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National
Product. For the Gross National Product includes air pollution, and
ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks
for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The Gross
National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death
of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles
and nuclear warheads. … It includes … the broadcasting of television
programs, which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.</p>
<p style=”padding-left: 60px;”>And if the Gross National Product
includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does
not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their
education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of
our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include
the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the
intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public
officials … the Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our
courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor
our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except
that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about
America–except whether we are proud to be Americans.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today’s world of sound bytes and fast money has no time for such
discourse. A billion dollars of fast money purchasing TV ads, it seems,
is all too much like hundreds of millions of tons of NPK fertilizer
applied to industrial farm fields–past the point of diminishing returns
we zoom, degrading public discourse and diminishing the fertility of the
soil as we go.</p>
<p>Which brings us around to the leaping earthworm, one Brook Le Van,
who, with his wife Rose, operates Sustainable Settings, a few hundred
acres organic farm near the Crystal River, at the foot of Mt. Sopris, in
Carbondale, Colorado, and who, at the dais of a recent anti-fracking rally in
Denver, displayed considerable imagination and erudition. It takes
considerable reserves of both, when talking about cows and pigs and raw
milk and food sheds and the water resources of Thompson Divide, to leap
all the way to “anthropocene reductionism.” But Brook did it. In public.
In a five-minute talk. I was there.</p>
<p>I’m looking forward to my next conversation with Brook, who is a Slow
Money founding member, so that he can elucidate the relationship
between Slow Money and anthropocene reductionism.</p>
<p>In the meantime, let’s appreciate the
nuanced thinking behind RFK’s rhetoric and the strength of Brook’s
grounded activism and remind ourselves that every time we support a small food
enterprise, we are voting in a powerful, direct way for life after fast
food and fast money.</p>
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<em>Image: “Money” by <a target=”_blank” title=”Aaron Patterson” href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40875537@N04/”>Aaron Patterson</a>, licensed under Creative Commons.</em>
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