“What we have to do is very simple,” says Woody Tasch. “We have to take some of our money and invest it close to home in local food systems.”

Tasch outlines his vision of sustainable investing in his recent book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. In it, he calls not for a speed limit on the flow of global capital (as if Wall Street would ever allow such a thing), but for investors with a conscience to steer a portion of their money into local sustainable farming. This isn’t just philanthropy. Done right, Tasch’s theory is that this strategy will earn steady income for investors without selling out the planet.

Tasch’s years in venture capital convinced him that simply reforming the existing financial system wasn’t enough; what was needed was a completely new paradigm of investing—a Slow Money revolution.

Most conventional investing, he found, underwrites precisely the type of unbridled growth that is putting ecosystems and the global climate in danger of collapse.

“If your money is in the stock market, 50 percent of it is going up a smokestack in China,” he says. “That is what is keeping our portfolios afloat.” Even many investment funds that bill themselves as socially responsible, he contends, continue to finance a system of production and consumption that is undermining the environment and our communities. “They’re not sufficient,” he says.

via Slow Burn – The Slow Issue – GOOD.