Slow Food/Slow Money/Hudson, NY
April 14, 2009
Dear Friends,
Woody Tasch, author of "Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing
as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered" and Paolo DiCroce, Executive
Director of Slow Food International (www.slowfood.com), will share the stage
at Time and Space Limited, in Hudson, NY, Friday, April 24th at 7PM.
Paolo DiCroce will describe the latest successes and challenges the Slow
Food revolution has encountered in their global effort to preserve
traditional cultures, heirloom food varieties, and the environment through
creating sustainable food systems and promoting social justice.
Woody Tasch will describe what he calls "Slow Money"
(www.slowmoneyalliance.org), shaped to complement and support the Slow Food
movement. Slow Money is a call to action, a call to design markets built
not around extraction and consumption, but around preservation and
restoration, an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems
and agriculture.
The event is hosted by the E. F. Schumacher Society, the Columbia Land Conservancy, Hawthorne Valley Farm, and Gianni Ortiz.
Admission is free. Time and Space Limited is located at 434 Columbia St,
Hudson, NY, 518-822-8100.
The book "Slow Money" is published by Chelsea Green Publishers
(www.chelseagreen.com) and is available through your local independent
bookseller. An excerpt follows. You can hear Woody talking about Slow
Money on Living on Earth:
http://www.livingonearth.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00002&segmentID=7
Please join us April 24th at Time and Space Limited to welcome Paolo DiCroce
and Woody Tasch.
Staff of E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org
413-528-1737
*****************************************
From Slow Money by Woody Tasch
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.
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