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Slow Money brings slow food values to investing
Ilana DeBare, SF Chronicle
Arno Hesse receives a check each month paying down the principal of a $5,000 loan he made to Soul Food Farm, an organic chicken farm in Vacaville.
For the interest? He gets two dozen eggs.
Hesse, a former bank executive in San Francisco, is part of a new national organization called Slow Money – an attempt to bring the values of the slow food, sustainable farming movement to the dollar-driven world of investment.
Slow Money will hold its third annual conference next month at Fort Mason in San Francisco, where potential investors will hear from a host of environmental speakers and 27 entrepreneurs seeking funding.
Unlike typical gatherings of angel investors, though, these entrepreneurs won’t be touting high-tech startups that aspire to become the next Google. They’ll be looking for equity or loans for humbler projects, like a slaughterhouse for grass-fed beef or a compost business that describes itself as “purveyors of premium poop.”
The audience will include not just wealthy accredited investors and fund managers, but rank-and-file slow food advocates with as little as $100 or $1,000 to invest.
And projects will be funded not just for their sterling business plans or expected return-on-investment, but for their commitment to a new, local, community-based model of agriculture and food delivery.
(25 September 2011)
Remembering Wangari Maathai
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Dr. Wangari Maathai died on Sunday at 71, of ovarian cancer. It is interesting to me that so many of the obituaries get her work wrong – consider what the New York Times says:
Dr. Maathai, one of the most widely respected women on the continent, wore many hats — environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser, human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977. Its mission was to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.
It is a small error, but an important one. Maathai did not wear many hats – it was all one hat. Her role empowering and educating women, repairing and protecting her beloved nation, mitigating climate change and improving the lives of the poorest people around her by enabling their subsistence, calling for justice at every turn – it was and is all one work. Maathai’s great gift was her ability to see the intersection between environmental, economic, political and gender justice – and that it is not possible to repair just one piece of the world at a time.
I think it is easier to imagine that being a feminist and an environmentalist are two different things, easier to imagine that caring about human rights and deforestation are two kinds of caring. In fact, Maathai saw a whole where we are falsely inclined to see pieces. It was her vision that was right.
Some memories will always be for a blessing.
(26 September 2011)
The Pioneers of Our Climate, Water and Food Security
Peter Bosshard, Common Dreams
When the World Commission on Dams reviewed the development effectiveness of dams, multipurpose projects with large dams, power plants and irrigation schemes had the worst social, environmental and economic track record. As the world is grappling for appropriate answers to climate change, influential actors such as the World Bank want to give these complex schemes a second chance. They are wrong. While we need to integrate the concerns of climate change, water, energy and food security, we don’t need to go back to old-fashioned multipurpose schemes like the Narmada dams. And while we need to store water to adapt to a changing climate, we can do so in other ways than the big, centralized reservoirs of the past. [Treadle pump in Bangladesh (International Development Enterprises)] Treadle pump in Bangladesh (International Development Enterprises)
Large dams and reservoirs are not well-suited to a changing climate for two reasons. First, the arteries of our planet are already suffering from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem. Climate change will compound the pressure on vital freshwater resources, and will make projects with large ecological footprints unaffordable. Secondly, big reservoirs cannot respond flexibly to the rapid shifts in streamflows that climate change brings about. Dams that reflect past hydrological patterns may become unsafe as storms intensify, and uneconomic as droughts become more frequent.
… Luckily, solutions that integrate water, food and energy security with climate resilience exist. They include a wide spectrum of small, decentralized, bottom-up approaches such as local check dams, other water harvesting techniques, mechanic treadle pumps, drip irrigation, and the system of rice intensification. Combining traditional knowledge and innovative techniques, these approaches rely on the initiatives of small farmers, use water efficiently, cost less than large dams, enhance the food security of the poor, and typically have minimal environmental impacts. Similarly, a diverse mix of decentralized renewable energy projects – including wind, small hydro, solar and geothermal – will not only strengthen resilience to climate change. It will also be effective at improving energy access for the rural poor and limiting environmental impacts.
Bottom-up solutions have an impressive track record.
Peter Bosshard is the policy director of International Rivers. He blogs at www.internationalrivers.org/en/blog/peter-bosshard and tweets @PeterBosshard.
(27 September 2011)
Climate Wedges reaffirmed
Robert Socolow, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
In August 2004 Steve Pacala and I published a paper in Science about climate change mitigation. Its core messages are as valid today as seven years ago, but they have not led to action. Here, I suggest that public resistance can be partially explained by shortcomings in the way advocates of forceful action have presented their case. Addressing these shortcomings might put the world back on the course we identified.
Let’s review the messages in our 2004 paper in Science. The paper assumes that the world wishes to act decisively and coherently to deal with climate change. It makes the case that “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century.” This core message surprised many people, because our paper arrived at a time when the Bush administration was asserting that, unfortunately, the tools available were not suited for addressing climate change. Indeed, at a conference I attended at that time, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham insisted that a discovery akin to the discovery of electricity was required.
Our focus on “the next half century” was novel; the favored horizon at the time was a full century — and still is. We argued that “the next fifty years is a sensible horizon from several perspectives. It is the length of a career, the lifetime of a power plant, and an interval whose technology is close enough to envision.”
In a widely reproduced Figure (see below) we identified a Stabilization Triangle, bounded by two 50-year paths. Along the upper path, the world ignores climate change for 50 years and the global emissions rate for greenhouse gases doubles. Along the lower path, with extremely hard work, the rate remains constant. We reported that starting along the flat emissions path in 2004 was consistent with “beating doubling,” i.e., capping the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at below twice its “pre-industrial” concentration (the concentration a few centuries ago).
Socolow is the codirector of Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, under which he has helped launch new, coordinated research in environmental science, energy technology, geological engineering, and public policy. His research interests include global carbon management, the fossil-carbon sequestration, and energy efficiency. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Socolow is a member of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board.
(27 September 2011)
Janice Sinclair writes: “Robert Socolow, contrary to recent reports that he has backed away from his 2004 Wedges Theory, here not only reaffirms the theory but adds 2 more wedges. We think this is an important article.”
