Civil Eats

RSF Social Finance, a non-profit financial firm focused on using money as a force for good in the world, has announced the launch of a new Food & Agriculture Program-Related Investing (PRI) Fund. The idea is to encourage investors to support elements of the agricultural and food sectors that look beyond the bottom line to take the health of our environment and communities into account. Read More

In recession-economy America, there’s no shortage of good ideas. Waves of creative and capable folks have been liberated from their desk jobs — by choice or by force — and are on the lookout for entrepreneurial ways to reconnect with the soil. Read More

Are the teabaggers ready to stop throwing tomatoes and start growing tomatoes? Glenn Beck’s latest sponsor, The Survival Seed Bank, is banking on Tea Party paranoia to sell a product it calls the “Full Acre Crisis Garden.” As Stephen Colbert noted on Wednesday, “nothing moves product like the hot stink of fear.”

For $164, you get a vacuum-sealed tube of PVC pipe filled with enough seed “to feed friends and family forever,” because, “in an economic meltdown, non-hybrid seeds could become more valuable than even silver and gold!”

But hang on to your credit card! It turns out that the folks flogging the Full Acre Crisis Garden are nothing but horticultural hucksters, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas revealed on Tuesday. Read More

A year ago, investor Woody Tasch’s book Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money might have seemed way out there. Slow money? Isn’t that like a slow race car or a slow rocket? An oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp? Suddenly, with Wall Street in shambles (the victim of too much too fast), Tasch’s vision for a more patient and holistic investment philosophy that values relationships (between people and other people, between people and the natural world) doesn’t seem so strange after all.

I sat down with Tasch and asked him to explain a bit more about his book. Read More