Q&A: Woody Tasch

Photo courtesy Patty Kestin

So how you bring those things into financial life and capital markets is extremely tricky because capital markets were designed to screen all of that out. Why do we have the capital markets we have? We created these markets because of the particular historical juncture we were at the time. Capital markets and our version of modern corporations and shareholder entitlement and fiduciary responsibility all came from the same mindset that started around 1500, picked up steam during the Industrial Revolution, and took off in the last half of the 20th century. And it’s all about conquest and exploration and exploitation, extraction and consumption and economic growth and standards of living—all of those things together. We created a financial system that optimized for the flow of capital, reduced the risk to capital, and created ways for capital to flow quickly. At every stage we tried to optimize for faster and faster capital, so we could have more and more economic growth and more and more technological innovation, more risk taking, and more “progress” as defined by the economy.

Now we're at a new juncture, and we have to create a different set of capital markets. The current collapse is a warning sign that we can’t continue that historical model anymore. The words "restoration" and "preservation" for me capture the values proposition that you raised. We need to move from capital markets based on consumption and extraction to capital markets based on restoration and preservation. You can call the new markets values-driven, but I would say that they are just getting down-right practical. It’s just recognizing that where we are in history, we have to behave differently if we want to survive—much less live by higher ethical standards. The crucible of global warming and environmental degradation and terrorism and all of these nested issues basically collapses, in my opinion, survival instincts and ethics. I don’t think these things are different anymore. We just have to start acting differently for all kinds of reasons at the same time.

We are at the beginning of that invention process. How would we have a stock market that wasn’t built around maximum shareholder profits over the short term? How would we have companies that more explicitly gave away more of their profits to stakeholders rather than just to shareholders? I think these things are going to happen. There is a lot of energy out there for fundamentally realigning things.    

I was once at a meeting where I heard Adam Werbach talking about how he was working with Wal-Mart as a consultant to green Wal-Mart and how important this was, and someone in the audience stood up and said, “If Wal-Mart really wants to be so green why does it have to keep growing as a company? I don’t understand how a company can be green if it is pursuing unlimited growth.” And that prompted Adam Werbach to answer, “The market demands growth.” That was his answer!

There was something about that exchange that made me act differently from how I had acted before when I had heard exchanges like that. I went home and I said, "Damn it, then we have to create a different kind of market." It’s very obvious. The old market—the market we inherited from the industrial revolution and from the robber barons—demands growth. So let’s create another market and the new market doesn’t have to be against growth, it’s just against unlimited growth that goes beyond the limits of natural and social capital.

In certain communities at certain times, growth is synonymous with progress. At other times, it’s synonymous with congestion and sprawl and overheating and speculation. The idea that the market demands growth is just a blank check for every investor and every company to go out and pursue maximum growth; it's patently absurd. So we need to create another market where other factors are valued by the investors and entrepreneurs who want to play in that market.  

This new kind of market is where the Patagonias of the world would live: The thousands of values-driven companies out there that would love to have liquidity and more access to capital, but don’t want to become a multinational company and don’t want to put themselves on the block for acquisition by global corporations. So we have to create a way for them to connect with the many millions of investors who would love to invest in a company like that. And I assert that over time there will be lots of investors who want to play there, and whether they will make as much money as companies that are mining and making armaments and making cars—these investors and entrepreneurs won’t care. They’ll be happy to put some of their time, money, and energy into this market, knowing that it is a lower financial return, because they’ll know it is the right thing to do.  

In a recent interview on TV, Bill Gates talked about what a miracle modern agriculture is because only one or two million Americans can feed the whole country. Modern agriculture is often called a miracle because of that, and because of the fact that our supermarkets are filled with a zillion products that didn’t exist a generation ago and seem to last a long time on the shelf and are pretty cheap in general. So people say, "What’s the problem? We have lots of food, lots of variety, and not very many people producing it—it’s a miracle!"  

But the modern agricultural system has had enormously violent consequences when measured in things like the destruction of rural economies, the destruction of rural culture, the loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, and unsustainable patterns of rural-to-urban migration. When you look at all of these things, the miracle of modern agriculture doesn’t seem to be such a miracle anymore. We have to look at all of these factors when we assess modern agriculture’s successes.  

The process that led to modern agriculture was about 10,000 years in the making. During all that process we have never had sustainable agriculture. We’ve sort of hopscotched our way to greater amounts of food and more material wealth. We kept borrowing from the future each step of the way; we just got much cleverer at our borrowing—using petrochemicals and technology. Now we are experiencing the limits of all of that on a global level.

But the next question would be: Can we really feed everyone without industrial agriculture?  I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that we have to get away from petrochemicals and synthetic fertilizers that destroy soil fertility. That’s part of the answer.  Another part is that the majority of the grain in this country is fed to animals. It takes many pounds of grain for that animal to gain a pound of meat, and that process is also incredibly water-intensive. So it's obvious that there is more than enough capacity to grow food. We are just using it in an enormously wasteful way.    

The burden doesn’t need to be on those of us who are saying we need more local and sustainable agriculture. Clearly the industrial agricultural system can’t solve all of our problems. The first attempts aren’t perfect, it’s hard, but we have to acknowledge that we have to do things differently now in the face of the global environmental, financial, and social crises we face.