Dear Fellow Boomer:
If you know, believe or strongly suspect that a culture that treats things such as small and mid-sized, diversified organic farms, soil fertility and local food systems as expendable is a culture that is headed for trouble—social and ecological trouble—then you have to confront the question of money.
Which is the question of efficiency, scale and cheap commodities.
Which is the question of fast food and fast money.
Which is the question of a world that is speeding up and heating up.
Which is the question of industrialization and globalization.
Which is the question of slavery, immigration and social justice.
Which is the question of whatever happened to the American Dream.
Which is the question of Manifest Destiny and Fly Over Country.
Which is the question of Wall Street vs. Main Street.
Which is the question of Silicon Valley vs. Organic Valley.
Which is the question of artificial intelligence vs. common sense.
Which is the question of fake vs. real.
Wow. That’s a lot of questions. All leading to one question: What does the counterculture look like in the Age of Ones and Zeroes?
The counterculture?!? That’s a big leap from something as small as Beetcoin and the slow money movement from which it has arisen. But from what we’ve seen and heard and felt over the past decade, as thousands of folks have put tens of millions of dollars into hundreds of small farms and food enterprises around the country, it’s worth wondering about. As an exercise in conscientious imagination. On the way to conscientious investing.
The structural problems that confronted us 50 years ago still confront us. Military-industrialism. Class warfare and inequality. Racism. Consumerism and planned obsolescence. Petrochemicals. This, despite the mind-boggling technological innovation of recent decades. And, now, here we are, amidst the Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History—tens of trillions of dollars, running from our parents to us and from us to our children.