Invest in Real Returns

This interesting article points out how the recent move of money into gold reserves has lead to the six-fold increase in destruction of South American rain forest in Peru as miners try to pull every little last bit of the metal out of the ground.  NASA satellites have captured and quantified some of the real-world impact of putting income into gold investments, which brings up a good point about how to think about your investments. 
The mining "is now plainly visible from space," Swenson says. "At the two sites we studied, Guacamayo and Colorado-Puquiri, nearly 5,000 acres were cleared in just three years, between 2006 and 2009, largely outpacing nearby deforestation caused by human settlement."
 While many will look strictly at returns whether in the form of capital gains or steady income-streams, in reality this can be very short sighted as we learned from the equity boom during the Dot.Com at the turn of the millennium followed by a preference for fixed-income investments leading to the explosion of desire for mortgage-backed securities.  At the end of the day, the place you park your income earned today so that down the road you can have it with purchasing power beating inflation ought NOT be a vehicle summarized by the percentage of return you end up reaping over that period, but also about how your capital leads to real actions and stewardship of scarce resources to create real positive returns for society.  You can see such a win-win solution happening in companies like GE that brought society many real technological innovations over the past century (perhaps Google will be a similar story for our culture), but such observations also stand for other standard everyday companies that provide a service or good that people use to live a happy and productive life.