The Slow Food Movement began in 1986 in Bra, Italy, initiated by Carlo Petrini as a protest against the opening of a McDonald's near Rome’s Spanish Steps.

This act symbolized resistance to the encroachment of fast food culture and homogenization of food traditions.

The movement’s guiding principles emphasize food that is “good, clean, and fair”—meaning high-quality, sustainably produced, and fairly sourced.

It rapidly grew into an international network with thousands of local chapters (convivia) across over 150 countries, united by a mission to preserve regional culinary heritage, protect biodiversity including heirloom crops and traditional breeds, and support small-scale producers facing industrial agriculture pressures .

Globally, Slow Food has manifested in culturally specific ways.

In Italy, it centers on artisan foods and endangered regional products.

In Japan, it integrates with the traditional practice of “washoku” and the refined kaiseki dining style.

The U.S. sees an overlap with farm-to-table approaches, championed by figures like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.

Places such as Oaxaca, Mexico, and Lyon, France, show strong slow food communities grounded in local ingredients, traditional farming, and communal meals.

Critics observe that Slow Food can sometimes reflect Western middle-class ideals, potentially overlooking local socioeconomic contexts where access and affordability are crucial.

However, many local foodways and practices predate Slow Food and have been embraced or highlighted within the movement’s framework, offering culturally relevant interpretations rather than impositions .

Prominent contemporary advocates include founder Carlo Petrini (Italy), Alice Waters (USA), and Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana (Italy).

Major events such as Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre in Turin regularly convene food activists, chefs, and producers from around the world.

The Slow Food Movement began in 1986 in Bra, Italy, initiated by Carlo Petrini as a protest against the opening of a McDonald's near Rome’s Spanish Steps.

Title:

Content: Praise the slow pace of life.
Explore the fun of the world calmly
The idea of slow living negates the belief that a successful person should be busy or fast, and encourages the person to be present consciously at every moment.
Once the society is saturated with the new, it returns to the past, and this is what happens in art, decoration, fashion, and social trends.
From here, too, the slow pace of life can be seen as a return to the old calm in some way, after the rhythm of life has become too fast to keep up with.
The idea of a slow life can be a convenient orientation for those who are looking for a calm state of mind, trying to take a long-term view of life and the world away from constant stress, anxiety and gasping.
Slow living helps us live more consciously and clearly with what we value and need in life, where we do everything at the right speed, rather than constantly striving for speed.
The idea of slow living negates the belief that a successful person must be busy or fast, and encourages the person to be present consciously at every moment.
Life is better, not faster.
The idea of slow living is part of the broader slow movement that began in the 1980s in Italy.
After opening McDonald ’ s restaurants in the heart of Rome, Carlo Petrini and a group of activists formed a movement defending regional food traditions called Slow Food.
Over time, the movement has gained supporters in more than 150 countries, trying to encourage the enjoyment of good food and conscious consumption that encourages respect for seasonality, and to minimize the negative impact on the environment of food production.
Carlo Petrini ’ s idea began to take shape when he noticed the disconnect between farmer and consumer, due to the huge boutiques and fast food restaurants that fed central Rome and dramatically eroded local food traditions.
Carl Honoré, one of the most famous theorists of the idea of slow living, helped bring the idea to areas other than food when he published a book in Praise of Slow in 2004.
Awareness is growing about slow travel, slow thinking and slow action, all of which are examples of the different branches of the slow living movement.
Not all slowness is negative.
As more people were forced to slow down their lifestyle, interest in slow living increased during the epidemic period.
The search for the term slow life has increased by 4 times in Google and YouTube.
Although some of these images and videos depict a romantic rural life far from reality, for most people, the increase in research related to this content shows the desire to return to nature and seek hobbies closer to it, especially as a large number of people turned to remote work, which gave the opportunity to connect more with the self and search for what is truly pleasing, which is forgotten in the midst of a fast and breathless life.
The slow life movement gets rid of the negative connotations of the word "slow", which some may associate with laziness and non-productivity.
Carl Honoré explains the difference between good slowness and negative slowness, as good slowness is the deliberate slowness to do things at the right speed to achieve the best result.
On the other side, there is also good speed and bad speed.
Speed can be exciting and exhilarating in the right circumstances while the rush to finish things from just above the surface without going deep is just the opposite, because it causes distraction and is difficult to prioritize.
Essential elements of slow living
Slow living doesn ’ t mean we give up technology and fall back into old times, but it does help us give up distracting activities, make us reclaim our own time to become more present and aware of every moment in life, and help build stronger relationships and spend quality time with friends and children.
It also helps us build our own values, design the lifestyle that suits us, and dedicate time to what we ’ re really looking for, not what the fast-paced lifestyle of the planet forces us to do.
A slow life entails taking a break and redefining our relationship with things like a phone, tablet, or other gadgets like them, and then making room for screen-free time.
Honoré says, “The cornerstone of slow living is to form balanced and more humane relationships with modern technologies.
“We have to somehow learn when to go ahead with technology and when to slow down and stop moving between social media, the Netflix screen or even aimlessly surfing the internet. ”
Honoré also emphasizes the need to let go of the fear of rejection or being lost, and instead of trying to do everything, we should choose only what matters to us and touches us, without the worry of saying the word “no ”.
We must say no to everything that does not concern us and not increase the burden we place on ourselves.
We have to prioritize carefully and let everything else go, having grown tired of the speed with which we feel we are racing rather than actually living our lives.
We always wait for a moment other than the moment we live, which makes us feel that our lives are vanishing in vain.
Slow life solidifies deep pleasures and strong emotions, away from entertainment and shallow pleasures that fade away shortly and leave us burdened with feelings of frustration and loneliness.
Source: Websites

What happened after the opening of McDonald's restaurants in Rome opened?

What is the birthplace of the slow food movement?

When did Carlo Petrini launch the Slow Food Movement?

Who is founder of the Slow Food Movement?

An Italian sociologist and activist
Carlo Petrini

This act symbolized resistance to the encroachment of fast food culture and homogenization of food traditions.

Title:

Content: Slow travel.
How do you enjoy your vacation in 2023 in a completely different way?
Tourism and travel have recently become another way to keep up with popular trends or “trends ”, and to capture impressive images that bring in more followers.
While planning vacations, some no longer think only of the places they themselves wish to visit, as much as they observe the experiences of others on social media and think of all those wonderful places they go.
In the meantime, we seem to be surrounded by a flood of travel and tourism social media accounts, which post only minute-long "flutes" where influencers navigate between various fascinating tourist destinations.
Photos and leaflets tell you that you can travel to 10 places in seven days, and that there are 100 destinations you shouldn ’ t miss.
All of this makes us feel like we are in a race to go to as many destinations as possible in as little time as possible, and creates hunger for more experiences, drives us to jump like rabbits from one destination to another and from one experience to another, so we plan vacations filled with experiences, destinations and landmarks instead of focusing our time and budgets on what really interests us.
So, perhaps it ’ s time to rethink the way we travel from a different perspective that gives us more opportunity to relax and delve deeper into the travel experience, through “slow travel. ”
From food to travel.
In praise of slow and slow
In the 1980s, in 1986, McDonald ’ s opened a new branch in Piazza di Spagna, one of Rome ’ s most famous tourist attractions.
Italian sociologist and activist Carlo Petrini published a statement announcing the launch of the Slow Food movement as a reaction to fast food that has become permeating food cultures from one country to another, leaving its negative impact on food cultures and local cooking and turning it into a similar and unified “monster. ”
The statement sparked interest around the world, and quickly led to the emergence of a global movement and organization supported by more than 100,000 members, a movement that over time evolved into sub-ideas in other domains such as slow living, slow design, and slow travel.
Hence the term Slow Tourism, an approach to travel that offers different possibilities and ways to support sustainable tourism and low-carbon tourism, based on reducing mobility by plane and car, and relying more on bicycles or walking.
It also relies on communicating with local people and cultures and eating local folk food, with an interest in preserving the environment (2).
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, global tourism had reached a record high of 671 million international tourists.
Despite the positive effects of the boom in tourism, it has a negative aspect that cannot be ignored.
In a study published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, researchers focused on the potential of slow travel in the face of climate change challenges, with travel at the time of publication accounting for 50-97.5% of the amount of heat emission of most tourist trips.
The emerging concept of slow travel at the time was a reaction to high-carbon travel practices, so that slow travel becomes an integral part of the tourism experience and not just a difference in mode of transportation.
The negative impact of the tourism boom was not only on the increasing carbon footprint, but also on other environmental impacts of no less importance, for example, the Philippine government was forced to temporarily close the Boracay tourist area in 2018 to tourists, after it was transformed from a picturesque island to a sewage and waste sink for tourists, which affected the aquatic life there.
All these and other effects have led to the embrace of a new way of tourism, while embracing greater responsibility towards the environment and local communities, and opening up another horizon for individual enjoyment and exploration of the self and the world.
Here are a selection of slow travel mechanisms that will help you enjoy this exciting experience.
Take the least traveled routes.
Off The Beaten Path (or The Road Less Traveled) is one of the terms associated with slow travel, and is adapted from verses by the American poet Robert Frost, which means choosing unusual areas and different routes than the familiar, crowded routes, and is highly associated with the search for hidden local gems and avoiding the pattern of consumer tourism.
We advise you to stay away from peak tourist seasons, so you will be able to avoid the crowds, as well as get cheaper accommodation and transfers.
You will also be able to explore your destination slowly and quietly away from the crowds and crowds of tourists.
Nobody sees everything.
Many tourists fall into the sin of trying to see and discover everything, and you find lists such as “places not to miss if you go to such a country ” containing dozens of places that it is impossible for an ordinary person to visit all of them on a short vacation.
Take the Louvre as an example, one of the most famous and important museums in the world, with an area of   about 13 square kilometers, and its complex map makes you wonder will you be able to visit all these halls?
And see over a million pieces of art and history in one day?
Or even a few days?
Here you will have to choose between jumping from hall to hall and planning your visit so that you can see as many pieces as possible and take dozens of photos, or choose the pieces that really interest you, and look at each piece, and reflect on its meanings.
You can gasp from hall to hall, or you can settle for a few paintings, and if you go in the opposite direction, you can visit the same painting for several days and spend hours in front of it.
And what about the pictures?
The images are already on search sites, and believe me if you ’ re not an exceptional professional artist, the image you take in the Louvre has been taken by thousands of people before you.
Choose what matters to you, and build your own list based on your priorities.
If you don ’ t enjoy art, and you love outdoor adventure, why spend hours in a museum and see paintings you won ’ t be able to communicate with instead of climbing a mountain, for example.
The opposite is also true.
Think about what really interests your heart, are you a lover of architecture, nature or art and history?
And what are your priorities?
Let coincidence lead you.
Despite the importance of planning, planning every minute of your trip deprives you of a lot of coincidences that may give you irreplaceable opportunities.
Leave room for a bit of randomness, an empty space for chance, free tours in which your feet and intuition lead you towards the unknown and the adventure it carries.
You might want to skip the usual tourist attractions to enjoy other things, such as living like the locals and exploring the side streets away from the city center.
Knowing people is a treasure.
Speaking of side streets instead of renting a car, walking and using public transport will enable you to get to know the country better, as well as the chance to get to know the local population.
It is said that "the people of Mecca know its people", and so in every city, away from the popular tourist destinations, the people of the city know the best and cheapest places, restaurants and shops, and from them you can explore the city in the best possible ways.
Not only that, in movies we often see heroes change their lives after having an inspiring conversation with a passing person on the way.
Perhaps we wonder why we do not meet such inspirations, and why our lives do not change.
You may not be able to take inspiration if the ones you ’ re talking to are the hurried tourists or the tour guide.
But what about people from different cultures?
Shopkeepers and old people who sit in cafes, those who belong to a land other than your land and a time other than your time, is it not possible that if you open your heart and speak without concern, you can draw inspiration from them?
There is a hidden pleasure in talking to strangers you may never meet again.
The conversation may not turn your life upside down like in the movies, but if you allow your soul to open up enough, it could be an opportunity to explore a new aspect of yourself or the world.
Find out about local markets and food.
Instead of buying souvenirs from tourist bazaars or airports, you can try buying from local markets, where you will find unique handmade goods.
You can learn about the many handicrafts of each city, from which you explore its history, and support it in the face of counterfeit products that do not carry a soul.
Be sure to try local food as it is one of the most important experiences not to be missed when traveling.
Look for local dishes and try what works for you, visit local markets, and taste vegetables and fruits that may be unfamiliar in your country.
If you ’ re a foodie, you might want to take lessons in cooking local dishes, learn how to prepare them and understand more about the culture and history of the place.
Instead of searching for branches of international chains of cafes and restaurants drink your coffee in a small local cafe, meet the waiters and pioneers and pick up the tales scattered from their mouths, this is your real wealth from the journey, not the bright photographic image that resembles the hundreds of photos taken by tourists before you.
Get rid of travel stress
When you rush from one place to another with a full list of activities you do every minute, you usually come back from vacation with a deep sense of stress, which is called travel fatigue.
In the slow travel experience you will enjoy relaxing, walking through forests and gardens, or lying in the desert in a star-studded sky.
Ignore your phone and your desire to take pictures.
Relax a bit and enjoy your experience. (6)
You don ’ t need any more time or money.
Some may say I can ’ t travel slowly, my vacation is only 7 days.
Slow travel doesn ’ t mean long travel, it doesn ’ t have to do with time frame as much as the way you travel and your way of thinking.
So slow travel brings us back to the real and root causes of travel, why do we move from one place to another?
And what are we looking for?
Are we looking for more photos of our social media accounts, are we looking for relaxation, are we looking for more cultures and history, or do we want to dig deeper and connect with ourselves?
In terms of budget, I ’ m happy.
There are many ways to reduce your travel budget, it is possible to try work while traveling, you can work in one of the farms or small hotels in exchange for accommodation, which many places offer, especially if you decide to settle in one place for long enough.
Also, instead of looking for luxury hotels, you can opt for shared homes, live with a local resident, or look for shared accommodations and cheap local hotels.
And within your city, too.
If you don ’ t have a chance to vacation outside your city, you can apply these ideas in your city as well, instead of meeting your friends in repeated places behind glass walls, go on a tour to explore the city, the unknown areas of it, the unfamiliar streets.
Turn to the old cafes, to the trees you pass every day on your way to work without seeing or noticing its presence, to people and stones.
Remember that slow travel is not just a way to travel, but a different view of the world and a way to live and think.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Sources:
Carlo Petrini and the History of Slow Food
2. Slow Travel and Tourism
Slow travel: issues for tourism and climate
Philippines to shutdown tourist island boracay for six months
The Tourist ’ s Perception about Slow Travel – A Romanian Perspective
In light of the Krona pandemic, slow travel is the latest tourism trends
Source: The Island

What are the supporters of slow food movement advocating?

What did Carlo Petrini think was the reason for the disconnection between farmers and consumers?

Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants saturated the city center

On returning to traditional food methods

What happened after the opening of McDonald's restaurants in Rome opened?

The movement’s guiding principles emphasize food that is “good, clean, and fair”—meaning high-quality, sustainably produced, and fairly sourced.

Title:

Content: 20 / 01 / 2023
The Spanish Amontillado Sherry Sydney wine with a slightly salty and aged flavor is perfect for those who prefer turnip cakes!
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• Liang Shuyi
Liang Shuyi
Rebecca Leung holds a WSET Diploma in Wine and Spirits from the UK. She is currently a Certified Educator of WSET, providing professional wine tasting courses for wine lovers and industry insiders. She has her own wine tasting blog, Wine is Beautiful, and has written wine tasting columns in various newspapers and magazines. She is also an online wine taster and San Francisco wine show. "Chinese Radio Program".
In order to turn her interests into practical experience and knowledge, Rebecca has visited wineries in many countries over the years, covering countless wine regions and serving as a judge for international prestigious wine competitions.
Drink life.
Updates from time to time
When the New Year comes, it is most enjoyable to meet friends and relatives to celebrate the Lunar New Year, eat and drink.
Traditional Chinese New Year food is mostly fried, fat is heavy, and the taste is strong, if you eat a little fast, you feel full after a few mouths; sometimes even bring load to the stomach.
Chewing slowly is the king of diet, but the modern rush of life has put our ability to gobble up very high, so I often remind my family and old friends that even if the Chinese New Year food is tempting, I still advocate a slow eating philosophy, which can enjoy the true taste of food, but also help digestion. The brain, send a message to the stomach, the stomach and intestines are prepared, will absorb better, otherwise the gastrointestinal mucosa may suffer from inflammation due to eating too fast.
When it comes to slow tasting, the Slow Food organization originated in Europe. It was initiated by Carlo Petrini, an Italian in the 1980s, and later established its headquarters in France. It is committed to promoting the dietism that fights fast food and aims to preserve the traditional food culture, and advocates supporting small business food units with a focus on quality and weight. In addition to spraying pesticides, herbicides, desiccants and other chemical products, resulting in the gradual loss of environmental biodiversity around the estate, in addition to the forced implementation of monoculture in some production areas, and even the exploitation of workers by businessmen, etc., the Slow Wine Coalition was established to promote a wine culture other than pleasure. The wine.
The organization also believes that the climate crisis that has plagued many production areas and wineries in recent times is obvious, and hopes to help promote more sustainable, organic or biodynamic wineries through its activities.
As an ordinary person who loves to eat and drink, of course, it is not necessarily necessary to know the dietary institutions and doctrines of different countries. However, carefully and slowly enjoy the good food and wine, understand the sources or stories of food and wine, and be grateful to the manufacturers of food and wine, whether it is for their own body and mind, or it is beneficial! The wine market is better.
For example, if you would like to eat radish cakes during the Chinese New Year, you can try the Spanish Amontillado Sherry Sydney wine, because the wine has a slightly salty taste, the subtle aging flavor of the wine, and the ingredients in the radish cake have a mutual improvement.
I would like to wish you all the best in the Chinese New Year.
The content of the signed and / or unsigned articles published by Economic Times is the author's personal opinion and does not represent the position of Economic Times, and the role of Economic Times is to provide a free speech platform.
【 2023 Year of the Rabbit 】 Happy Chinese New Year, Happy Chinese New Year, Happy Chinese New Year, Happy Chinese New Year!
Let ’ s look at the forecast for 2023, and the year of the rabbit is in full swing!
► Let 's see the Great Law of Luck
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What are the supporters of slow food movement advocating?

Enjoyment of good food
Conscious consumption

A movement promoting high-quality, fair, and clean fisheries

It rapidly grew into an international network with thousands of local chapters (convivia) across over 150 countries, united by a mission to preserve regional culinary heritage, protect biodiversity including heirloom crops and traditional breeds, and support small-scale producers facing industrial agriculture pressures .

How many countries have members of Slow Food organization?

On returning to traditional food methods

What happened after the opening of McDonald's restaurants in Rome opened?

Globally, Slow Food has manifested in culturally specific ways.

Title:

Content: Taitung ’ s first ever International Slow Food Forum will be held on April 28!
International slow food representatives from Italy, the Philippines, India and Malaysia gathered at the Taitung County Government Hall to share the experience of slow food promotion around the world, and exchange and learn with local slow food practitioners in Taitung, making Taitung a new base for dialogue with the international slow food movement and linking up the southern island culture.
The slow food movement originated in Italy, has been popular around the world for more than 30 years, and has been promoted in Taitung for 10 years.
The slow food spirit of “Good quality, clean and fair ” comes from Italy, but it has grown up in Taitung with a rich variety of local features.
The Taitung County government specially invited seven international slow food activists and local slow food practitioners from Taitung County to exchange ideas on the eve of the first slow food festival this year, “from the festival to the day, from the traditional to the contemporary. ” The theme is to explore how traditional food culture can be practiced in contemporary society through the Slow Food Movement, and how the international Slow Food Movement can blossom in all corners of the world through the diverse participation of citizens and community power.
On the agenda, Andrea Amato and Daniel Cruse, from the International Slow Food Headquarters in Italy, first introduced the expansion of Slow Food from Italy to the world, and shared the classic Ark of Taste and Slow Food Presidia projects of the Slow Food movement.
In response to the International Year of Xiaomi 2023, Indian representative Aruna Tirkey will introduce the Xiaomi Kitchen in Jharkhand, India.
Nazlina Spice Station in Malaysia is an introduction to the local cuisine, starting from Laksa, to the preservation of Penang ’ s food culture.
Community power is also an important theme of this forum. The Gonnay couple from the Philippines and Ramon Uy Jr will discuss how the Slow Food movement can achieve the function of cultural inheritance and food farming education through community connection from family, community, organization, market, and tourism.
The local representative of Taitung, ibu istanda takiscibanan of the Bunun tribe, shared the history of restoring millet in the Kandeng tribe of Haiduan Township; Guo Lijin, CEO of Jinhetang, will talk about the experience and future vision of slow food in Taitung for ten years; and many Taitung slow food chefs and shop owners will join hands to show the strength of the cohesion in the local community.
Simultaneous real-time interpretation service is available, and people who are interested in promoting slow food are welcome to join us.
For details and registration, please go to
https: / / www.accupass.com / go / TTSlowFoodForum
2023 Taitung Slow Food International Forum
From Festivals to Everyday, From Tradition to Contemporary
Date: 4 / 28 (Fri) 09: 00-16: 30
Venue: Taitung County Government Hall
Taitung County Government Advertisements
# Slow Food # Taitung # International # Slow Food Movement # Italy

On returning to traditional food methods

In Italy, it centers on artisan foods and endangered regional products.

What are the supporters of slow food movement advocating?

On returning to traditional food methods

In Japan, it integrates with the traditional practice of “washoku” and the refined kaiseki dining style.

On returning to traditional food methods

The U.S. sees an overlap with farm-to-table approaches, championed by figures like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.

On returning to traditional food methods

Places such as Oaxaca, Mexico, and Lyon, France, show strong slow food communities grounded in local ingredients, traditional farming, and communal meals.

On returning to traditional food methods

Critics observe that Slow Food can sometimes reflect Western middle-class ideals, potentially overlooking local socioeconomic contexts where access and affordability are crucial.

However, many local foodways and practices predate Slow Food and have been embraced or highlighted within the movement’s framework, offering culturally relevant interpretations rather than impositions .

On returning to traditional food methods

Prominent contemporary advocates include founder Carlo Petrini (Italy), Alice Waters (USA), and Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana (Italy).

Who is founder of the Slow Food Movement?

An Italian sociologist and activist
Carlo Petrini

Major events such as Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre in Turin regularly convene food activists, chefs, and producers from around the world.

Title:

Content: The first Taitung Slow Food Festival in 2023 will be held in Taitung Forest Park on April 29 and 30. Slow food chefs from all over Taitung will serve up the best dishes and lead you to rediscover the rich breakfast scene in this land.
For the first time ever, the Slow Food Festival starts in the morning, what are the highlights to miss?
1.
Slow Food: Four major morning food themes + interactive food promotion booths in small rural areas + food farmers promotion, more than 40 booths, in the comfortable shade, show the morning vitality of Taitung.
2.
Slow Food: How good is Taitung ’ s food?
Teach you to use natural materials combined with traditional craft wisdom DIY, eat endless food, you can also use leaves to help you pack up, beautiful and beautiful!
3.
Slow Food Talk: What is the traditional breakfast in Taitung, India, and the Philippines? Representatives of Taitung landlords and international slow food chefs came to the scene to demonstrate and taste for free!
4.
Free guided tours: Walk through the streets, read the slow food festival scene, and learn about slow food and Taitung breakfast culture.
5.
Slow food exercise: Taitung breakfast, with the jump to show you!
6.
Slow Food: The only food blog in the world from the perspective of Taitung, this issue includes 400 years of history of local breakfast, a map of Taitung breakfast, a special collection of traditional breakfast of the tribe...
7.
Bilingualism: English instructions on site, English introduction to restaurant dishes, translation of lectures, English audio guide, etc. International travelers are also welcome.
And the first Taitung International Slow Food Forum will also be held on 4 / 28.
International Slow Food representatives from Italy, the Philippines, India and Malaysia gathered in Taitung to discuss how traditional food culture can be practiced in contemporary society through the Slow Food Movement, and how the international Slow Food Movement can blossom around the world through citizens ’ diverse participation and community power. Let Taitung become a new base for dialogue with the international slow food movement and link up the Austronesian culture.
The slow food movement originated in Italy, has been popular around the world for more than 30 years, and has been promoted in Taitung for 10 years.
The slow food spirit of “Good Quality, Clean, Fair ” has developed a unique and rich look in Taitung.
Please let us know Taitung through slow food, and change the world with “eating ”!
Taitung Slow Food Festival “Morning Table ”
Time: 2023 / 4 / 29 (Sat) - 4 / 30 (Sun) 9: 00-14: 00
Location: Taitung Forest Park
2023 Taitung Slow Food International Forum
From Festivals to Everyday, From Tradition to Contemporary
Date: 4 / 28 (Fri) 09: 00-16: 30
Venue: Taitung County Government Hall
Read more: Slow Food Taitung Facial Powder
(Taitung County Government Advertisement)
# Taitung # Slow Food Festival # Taitung Forest Park # Breakfast # Morning Table


The contemporary Flat Earth movement has experienced a notable resurgence in the Internet era, primarily fueled by online platforms such as YouTube, social media, and forums that enable rapid spread of flat Earth theories worldwide.

A key organization is the Flat Earth Society, originally founded in the United Kingdom, which now has international branches promoting the idea.

These online communities serve as hubs for sharing content and convincing new adherents, creating virtual echo chambers that reinforce beliefs despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

Several public figures and celebrities have publicly discussed or supported flat Earth concepts, including musicians, actors, and internet personalities.

Their endorsement often draws significant controversy and skepticism but increases visibility and appeal, especially among younger audiences who may admire or follow such figures.

Social media greatly amplifies their influence by allowing rapid dissemination and interaction surrounding these views.

Typical arguments used by flat-earthers include perceived inconsistencies in space imagery, such as photographs from NASA, the apparent flatness of the visible horizon upon personal observation, and deep distrust toward governmental and scientific institutions.

Many adherents share the belief that agencies like NASA are engaged in conspiracies to conceal the true flat structure of the Earth.

The resurgence of this seemingly obsolete idea is tied strongly to social and psychological factors found in today’s digital culture.

Distrust in authority and mainstream science fuels attraction to alternative views.

Contrarian thinking appeals to some as a form of identity and rebellion.

Furthermore, internet platforms create insular communities where members mutually reinforce their beliefs without exposure to counterevidence, facilitating growth of the movement.

The contemporary Flat Earth movement has experienced a notable resurgence in the Internet era, primarily fueled by online platforms such as YouTube, social media, and forums that enable rapid spread of flat Earth theories worldwide.

Title:

Content: How did Muslim scholars refute the flat Earth theory a thousand years ago?
The flat earth is currently one of the most famous scientific myths widespread in the Arab world, and has private groups on social media met by supporters from all over, and in recent days has been controversial because of statements by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy.
There are two histories to this theory, not one; the first is ancient and the second is modern.
A number of Greek philosophers believed that the earth was flat, and the ancient Scandinavian and German peoples also believed that the earth was flat and surrounded by oceans, and the common belief in ancient China was that the earth was square and flat while the sky was spherical.
But it ’ s really surprising to know that early astronomers assumed its sphericity, and they were from almost every culture: Pythagoras, who lived about 2,500 years ago, proposed the sphericity of the Earth based on his observations of the moon during the eclipse.
Pythagorean's observations are still evidence of a refutation of the flat Earth theory: Pythagorean observed that the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon during the eclipse is always round.
Regardless of the moon-facing part of the planet, eclipses occur everywhere in the world.
The idea of a lunar eclipse is simple: put a big lamp in the middle of your room and turn off the rest of the lights, stand at a distance of one meter from it, now turn around while you reach your hands in front of you with a tennis ball, when you give your back to the lamp and pass the tennis ball in the shadow extended in front of you because of your body, this is the eclipse.
To Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes, born 276 BC, was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth using a simple method involving the angle of the Sun at different locations.
Eratosthenes was astonished to read that the columns in the ancient Egyptian temples of Aswan on the afternoon of June 21 of each year did not leave a shadow under them, and the mystery of the wonder was that the columns in Alexandria left a shadow under them on the afternoon of the same day.
Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that the earth must be convex and not flat, otherwise the columns in Alexandria would appear shadowless, and then after reflection Eratosthenes came to the clever idea that we could measure the length of the shadow in Aswan which is zero, and its length in Alexandria, and then measure the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, and infer the circumference of the earth.
The story goes that he sent a man to measure the distance, so that with some simple geometry he could measure the circumference of the Earth, which he concluded was about 39,348 kilometers.
Eratosthenes' account was transferred to the Arabs from among the sciences they translated.
According to Carlo Nelino in his book "Astronomy: A History of the Arabs in the Middle Ages", the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Abbasi (who ruled from 813 to 833 AD) asked two teams of astronomers to test these calculations and come up with the most accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference....
The safe astronomer.
The method adopted by the Arabs is to go out into a perfectly flat desert, and then rely on the inclination of the polar star in the sky.
The ancients realized that the position of stars in the sky is affected by your place on Earth, the further you travel south, the lower the polar star in the sky until it disappears completely after the equator, and the more you travel north, the higher the polar star sky until it became above your head in the North Pole, which means that the Earth is round, otherwise the position of stars in the sky changes with your place on it.
The height of the polar star (and all other stars) is measured in degrees, and it is like to put a protractor in front of your eyes, the horizon is at zero, and then look at the protractor from the side to find at what degree the polar star stands, and this is something you can do exactly as the ancients did, and now astronomical software is easily available.
Al-Ma'mun astronomers measured the height of the polar star, then moved north once and south once, until the amount of inclination of the polar star changes by one degree, and then measured the distance north and south, and this measured distance is one degree from the circumference of the Earth's circle, and it can know the rest of the circumference of the Earth, because the Earth is a ball, and like any ball, rotation around it requires 360 degrees.
The first team of Al-Ma ’ mun astronomers went out to the Sinjar desert, a small city in northwestern Iraq today, and the second team to the Palmyra desert in eastern Syria, and carried out the same experiments in both places. In the Sinjar desert, for example, the height of the polar star was about 35 degrees. south of the wedge site until the measurement dropped by a degree.
According to al-Ma ’ mun ’ s astronomers, the scale of one degree was about 56 parsecs and two-thirds parsecs, which Nalino calculated — according to Edward Kennedy of the American University of Beirut in a paper published in the Encyclopedia of the History of Arab Sciences — to be 111.8 kilometers, a value used by later researchers such as al-Biruni and al-Toussi.
Calculating the circumference of the Earth in this experiment, it turned out to be about 410,248 km, which was close to modern measurements (40075 km) in the most accurate way at the time.
Note that the difference between the two measurements is about 1,100 years, and the reason for the difference is not related to the same method but to the ellipse of the Earth, as the distance between the two latitudes increases slightly as we head north.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
The second attempt was by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in September 973 AD, who used the best and easiest formula to calculate the circumference of the Earth in his time.
The Al-Biruni method is based on triangulation, where the sunset is observed from the top of a high mountain overlooking flat ground to the horizon, the astrolabe measures the angle the sun descends relative to the observer on the top of the mountain, where the line connecting the observer on the top of the mountain and the horizon makes the sunset clock touch the planet Earth.
It is known that the tangent of a circle perpendicular to its diameter, and then we have a right-angled triangle at the horizon, and we can measure the radius of the Earth by knowing the height of the mountain, which is mathematically easy.
Currently, the same calculations can be applied by high school students, for example, in all countries of the Arab world, who have a good amount of trigonometry study.
In a study published in the International Journal of Sciences, an Italian team repeated al-Biruni ’ s experiment and concluded that its results for the radius of the Earth are equal to 3,928.77 English miles, which compares favorably, being 2% different, with the average reference radius at the measurement latitude, which is 3,847.80 miles.
Pakistani physicist Mazhar Mahmood Qureshi, in his book An Introduction to Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology, points out that al-Biruni ’ s experience in what is now Nandana Fort in the mountains of northern Pakistan is a typical example of the use of experimental scientific methods.
The most important book of al-Biruni astronomical is "The Law of Masoudi", in which al-Biruni collected all the astronomical problems of his time, and the way of al-Biruni was to present the origins of the matter and the views of the Indian, Greek and Arab astronomers and then weighted between them.
Modern history of flat earth
But at that point, you might ask yourself: if the sphericity of the Earth was obvious to Muslim scholars and their comrades in other parts of the world in ancient times, why did it come back?
In 1849, the English writer Samuel Rowbotham published a pamphlet entitled "Oil Astronomy" (from the Greek letter zeta, not oil), in which he defended the theory of the flat earth, and followed this with another entitled "The Instability of Modern Astronomy and its opposition to the Bible".
In 1883, Rowbotham founded oil societies in England and New York, shipping thousands of copies of his books to talk about flat earth.
Meanwhile, William Carpenter, a printer and native of Greenwich, England, supported Rowbotham and advocated his theory, learning it from John Jasper and preaching to more people than any cleric of his generation in the southern United States. Once.
From here the myth began to branch again in the United States, and then to Europe, and then to the Arab world and the rest of the world, but in this context it was mixed with conspiracy theories concerning secret groups trying to control the world by deluding people that the earth is round.
The proof of the sphericity of the earth is not new, and has a long history in which Muslim scholars have made an influential contribution, but because the “flat earth ” has been transformed from ignorance of the nature of science into a conspiracy theory it has been imported along with other famous theories into our Arab world.
Source: Al Jazeera + Websites

A key organization is the Flat Earth Society, originally founded in the United Kingdom, which now has international branches promoting the idea.

These online communities serve as hubs for sharing content and convincing new adherents, creating virtual echo chambers that reinforce beliefs despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

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TECH WORLD

Stewart Brand Saw the Future

In his journey from hippie sage to global business consultant, the Whole Earth Catalog founder embodied the shifting spirit of Silicon Valley.

You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. Published less than a week later on the front page of The New York Times, the image set off a general ecological awakening. The lesson was: Behold the fragile jewel that is your one possession and cherish it accordingly. “Within two years of this picture being taken, the modern environmental movement was born,” Al Gore explained in the book version of An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore is one of many to tell the tale, which I most recently encountered in a book by the economist Diane Coyle on the statistical measure known as GDP: “Seeing the earth from space had given us a vivid new perspective,” prompting “concerns about the effect of economic growth on the environment and the planet as a whole.”

Such claims invite skepticism. Can a photo really induce instantaneous enlightenment? As it turns out, climate change and resource depletion have accelerated, not slowed, since publication of the “Earthrise” photograph. Nor has the basic ambiguity of the image been noted often enough: The photo may have encouraged new environmental commitments, but to take it at all entailed leaving the planet behind—much as tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with their fantasies of colonizing space, now imagine humanity doing on a more permanent basis. In this way, an ostensible portal to ecological salvation contains a different implication—in which Earth is, Eurydice-like, glimpsed only to be lost and abandoned. But to enter these objections may be to pitch criticism of the “Earthrise”-as-Eureka meme at too high a level. Prior to 1968, it was by no means unheard-of to encounter mounted globes of the planet, in classrooms and elsewhere. Spin one of these and you can see the whole terrain, as isn’t the case with a photo.

The notion that a revolution in consciousness ought to follow from whole-Earth imagery is most closely associated with Stewart Brand, the Bay Area networker, publisher, booster, and impresario who, toward the end of the 1960s, launched the countercultural handbook the Whole Earth Catalog and, almost two decades later, founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an important precursor to the internet. As veteran tech journalist John Markoff recounts in his biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, a vision came to Brand after he took LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966. Floating up over the city, in his acidulated imagination, and then beyond the atmosphere, Brand felt a light bulb the size of the globe switch on: “Seeing Earth from space would transform the way we view our planet and ourselves.” All was one and everything was connected. Brand would soon put together a plywood sandwich board emblazoned with the vaguely paranoid query WHY HAVEN’T WE SEEN A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WHOLE EARTH YET? in Day-Glo letters, and wear it, along with a white jumpsuit and feathered top hat, to college campuses.

It was Brand who, in the fall of 1968, scooping The New York Times by several months, put a NASA satellite photo of the planet on the cover of his first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. In tones of somehow giddy responsibility, an early editorial note suggested that human beings held the planet in their hands: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” More practically, Brand’s semiannual catalog would function as a sort of Sears-Roebuck resource for hippie homesteaders, enabling them to set up their lives after their own fashion, beyond the administered patterns of bureaucracy and suburbia.

Yet this vision of an interconnected planet ultimately led Brand, now in his eighties, beyond the 1960s idyll. As a hippie sage, he’d proposed a DIY counterculture as the logical expression of a properly planetary point of view. Later on, his enthusiasm for the burgeoning internet suggested to fans such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos that, in fact, it was a global network of communication and commerce that best embodied the truth that the world is a single entity made up of interconnected inhabitants. The title of Fred Turner’s 2006 study, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism, neatly captures the arc of Brand’s singular career. It also poses the question of whether the cyberculture of the 1980s and beyond should be seen as a betrayal or, instead, a fulfillment of the counterculture of the 1960s. In both periods, Brand insisted on placing the relevant “tools”—whether psychedelic drugs or personal computers—in the hands of individuals. And in both cases, he hoped the result might be a world of newfound individual satisfaction and collective responsibility.

Born in 1938, Stewart Brand preceded by more than half a dozen years the earliest of the baby boomers. If the boomers were a generation whose outlook and trajectory he often seemed to anticipate—from early countercultural forays, to a later embrace of PCs and the internet, to a final accommodation with big business—it must have helped that in relationship to them he possessed the confidence and sophistication of an older brother, without ever projecting the authority of a parent.

Brand’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois, furnished the subject of a 1949 photo essay in Life, because the magazine’s editors judged it the most typical city in the country. And the Brand household does seem a distillate of postwar America. Brand’s father was a partner in a local advertising firm—much as Brand himself would later operate as a publicist for countercultural ideas and products. In the father’s ham-radio hobby, it’s also possible to spy the son’s future embrace of the personalized, as opposed to bureaucratic, employment of technology. As for Mrs. Brand, a Vassar-educated homemaker and “space fanatic,” her passion for exploration of the New Frontier recurs throughout her son Stewart’s life, from his boyhood attachment to a book called The Conquest of Space onward. In recent years, Brand traveled with Jeff Bezos through the Western United States to find a site for Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company.

The brightest thread running from Brand’s youth to his later years may be the individualism he articulated in a diary entry from 1957, when he was still a teenager. Should the United States and the USSR come to blows, he told himself, “I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty.” Such Cold War self-reliance was complicated, however, by Brand’s classes at Stanford, where he majored in biology: “At long last,” he wrote his parents, “I’m getting what I was looking for in biology: ecology, ‘the interrelation between living organisms and their environment ...’ This is the ‘living whole, not the dead parts.’” Much of the organizing tension of Brand’s life—as a promoter of environment and community, on the one hand, and of technologically equipped personal freedom, on the other—comes from his efforts to square his youthful individualism with the ecologically minded holism he discovered in college. The Whole Earth Catalog would call for planetary life to be seen as one integrated system and, at the same time, seek to release its readers into splendid isolation, through “access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” as early copy had it. The question has always been whether these two aims were complementary, as the Catalog suggested without really stating as much, or contradictory.

In June 1960, Brand, the future icon of the counterculture, attended Stanford’s commencement ceremony in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps dress uniform. Little about the next two years he spent in the Army appealed to him, besides the opportunity to take photographs from a C-123 transport plane. According to Markoff, he passed the bulk of his time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, attempting, without success, to use “his skills with a camera and typewriter” to secure a new posting in Europe, as a military photographer or public affairs officer. Unsurprisingly, Army life chafed against Brand’s individualism. Drawing on several dozen interviews with its subject over four years, Whole Earth comes across as something like a third-person memoir, and here as elsewhere Markoff sticks to Brand’s point of view: “Right here in America [Brand] was experiencing regimentation, pettiness, and institutionalized stupidity—all the attributes he hated about communism.” Granted early release from the Army to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brand packed up his VW bus and, in August 1962, lit out for the Bay Area.

Within a few months, the former second lieutenant was regularly ingesting considerable quantities of LSD under the auspices of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park. As Brand, who would take acid throughout the ’60s, wrote to a friend: “I vote Yes on drugs. Yes with huge capital letters that spill over into everything else.” Less rhapsodically, he also defended psychedelics in a letter to his concerned parents back in Illinois, who, in spite of their misgivings, continued to subsidize Stewart’s bohemian lifestyle: cheap San Francisco lodgings; hallucinogenic socializing; and a more or less stalled journalistic career, consisting in large part of failed pitches to The New York Times.

Like many people in his Bay Area milieu, Brand associated psychedelics with the possibility of a new kind of society lying beyond the staid, salaried, hierarchical variety he’d inherited as a child of the postwar Midwest. After a friend who had participated in enough indigenous peyote sessions to acquire the title of a “roadman,” or leader of peyote meetings, introduced Brand to the drug, he ate peyote buttons in the company of Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico. The experience fortified Brand’s penchant for big-picture consciousness, ratifying “his conclusion,” as Markoff puts it, “that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian life was land time. It was geological and astronomical.” Brand soon requested and received admission into the Native American Church, complete with membership card.

In 1964, Brand’s attraction to indigenous society converged with his training as a photographer to produce a portable multimedia spectacle or “ambitious traveling sensorium,” in Markoff’s words, called America Needs Indians! In miscellaneous venues around the Bay Area (a courtyard, a nightspot, an architect’s studio ...), Brand would project on a pair of screens photos he’d taken on Indian reservations, as well as images of middle American life, to a soundtrack of chanting and drumming. “One of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture,” in Markoff’s description, America Needs Indians! was screened at one of the Bay Area psychedelic parties that Ken Kesey called his Acid Tests. The work’s message seems to have been that the audience might learn to emulate the Indians’ communal, rooted, ecstatic life. “To many of us—white kids who had grown up watching Westerns in the fifties—these revelations struck like lightning bolts,” recalled Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Tests. Before long, Brand, with his talent for networking, was helping Kesey to organize a successor happening, the Trips Festival, at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall.

Brand and Lois Jennings, the half-Ottawa mathematician who would become his first wife, promoted the Trips parties wearing what Markoff calls “Native American regalia.” Revolutions, whether real or merely would-be, typically present themselves as reviving the spirit of some previous historical period, and, during the ’60s and ’70s, the real or would-be cultural revolution that came to be called the counterculture often liked to invoke pre–Wounded Knee Indian societies for this purpose. The geographical shift of the counterculture, circa 1970, away from cities and college towns and toward rural communes, only reinforced this tendency, for the obvious reason that the indigenous peoples of North America (at least after the abandonment of cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan) lived on the land rather than in conurbations.

No publication flattered this back-to-the-land shift more than the Whole Earth Catalog, started in 1968 with the decisive assistance of an inheritance from Brand’s adman father. Consisting of information “continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff,” the publication turned its readers on to how to order farm implements and carpentry tools, Volkswagen repair manuals and Carlos Castañeda novels, bamboo flutes, calculators, Army surplus jackets, and potters’ wheels, as well as larger “tools” like canoes and geodesic domes, all with the idea of facilitating a hazily indigenous rural self-sufficiency, along somehow modern lines. In this, it drew inspiration from Aquarian settlements in rural Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere, with names like Drop City, Libre, and the Lama Foundation, which promised to bring communitarian self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship into harmony. The idea appealed to many more counterculturalists than those who actually decamped to the countryside, as a vision of the good life—good for you and good for the planet, too—they might one day realize.

A contradiction inhabited the heart of the project. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner writes that the back-to-the-landers who “embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness and, with it, the nature of community” also “celebrated imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw themselves as latter-day cowboys and Indians, moving out onto the open plains to find a better life.” Much as Brand and the readers of his Whole Earth Catalog did, the passage confounds settler colonialists with the indigenous people they displaced, as if these antagonistic parties were one and the same. In retrospect, the back-to-the-land movement consisted of cowboys (in the sense of transient settlers, with an unsustainable relationship to the earth) who liked to imagine themselves as Indians (in the sense of a rooted and symbiotic relationship to nonhuman life). The movement’s rural communes almost all succumbed to bankruptcy or strife before the 1970s were out, and expired. By that time, Brand himself had noticed that compact cities made for a more efficient use of energy and materials anyway.

Brand has been a compulsive founder of new institutions—from the Whole Earth Catalog’s more intellectual heir, CoEvolution Quarterly (1974); to the digital community known as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (1985); to a corporate consultancy, the Global Business Network (1987); and, finally, to something called the Long Now Foundation (1996). In the fall 1975 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand ran 25 pages of stories on “space colonies”: “Practical, Desirable, Profitable, Ready in 15 years,” announced the cover. The physicist Gerard K. O’Neill insisted that “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem.” Such extraterrestrial environmentalism provoked indignant responses from many of Brand’s readers. It was clearly less the gesture of a self-created Indian than that of a cowboy, with a taste for new frontiers.

Brand had imagined the Whole Earth Catalog not only as a clearinghouse for information on useful commodities but, through the publication of letters and product reviews from its readers, as host to a geographically diffuse, nonhierarchical community. In this sense, the Catalog can be seen as a sluggish, analog anticipation of the internet: In 2005, Steve Jobs, who often invoked Brand as an inspiration, described it as “Google before Google.” Living among the computer programmers of the Bay Area, Brand was well-placed to hail the emerging cyberculture of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in a 1972 article for Rolling Stone he’d already announced: “Ready or not, computers are coming for the people.” As a magazine publisher familiar with the travails of manual typesetting and longhand bookkeeping, the Brand of the early 1980s found word processors and spreadsheets the most immediately mind-blowing feature of PCs. More astutely, he also perceived that a web of networked personal computers could—like the Whole Earth Catalog, but at a different scale and speed—bring into being specialized and temporary communities of far-flung people, united by shared interests: the sort of thing familiar to us today as Reddit forums or Facebook groups.

In the early ’80s, Brand joined the faculty at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, which pioneered “the use of teleconferencing,” as Markoff says, to bring together scholars in various related fields. This experience led to Brand’s establishment of the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which charged its users’ credit cards a few dollars each month so that from their separate terminals they might participate in digital “newsgroups” on whatever subjects interested them. For reasons of both personal liberty and legal liability, WELL users retained title to their own content (“you own your own words”). In practice, they didn’t discuss ecology or geopolitics or even technology so much as the Grateful Dead, a band beloved by hippies and programmers alike.

The savvy Brand also gave tech journalists access for free. The idea was that an amorphous, leaderless, nonhierarchical flock of discussants of anything and everything would shepherd one another toward a continuously better-informed state of mind. “On the one hand,” Brand stood up and said at a Hackers Conference in 1984, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower all the time.” Both aspects of the statement proved prescient: Here was a casual prophecy of the expensive IP (vaccine recipes; superhero franchises ...) and cheap posting habits of our own digital culture. It’s less easy today to endorse what Brand told a San Francisco journalist around the same time: “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.” Angels must delight in bandying about ill-tempered fallacies more than theologians had suspected.

Over recent decades, Brand has become less a prophet than a consultant. Through his Global Business Network, “THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT,” as a Fortune profile called him, has counseled corporate boards on flexibility, adaptiveness, and learning. Here were the familiar precepts of neoliberal capital—a regime ever more spontaneous as to organization, and ever more unequal as to money and power—in Brand’s preferred idioms of biological evolution, systems theory, and self-education. Markoff writes that GBN “rose to prominence based on several big ideas: that globalization would change everything, computer networks would change everything, and the internet would change everything.” These two or three ideas are also, in another way, none. To predict that everything will change is not to identify the differential components of transformation and persistence that make any emergent phenomenon, including global capitalism, legible at all. At most, pointing hectically to globalization indicates the setting—Brand’s whole Earth again—of the titanic development.

Stewart Brand is an earnest and serious-minded person. Nevertheless, one of his moments of illumination, as related by Markoff, caused me to laugh out loud. Here Markoff recounts the courtship of Brand and Patty Phelan, his second wife, in the 1970s: “Brand and Phelan lay on a hillside in the late afternoon sun. He had taken off his shirt, and he suddenly realized that she had taken off hers as well. Phelan, who was living with someone else at the time, had fallen for Brand head over heels, and it would soon be apparent that he had finally found his great love.” It’s as if the baring of Phelan’s breasts unveils, at one fell swoop, a destined and enduring love.

Everyone knows that breasts lie under women’s clothing in much the way that everyone knows that Earth is a frail blue dot zooming through space: These things are always the case, only mostly you don’t see as much. Nothing is so hippieish about Brand as his sense that radical improvements to life as we know it derive naturally, or at any rate ought to, from sudden, flashing revelations of the already known, glimpsed as if for the first time. The principal undertaking of Brand’s Long Now Foundation, the main preoccupation of his later years, has been to build, with funding from Jeff Bezos, an enormous clock that chimes only once a century, with the aim of promoting “long-term THINKING” of the kind otherwise in short supply in the twenty-first–century United States. Like the planet in its entirety, deep time is always there, and often overlooked.

Brand has surely been right in believing that to register the full dimensions of Earth, and the whole span of historical and evolutionary time, would be the start of wisdom. The trouble is that this enthusiast of new beginnings so often mistook such preliminary awareness for a meaningful conclusion. The revolution in consciousness promoted by Brand forever toggled between two vastly different scales: the planetary, and the individual. Its great shortcoming was that it never learned, or seriously studied, how best to integrate the two scales—that of the liberated individual, on the one hand, and the imperiled planet, on the other—through human institutions on an intermediate scale. There was only the dead end of the commune, or the default of the corporation. And so a kind of smog of dissipated insight hangs over Brand’s life and that of the boomers. You might even say it covers the earth.

Several public figures and celebrities have publicly discussed or supported flat Earth concepts, including musicians, actors, and internet personalities.

Their endorsement often draws significant controversy and skepticism but increases visibility and appeal, especially among younger audiences who may admire or follow such figures.

Title:

Content: Earth Day 2023: A Moment for Recognizing Employee Contributions

56 minutes ago

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 21, 2023 / SAP

Each year on April 22, Earth Day is celebrated in more than 193 countries to advocate for environmental protection. It may be hard to believe, but the first Earth Day was half a century ago.

During the 1950s and 1960s, industries were emitting vast amounts of pollutants with hardly any consequences from the law, consumers, or the media. People were mostly oblivious to environmental concerns and the threat to human health. This perception changed when a massive oil spill in California inspired an unprecedented movement that united students, politicians, and everyday citizens to demonstrate against the devastating impact of 150 years of industrial development.

The first Earth Day in 1970 signaled the birth of the modern environmental movement.

A Turning Point

As the chief sustainability officer at SAP, I am keenly aware of the fundamental impact business and industry have on society, the economy, and the environment. Despite growing environmental awareness, the Earth has continued to take a massive amount of abuse since the first Earth Day.

The facts are alarming: according to the World Wildlife Organization, wildlife populations have plummeted 69% in 50 years. Human activities have doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing climate change that severely impacts weather and natural habitats. Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly, with only nine percent of plastic being recycled. The devastation to life on land and in the oceans is heartbreaking.

But there is good news as well. The modern-day grassroots movement triggered by young people has been highly successful, inspiring older generations with their determination to make the world a better place. At the same time, there has been a strong surge in governmental action and other movements such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on Climate Change and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation for Circular Economy.

Importantly, business can be the game changer as companies realize that environmental preservation and social justice must be a prominent element in their holistic strategy to ensure long-term survival.

Enabling Sustainable Impact

At SAP, we are very aware of the challenges our customers face as they strive to meet their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. Being able to reliably track and manage their progress is one major challenge. Our products and services aim to address this and help our customers record, report, and act on their ESG ambitions while incorporating sustainability in their business end to end.

SAP customers around the world generate 87% of total global commerce, which comes with a social and environmental footprint. We have an opportunity here to influence for the better - and we are taking it, with solutions supporting companies to measure and improve sustainability across entire networks, allowing them to effectively work toward an aspiration of zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality.

This journey is impossible without partnerships. SAP is teaming up to drive sustainable change with customers as well as a variety of other stakeholders. For example, we were among the first 50 signatories of the UN Global Compact and we co-founded the Value Balancing Alliance. In collaboration with the WBCSD, we work to enable companies to gain full transparency of their product life cycle and supply chain emissions. And we joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation network to accelerate the adoption of circular economy practices and processes.

Leading by Example

At SAP, we do not have a sustainability strategy, we have a business strategy that is sustainable. We believe economic, social, and environmental factors and performance are interrelated and integrate these in the holistic steering of our business. Consequently, SAP executive short-term incentive compensation includes sustainability targets (key performance indicators for sustainability) such as our carbon impact on top of financial targets.

We have set ourselves ambitious environmental targets in our Global Environmental Policy to foster the continuous enhancement of our environmental impact. This includes our science-based target to achieve net zero along our entire value chain in line with a 1.5° c future in 2030 - 20 years earlier than originally planned.

Executing on these targets is a company-wide effort and I am proud of our collaborative achievements. Our data centers and buildings worldwide have been running on 100% renewable energy since 2014. We use internal carbon pricing to offset business-related carbon emissions. We are phasing out single-use plastics. By 2025, one-third of our fleet will be ecofriendly cars, and all cars procured thereafter will be electric. SAP's environmental management system is implemented in over 50 sites in 29 countries worldwide and is certified by the renowned ISO 14001:2015 standard.

SAP is also one of the most diverse and inclusive software companies in the world, dedicated to building a business without bias. We have built an inclusive workplace, giving people the skills to thrive in a digital world and a culture that supports their health and well-being.

Besides following ethical business practices that respect and promote human rights and secure human rights due diligence as required, for example, in the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, we are very active when it comes to promoting social and inclusive entrepreneurship, offering programs and partnerships that range from inspiring early-stage innovation to scaling mature social enterprises.

Earth Day 2023 is a day to remember what we can accomplish together and how much more we still need to do. The movement pushed by the first Earth Day in 1970 has become a global force that has changed the way people think and act upon the environment. Regulators, investors, companies, consumers, and everyday citizens increasingly recognize the need to invest in our planet. But time is of the essence: "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all," the latest IPCC report states.

I feel humbled by the contributions we have achieved as a company. These results were only possible thanks to visionary leaders and SAP's highly motivated, dedicated employees working in every line of business and every region of the world. As our latest employee engagement surveys showed, 82% of SAP employees actively contribute to the company's sustainability goals. Many of them are driving specific programs today to inspire even more colleagues to join in.

In celebration of Earth Day 2023, I want to acknowledge our employees' outstanding efforts, alongside those of like-minded supporters across the globe, and invite all of us to collectively step up in safeguarding our planet.

View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from SAP on 3blmedia.com.

Contact Info:
Spokesperson: SAP
Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/sap
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE: SAP

View source version on accesswire.com:
https://www.accesswire.com/750645/Earth-Day-2023-A-Moment-for-Recognizing-Employee-Contributions

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Social media greatly amplifies their influence by allowing rapid dissemination and interaction surrounding these views.

Typical arguments used by flat-earthers include perceived inconsistencies in space imagery, such as photographs from NASA, the apparent flatness of the visible horizon upon personal observation, and deep distrust toward governmental and scientific institutions.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

Many adherents share the belief that agencies like NASA are engaged in conspiracies to conceal the true flat structure of the Earth.

The resurgence of this seemingly obsolete idea is tied strongly to social and psychological factors found in today’s digital culture.

Distrust in authority and mainstream science fuels attraction to alternative views.

Contrarian thinking appeals to some as a form of identity and rebellion.

Furthermore, internet platforms create insular communities where members mutually reinforce their beliefs without exposure to counterevidence, facilitating growth of the movement.