New
Internationalist 343
March
2002
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Speed-Up / SLOW DOWN
The movement has received a boost recently because of European scandals over food safety, including the plagues of mad-cow and foot-and-mouth disease. Public revulsion against genetically modified food has also helped to cement support. For Carlos Petrini the slow-food movement is a bet on quality against cheap industrial food. To this end the movement publishes Italy’s best guide to wine, restaurants and foodstores, Gambero Rosso, which evolved out of the food supplement in the Left-wing paper Il Manifesto. The movement has now embraced organic methods of agriculture to produce safer food more slowly that costs a bit more. It is counting on a bit of wiggle-room in household budgets to challenge the industrial diet. Petrini sees Slow Food as ‘not merely a gastronomical organization but one that deals with the problems of the environment and world hunger without renouncing the right to pleasure’. Contacts: A beautifully designed website: www.slowfood.com Main Office: US Office: UK Contact:
Other priorities include the use of recycling, alternative energy sources and ecological transportation systems. The movement rejects the notion that it is anti-progress and holds that technologies can be employed to improve the quality of life and the natural urban environment. To qualify, a city must be vetted and regularly checked by inspectors to make sure they are living up to the Slow City standard of conduct. The movement hopes eventually to build a worldwide membership inspired by the notion of ‘civilized harmony and activity grounded in the serenity of everyday life by bringing together communities which share this ideal. The focus is on appreciation of the seasons and cycles of nature, cultivation of local produce and growing through slow, reflective living.’ For more on the movement, including their charter of principles,
The idea of the clock is to provoke thinking about the earthly environment as a single thing, stretching from 10,000 years back to 10,000 years in the future. Stewart Brand, past editor of the Whole Earth Journal and a Long Now board member describes it as: ‘The idea that you move in the now and feel a responsibility for what happens in the now; if you can push the now out past your own lifetime in a couple of directions, that’s good. If you can push it way out, that’s better.’ The emphasis of the project is to get people away from thinking in the hurried immediacy of their everyday lives and look at the long-term process of change that we are engaged in. Contact:
Excerpts from the reasons for establishing the Society: Verein zur Verzögerung der Zeit, Interdisziplinäres Institut für Forschung und
This movement has made most headway in Europe, where the 32-hour-week has been officially legislated in France. Similar moves are afoot in Germany, Denmark and Italy. There are, however, organizations advocating a reduction in compulsory work across the industrial world. One of the possible advantages of reduced work time is the effect of economic activity on the environment – reductions in both the material inputs of production and the wastes of both the production process and the throwaway consumer goods that fuel our current economic growth. Another advantage is that with more free time there is the potential of greater volunteer and political energy going into the public sphere. Organizations involved in the reduced work-time movement: Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand Canada France United States Society for the Reduction of Human Labour,
Contact: And for something completely different check out www.standardtime.com to hook up with the campaign to eliminate daylight savings time.
Contact: The website for the Buy Nothing Day campaign in the UK, www.Buynothingday.co.uk also has links with the Buy Nothing Campaign throughout Europe.
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This movement to defend endangered local foods has its roots in Italy but has since grown
to 65,000 members in 42 countries. It is headquartered in the Piedmontese market town of
Bra. It is opposed to the fast-food monoculture that is associated with franchise food
outlets and the growth of supermarkets. Slow Food champions local cheeses and salamis,
varieties of slower-growing grains and types of endangered livestock, like the Paduan hen
and the Piedmontese cow. According to the movement’s founder, Carlos Petrini: ‘A
hundred years ago people ate between 100 and 120 different species of food. Now our diet
is made up of at most ten or twelve species.’
Inspired by the Slow Food movement, 32 Italian cities and towns have committed themselves
to preserve their unique character by creating ‘slow cities’. According to the
Mayor of the Tuscan town of Greve: ‘The American urban model has invaded our cities,
making Italian towns look the same. We want to stop this kind of globalization.’ The
Slow City programme involves enlarging parks and squares and making them greener,
outlawing car alarms and other noise that disturbs the peace, and eliminating ugly TV
aerials, advertising posters, neon signs.
This organization is rallying around the notion of building an eight-foot-tall,
state-of-the-art clock that will keep time for 10,000 years. It uses no electricity (all
done with Bronze Age technology) and will be placed in a dry highland area. It harks back
to the era of the big town clock between the 16th and 18th centuries in towns like Venice
and Prague.
An eclectic group of some 700 members drawn from the German-speaking world and
headquartered in Austria. ‘The Society does quality research on the phenomena of
time, organizes symposia, publishes regularly. Occasionally we go activist ourselves in
the hope of drawing attention to unnecessary hustle and bustle that shapes so much of our
lives.’ The society encourages members to prolong the time taken whenever it makes
sense to do so, regardless of the kind of activity they engage in. They should stand for
the right to pause for reflection in situations where mindless activism and vested
interests produce solutions that are expedient rather than genuine.
Reducing working hours has long been an important theme of the labour movement. Once the
eight-hour day was thought to be an outrageously radical demand. Today a range of
organizations is pushing for anything from a 32-hour week to a four-hour day. Some effects
of this would necessarily slow down our overheated economy and improve our quality of
life. According to the Four Hour Day Foundation: ‘Modern life remains a headlong rush
into long commutes, two-income families, late nights at work and exhausting recreation.
How could this be? What is it about our collective personality that drives us over this
cliff of endless rat race?’
A BI-monthly magazine produced by the Adbusters Media Foundation in Vancouver, Canada.
Adbusters groups together form a creative band of activists who are at the center of
anti-corporate culture jamming. It was they who initiated both Buy Nothing Day and No TV
Week. They have produced a series of leaflets and posters and pioneered the notion of
‘subvertising’ – the creation of clever anti-ads that subvert the creation
of artificial needs on which runaway consumption is based. Adbusters has pulled together a
culture-jammers network, mostly from North America but also from other parts of the world.
The organization ‘believes culture jamming can be for our era what civil rights was
to the 1960s, what feminism was to the 1970s and what environmental activism was to the
1980s.’ Adbusters is a rich vein of anti-consumerist ideas and images just waiting to
be tapped.
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