Think Globally, Act Locally

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"Think globally, act locally" in Sofia, Bulgaria

Think Globally, Act Locally was reportedly coined by David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, as the slogan for FOE when it was founded in 1969, although others have stated it was originated by Rene Dubos as an advisor to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Canadian futurist Frank Feather also chaired a conference called "Thinking Globally, Acting Locally" in 1979.^[1] Others suggested that this phrase is coined by French theologian Jacques Ellul.

Others later converged "global" and "local" into the single word "glocal," a term used by several companies (notably Sony Corporation and other major Japanese multinationals) in their advertising and branding strategies in the 1980s and 1990s.

The phrase is an in-joke among mathematicians, as it is often used in situations where the global structure of an object (e.g., a manifold, a Diophantine equation, or a group) can be inferred from the local structure. (See Hasse principle for a detailed description of one such example.)

This phrase is also the main one of the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations.^{[citation needed]}