Story by Zoe Chen
Editor-in-Chief

Part of my summer included a half-hour interaction with a very conspicuous flat Earther. 

I spent July at a UC Davis summer program, and on Saturday mornings I biked with friends to the Davis farmers market. We had heard of the flat Earther, and we made it our quest to see him ourselves at his weekly farmers market booth. The market is a seemingly endless walkway lined on either side with tents, and we treated it as a yellow brick road with an emerald city at the end. We walked the stretch like Dorothy and friends, pausing often to smell a soap or try a nectarine sample but never forgetting our destination. 

It was not shiny green but a white tent like all the others we had passed, and from afar it could have sold tomatoes or peaches or niche vegetables, but instead of a bread bakery or farmstand, its banner said in all capital letters “Earth is flat.” (As an aside, over the summer I also stood 20 feet above an active nuclear reactor, which, so much for the idea put into my head by The Simpsons, was not a hazardous green but a calm blue. Many things that ought to have been green this summer failed to meet my expectations.)

Pro-flat Earth memes hung from the tent’s rafters, and the table set up in front of the booth had maybe a hundred different postcard-sized printouts with flat Earth stock images captioned with phrases like “Gravity is fake!” and “They lied to you!” Posters explained the Antarctic ice wall, and shirts for sale read “Once you go Flat, you never Globe back!” Smaller flags and signs became increasingly off-topic and bewildering the longer I studied them. My personal favorite was a backgroundless image of Donald Trump giving two thumbs up captioned “Time Traveler.”

The gentleman behind the booth was on the older side but otherwise defied my mental image of what a flat Earther should look like. He did not wear a tin foil hat or a camo vest, he did not have unkempt hair or disheveled clothes, and he did not have a long beard or a permanent frown. A small crowd surrounded his stall, and he smiled good-naturedly at those who approached him and politely bade them good day as they departed. 

It was interesting to watch people try and fail to successfully explain gravity or not know what to say when asked how they knew that photos from the International Space Station were not fabricated. The man engaged in civil conversation with anyone who tried to disprove his flat Earth claims and provided comical lines like “Yes, the Earth is round. Round like a pizza.” 

I tell people the story of my flat Earth adventures as a humorous anecdote of my summer, but the more I tell the story, the more my perception of the experience changes. It is hard for me not to be dismissive of someone whose beliefs seem so fundamentally wrong, but still I am developing a respect for the fact that this person set up a booth in a liberal college town and tried to explain his worldview in a mature manner without aggression, even as people cursed at him and heckled. Ignorance of science is not something to be commended, but civility is, and I truly think there is something to be learned from interacting with people of widely varying beliefs, no matter how much one disagrees with them.