January 17th, 2007
Stefania Minotti
Resourceful living…
I’m lucky. I grew up in a generic semi-detached home in a middle-class neighborhood of the
Montreal suburbs. My parents are different. Like many Canadians, they are “off-the-boat”
immigrants that left their roots in search of a better life for themselves and their descendants.
They came from generations of farm cultivators and lived through hardship. They had little but
enough. And they wanted to ensure that my sister and I never forgot that.
Our house is minimalist. With no dishwasher, no microwave and no dryer, it does not qualify as
a 21st century dwelling.
My parents did not see the need for many things that, in most
households, are considered necessities. We have no big TV, no cable, no surround sound, no
stereo system, no cordless phone, not even a Christmas tree during the holidays. Everything
we have is essential.
My parents are resourceful. Throughout my childhood and to this day, the notion of waste has
always been foreign to me. Nothing that enters our house is ever thrown out unless it has
exhausted every possible use. Clothes that are too worn out or in an unacceptable state to be
donated to charity are cut up into cleaning rags. Objects that break or which are no longer
needed are modified to be used for something else: they sit and wait for my father to use his
creative genius in order to transform them into new and shiny purposeful objects. All year
round, we collect food remains to be composted and to serve as natural fertilizer for our very
generous vegetable garden. The garbage bag on the corner of our lot on Tuesday mornings has
always been no bigger than a football while our recycling box never fails to be on the verge of
explosion. Air conditioning was never achieved using some noisy, water-dripping metallic box
attached to the house, but rather by opening all of the windows in the house and creating
natural air currents by cross ventilation. This is how I lived for nine months of the year.
Summers were slightly different. Ever since I can remember, three months of the year were
spent with my family in Italy. By mid-June, my sister and I would pack up and leave our
heavily automobile-dependent, spacious and artificially-manicured neighborhood to spend our
summers in our parent’s hometown in southern Italy.
Santa Croce is a typical, small 17th
century town built atop a hill. It sits so comfortably in the rich landscape that it looks like an
extension of the earth reaching out between the trees and boulders. There, we would stay
with our grandparents whose home, like the majority of houses in the village, is hundreds of
years old.
From the foundations to the finishing coat of the walls, the entire house is
constructed from local limestone found in the neighboring farming fields. It remains cool in the
hot summers and it retains heat in the cold winters. Moreover, since the houses are usually
composed of few large rooms with divisions only made from furniture or movable partitions,
they can easily accommodate other occupancies such as stores and office space. The buildings
of this town are so durable that they are simply passed down from one generation to the next.
This, to me, is sustainable construction. The road system of Santa Croce is laid out in a grid
and local streets are no wider than three meters while the two main streets are seven meters
wide.
Given that the total area of the town is about four-and-a-half kilometers-squared,
movement on foot still remains, to this day, the easiest and most common mode of
transportation.
The majority of the five thousand inhabitants work in the town in small
businesses, while the rest usually commute on a daily basis to larger towns nearby. This, to
me, is a sustainable town.
When I was twelve, my parents made a decision I would despise for quite a few years: they
chose to send me to a small and strict all-girls catholic high school, privately run by nuns. In
promoting discipline and enforcing rules, the nuns went as far as monitoring the length of each
student’s uniform skirt with a ruler. There, I received a rich education. And there is where I
was introduced to the worship of material goods. The girls around me spoke of their beautiful
lavish homes and top-of-the-line possessions, while the older girls drove to school in shiny
luxury cars I didn’t even know existed. It is there that I realized I had been deprived all my
life. I cried, pulled tantrums and blamed my parents for not providing me with what everyone
else had. They rarely budged and most often failed to buy me what I wanted. They could not
understand why I was so fixated on being surrounded by material goods. I was miserable and
hated my parents for their humble ways throughout my adolescence.
Eventually, I gave up my attempts to convince my parents to be what they are not. And as I
grew older and wiser, I realized it was not me who had been underprivileged, as I thought for a
long time: rather, it was the others who had not been lucky enough to be educated by parents
who had not become victims of the North American ways of buy and throw. The legacy my
parents have passed on to me is one of economic responsibility, humility, and most
importantly, of environmental conscience. These principles guide my own lifestyle, and will
serve as a basis for my own children’s education and my career. For this and much more, I can
never be grateful enough to my parents.