Interview with Gianfranco Scimone (2/5)

What was the trigger for you to start considering about the environment?


There was a beautiful beach in the coast of Almeria, Spain, near the town of Carboneras. Transparent water, splendid view and bright white architecture… I used to go there often in my 20s. However in the 1980s they constructed a cement factory. The beach was destroyed, many related companies poured in, hotels were built, and asphalt covered the dirt roads. This was a striking experience of how so-called “progress” destroyed an irreversible treasure. Even though the residents must have made economic progress, I feel they lost something more important.

An even bigger shock was in my home town, Taormina, Sicily which was the location of the movie “Grand Blue”. My family owned a wine orchard. Taormina has wonderful wine with a long history from the Roman period. The local governing body of the town of Castelmola, located right above Taormina, to where the territory of our wine orchard belonged to decided to build houses for homeless people nearby our orchard. We were concerned about the environmental effect but still agreed because it was something good for the society. However the government decided to build apartments instead of single story houses, and what is more they decided not to build septic tanks. All garbage, water sewage and chemicals started running into our orchard. We went to law of course, but for 10 years nothing changed, and in the end they didn’t make a septic tank but instead made a pipeline to run all sewage into a nearby river. The orchard and river were both crucially damaged. And to make the damage total they did not give the apartments to the homeless but sold them at a cheap price to the families who gave most votes.

This is such a typical example of what was going on in the world in the 1970s and 80s. Humans were allowed to discharge living waste into natural environment before, as long as it was within the circle of ecology. Now we have plastics, chemicals, materials that can’t be digested by nature anymore. We need to be responsible for what we are living on. My father lived a life from 1910s to 2000s, a very healthy era in terms of food and environment. I feel my generation, from 1950s to now, went through an age of destruction, and I want to descend this regret down to following generations so we won’t make the same mistake again.