ENVIRONMENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS from women of multicultural backgrounds ...... Penelope Polyzou was born in Athens, Greece, and studied Chemical Engineering in Vienna, Austria; and obtained her PhD Organic Chemistry from Berlin, Germany. She came to Canada with her family in 1976.

In different ways, we all sense that we live in rapidly changing social structures, and we are looking in all possible directions for some guide to help us cope with the changing society. It is now becoming more and more evident that the magnitude of modern human actions towards nature threatens our own existence and the economies based on them.

To most women of non-North American background, the more readily available knowledge to draw from is their original cultural experience.

The majority of these women came from technologically underdeveloped countries, where the survival and the flourishing of the human society is still more directly connected to a healthy natural environment, where all its components are allowed to interact with much less massive human intervention than in the North American countries.

These women are experienced with handling raw materials to prepare food, clothing, and cleaning products, and are overwhelmed and confused by the supply of processed and prefabricated products available here. Their previous lifestyle produced very little waste, or none at all.

It is thus only understandable that all the modern concepts of the environmentalists are not shocking them, instead, they seem obvious. Yet these women are still hesitant to fully apply the conservation practices possible today in our society. They try hard to assimilate themselves and their families into the 'Canadian' society and this leads to a fast adaptation of the average lifestyle in big cities, where the majority of them live.

There is also a limitation to the access of consumer information confronting them, partly due to language problems, among others. For instance, I am faced with disbelief every time I explain to women friends that the common table salt they are using contained aluminumsilicate (a kind of sand), in order to have its 'free running' properties; or that all 'smoked' meats contained a proven carcinogenic (sodium nitrite) as preservative. There are countless other examples of ignorance about the products offered in the stores and also about new habits they are acquiring, like the everyday shampooing of the hair. They feel obliged to buy and use all these fancy, over packaged cleaning products advertised, as a sign of a more 'civilized' lifestyle. This way they abandon very valuable methods in hygiene, such as using the sun's ultraviolet light as bleach and disinfectant (instead of chlorine) or using soda and vinegar as cleaning agents.

As a possible way to revive and incorporate the very valuable and essential methods of resources utilization known to most immigrant women into our lifestyle, is to organize information meetings where knowledge and experience about these issues can be conveyed and exchanged. The essence of these meetings can be made public so that more broad discussions can be initiated, which might help us all change our ways of living and interacting with our environment.

This article was originally published in Cross Cultures Magazine in Volume 1 - Issue 4 - 1992. Unauthorized copying, distribution or other usage without express written permission of the publisher is prohibited.