Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Center for Spirituality and Sustainability will honor two dedicated and accomplished people during its annual Awards Dinner at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 23.
The dinner program will be held in the Leclaire Room on the N.O. Nelson Campus of Lewis and Clark Community College. SIUE Chancellor Julie Furst-Bowe will give the welcome and provide an update on SIUE’s efforts regarding sustainability.
This year’s Spirituality Leadership recipient is Sister Maxine Pohlman, School Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) and director of the La Vista Ecological Learning Center in Godfrey. The Sustainability Leadership recipient is botanist Dr. Richard Keating, SIUE emeritus professor of Biological Sciences, who served the university for 26 years.
Pohlman has been a member of the SSND, an international Roman Catholic congregation of women, since 1967. She has a master’s in religious education from Boston College and spent 28 years in religious education at elementary and secondary schools in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri.
In 2005, after receiving a certificate in “Ecology and the Human Spirit” from St. Thomas University, Pohlman joined the staff at La Vista Ecological Learning Center, a ministry of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. She currently serves as director of the Center where she leads ecological workshops, retreats and discussion groups. She works in community ecological education through SSND and is a member of St. Louis’s Inter-Community Ecological Council and its Inter-School Ecological Council.
Keating has been a research associate at Missouri Botanical Garden since 1969. In his courses, he emphasized the common evolutionary history of life, the vulnerability of species due to mankind’s activities, the services provided by healthy ecosystems, and mankind’s responsibility to respect and preserve the diversity of life. He has promoted education about the environment and is widely published on environmental issues.
Keating is presently vice president of the James and Aune Nelson Foundation, which supports environmental programs in southwestern Illinois. He was a founding director and leader for the Nature Preserve Foundation, which operates Edwardsville’s Watershed Nature Center; a founding director and officer for The Nature Institute, which preserves and restores natural land in southwestern Illinois; co-founder and chairman of the Piasa Palisades Local Sierra Club Chapter; and commissioner in the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission.
The Center has presented annual Spirituality and Sustainability Leadership awards since 2009, with the first Sustainability Leadership award going posthumously to R. Buckminster Fuller, designer of the Center’s geodesic dome.
For more information about the awards dinner or to make a reservation, call (618) 650-3246 or email jjacobso@siue.edu. Tickets are $50 per person and are partially tax deductible. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. A reservation form is also available on the Center’s new website www.fullerdome.org.