Photo credit: Susan Bence/WUWM
On April 15, Sister Joanne Poehlman was featured by Milwaukee’s NPR station, WUWM, in a piece about what materials can be recycled in her area. She had written in to the station’s Beats Me column with a question about recycling a particular plastic. Although she was pleased to receive an answer from the education coordinator for Keep Greater Milwaukee Beautiful, Sister Joanne was eager for a chance to expand the conversation beyond the details of recycling to a broader examination of how care for the Earth can become a way of being.
A cultural anthropologist by training and profession, Sister Joanne tends to look at the big picture, analyzing how people shape and are shaped by their social worlds. This extends to her thinking around care for creation. So, although she is involved in many environmentally conscientious activities—including as a member of the Green Team at Mt. Mary University where she is professor emeritus and still works as a tutor—she isn’t satisfied with just a list of tasks she can complete.
“We should, of course, be careful about our daily lifestyle choices and how we consume, but we should also ask why we are having the problems we are having today,” said Sister Joanne. “We must be thinking about both the transformation of individual behaviors and the transformation of systems. We can and must do both of those things at once.”
Sister Joanne also believes that an understanding and acceptance of the inextricable link between the natural environment and human society is key to kind of mindset that will make meaningful change possible. “In Chapter 4 of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis says that ‘nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live,’” said Sister Joanne. “That has to be the lens through which we see.”
To read the original article run by WUWM, visit https://www.wuwm.com/what-plastics-recycle-depends-on-where-you-live.