While an advisor to the United Nations in 1972, Renes Dubos coined the term “Think Globally, Act Locally”. Thinking globally and acting locally challenges everyone to evaluate their individual impact on the environment. More recent concerns for how natural resources are managed have spawned the term “Sustainable development”, which usually refers to using natural resources in a sustainable way to insure that habitat, biodiversity, and resources will be present for future generations. Balancing the pros and cons of different management decisions to maintain habitat, biodiversity, and the use of natural resources in a sustainable way is difficult.

Students in Mr Ekness’s biology classes are preparing pretreatment forest product inventories on two study sites on Wilbraham & Monson Academy property. Each of the two study sites will have timber harvested in two different ways. One section of each site will be clear cut and another portion of each study site will be selectively cut. One of the sites has a mix of eastern white pine and different types of oak trees. The other site is a mixed hardwood forest stand. Students are presently collecting pretreatment data on the two study areas. This data will be used to evaluate future regeneration within the areas and allow for the comparison of forest composition in these areas to other areas on the Academy campus. The small-scale harvesting is a part of a long-term resource management plan for the school’s natural resources. The integration of the Academy’s natural resource management into curriculum is providing students the ability to develop an idea of how our school’s resources fit into the global perspective. Assessing the value of the resource and then harvesting part of the resource places the students in a situation that is shared by many who are managing natural resources in countries, communities, and businesses.
The forest products taken from the small scale harvesting are going to be used in a broad assortment of products. Mrs. Hsiao’s entrepreneurial studies students are evaluating the timber products that can be made from the various types of woods that will be harvested. Students are given an active role in assessing and determining possible management options and how to use the school’s resources. The project is exciting in many ways from both a biological and a resource economics perspective. From a biological viewpoint the small harvest is managing our school’s forests to have more mixed age groups of trees as well as provide diverse habitats that have been lost in this part of New England. Entrepreneurial students are challenged to develop sound management decisions for the resources produced in the harvest. They will be able to take raw material produced on the campus and design products that will be constructed for sale to buyers in the WMA community. Students are acquiring valuable skills from this connection with the natural resources on our campus that help them learn to think globally and act locally while planning for sustainable development of our natural resources in The Global EcoLearn Project^tm.