SEEING THE WOOD AND THE TREES Sustainability education lessons from sustainable forest management

Abstract

Forests play a critical sustainability role in global health, in CO2 sequestration and climate change mitigation and in biodiversity conservation. • Forests also play an intrinsic role in local and global ecosystems, and understanding natural resource management programs like forestry management can provide important framing and context in sustainability education. • Sustainable forest management (SFM) principles are important in providing sustainable development norms for forestry management that can also be applied to other public and private resource sectors. • SFM also highlights the latent and explicit tensions that exist between natural resource management and human consumption and production and the trade-offs that are involved in public and private resource decision making. • SFM principles help demonstrate the importance of socio-ecological values and seeing the ‘wood and the trees’ in framing sustainability education.