Living as international student in Hokkaido, Japan, I got many opportunities that only could be accessed for international students. From February to March, I were becoming teaching assistant for high school student in Hokkaido on Super Science High School (SHS) Program. In this program, students were choosen from different senior high schools to learn about environment by doing study tour. They come from different high schools, namely Sapporo Keisei Senior High School, Sapporo Minami Senior High School, Sapporo Intercultural and Technological Senior High School, Sapporo Higashi Senior High School, Kushiro Koryo Senior High School, Iwamizawa Higashi Senior High School, Asahikawa Nishi Senior High School, and Sapporo Nishi Senior High School. After study tour, they were presenting their study tour result in the International Forest Environmental Forum by the title ?The Symbiotic relationship between Human and Forests?. This Forum was held by Hokkaido Sapporo Keisei High School at Sunday, March 8^th 2015.

There are two teams of study tour, One team learning about Tropical Rainforest in Malaysia and Singapore, and the other team went to Temperate Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada. They went to that two countries around 10 days. For tropical rain forest team, they were learning tropical peat land, tropical forest and environmental education in Malaysia and also water management in Singapore. Then for Canada team, they were visiting temperate rain forest composition, local wood utility and environmental changes. I was really envy with that students, they still high school students but they learn about nature from their home country, Japan, to overseas.

I helped them to make a poster, to give a comments, and to listen their presentation all in English. By being teaching assistant, I got many new insights from what they did during study tour, like medicinal plants utilisation, tropical peat land forest and its problem, environmental Education, Palm plantation, Water management, Local wood usage and its sustainable management, Importance of energy circulation through various ecosystems, and Forestry issues.

They comparing plants usage as medicine in Japan and in Malaysia and learning how important those plants for human being. Then, in the tropical peat land forest there are many problems such as illegal logging and forest fire which is triggering released carbon from the peat land and enhancing global temperature. They also learned on environmental education to elementary school students. In the tropical forest, Palm plantation also become one of the problem that can threat tropical forest existence. They suggested people to use certified palm oil because this kind of palm oil is using environmental friendly palm oil processing.

In Singapore, they studied water management because Singapore is small country with limited fresh water. They manage their limited water resources to fulfil Singaporean water demand. To enhance local economy and reducing wood transportation emission, local wood usage and its sustainable management is important because most of wood demand in Japan is imported from other countries. In the other hand, forest area in Japan is increased slowly.

After poster presentation, there was presentation from Mr. C. W. Nicole from Canada but he already become Japan citizen. Full profile of Mr. C. W. Nicol can be read in this following link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._W._Nicol . Even he was speaking in Japanese, I could get the main idea of his speech. He presented his experiences with title ?Seeing the Future from the Forest? on establishing nature school, and how human can live with nature in harmony. I though that he is the real environmentalist because he spend most of his lifetime contribute to environment. I wish I could be like him.

Lessons that we could take from this event is to learn about nature we have to get involved with nature, so we can understand importance of nature, how nature contribute and support our life. Then, we also have to learn about it as early as possible because the more we know nature, the more we love to nature.