Insatiable Appetite

The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World

Richard P. Tucker

In a comprehensive and unified program of conservation, designed to replace scarcity with abundance, forestry and forest lands commonly occupy a key role. They may provide a continuing flow of products to satisfy human wants; and they may ensure the protection of soil, water flows, and local climate, without which food and agriculture in many lands will continue to deteriorate. They may, then, hold the whole task of conservation together.

Introduction: Tropical Timber Exploitation in the Twentieth Century

The global loss of tropical forests mounted slowly for several centuries, then began a rapid acceleration during the 1940s. The increase occurred for many reasons; the most important undoubtedly was the expansion of agriculture in all of its forms. Export crops and beef production degraded or replaced incalculable extents of tropical forest and wetland and savanna, as if the forest itself had no biological or even economic value. The benefits of these industries to investors and consumers have been enormous, constituting the primary driving force behind this great ecological transformation. But the value of the forest itself has also risen on local and global markets, primarily in the form of timber products. As the tropical timber products industry became industrialized, wood products joined foods as a major commodity that northern economies could harvest from tropical lands, ¹ and as light railways, heavy-wheeled vehicles for grading roads and hauling timber, and more efficient multipurpose sawmills became available to meet rapidly increasing global demand, forests retreated before the logger as well.

The United States provided markets for tropical hardwoods beginning in the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century the market for tropical hardwoods accelerated, but as a portion of total U.S. hardwood consumption, it was always minute. Domestic hardwoods like oak, maple, and walnut provided as much as 99 percent of each year's market. In terms of harvests in some tropical countries, the American market for tropical hardwood produced major ecological impacts. To make the picture more complex, the flow of timber between the United States and the tropics was reciprocal, for Pacific and Caribbean markets were important for American conifer lumber from the late nineteenth century on, when the U.S. timber industry began looking for foreign customers in order to diversify its markets and stabilize its operations.

Americans played four major roles in the expanding scale of tropical forest exploitation: as investors and consumers, and as loggers and foresters. Logging companies measured their effectiveness largely in terms of the expanding scale and efficiency of the extraction of wood products. A foreign mahogany logger was aware of his lack of knowledge, but he could recognize a tall, straight mahogany trunk even if he found only one per acre- and that was enough for him. Professional foresters saw their effectiveness increasingly in terms of managing the forests for a sustainable yield of wood products. Although foresters studied tropical ecosystems, coming over the course of decades to understand their complexity, fragility, and limited extent, most of their time was spent studying commercially important species, since no species had any "value" unless it was recognized by the buyers of finished products. Even more than agronomists and ranch managers, they struggled to understand how to maintain the forest for future human use. By the 1950s some of them had begun to wrestle with the social and ecological issues that are imbedded in forest use.

These foresters faced a profound dilemma, which even today is unresolved. Was it possible, by introducing more systematic exploitation of timber resources, to establish sustainable forestry in the tropics and contribute to social welfare into the future? Or would modern timber technology be yet another power in the hands of those who wanted quick profits at the expense of entire ecosystems? Through the work of pioneering American tropical foresters, we can glimpse what the forests of Southeast Asia and Latin American were like at various times, how the patterns of human pressure on them escalated, and how these ecological technicians envisioned the future of domesticated tropical ecosystems.

The Yankees' Tropical Woodlot: Timber Exploitation in the Caribbean Basin

Timber had been a profitable export from the Caribbean Basin since the time of the first Iberian settlements. When American loggers and timber buyers began working the hardwood forests of the Caribbean Basin in an extensive way in the 1880s, they entered a three-hundred-year-old competition among Europeans for capturing treasures like dyewoods and mahogany. Two major forest types were exploited over the centuries. One was lowland moist forest, which contained the precious dye and cabinet woods that grow as individual trees in the midst of many other species. The other was the higher, drier pine forest, useful primarily for inexpensive building lumber. The two stories had different histories, and each history had a distinctive American role.

High-Grading in the Lowland Forests

High-grading- felling only the finest trees- was practiced by the first Portuguese to intrude on the Bahia coast of Brazil in the early sixteenth century. These loggers were interested only in brazilwood, which they exported to Europe as a source of red dye. The dye was highly valued in the clothing industry, which was expanding to meet the demand generated by a rising and prospering population. ² By the end of the 1500s highgrading had reduced the forest along the coasts and riverways to economic insignificance. Constrained by the only timber transport method then available, a team of oxen, loggers rarely penetrated far from waterways or into steep hilly areas. The full diversity of the deeper forest remained.

During the same era, European dyewood hunters, or Baymen, discovered logwood, an equally valuable source of red dye, growing along the Caribbean littoral. A hardwood of the lowland moist forest, logwood grew prolifically from Campeche and Yucatán in Mexico through coastal Belize to the Miskito coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. In the 1600s, despite the Spanish navy's attempts to suppress them, British and other non-Spanish privateers generated a large-scale export of logwood for the cloth mills of northern Europe. This trade lasted for over 300 years. ³ The Baymen's anarchic ways served them well in the turbulent political conditions that prevailed until 1670, when Spain and Britain agreed by treaty that Belize would become the British possession of British Honduras. ⁴

Even thereafter political instability was so severe and working conditions were so harsh that the loggers took what they could easily find and sailed away. Logs had to be floated to the coast in the rainy- the very rainy-season. ⁵ One early traveler observed,

During the wet season, the land where the logwood grows is so overflowed, that they step from their beds into water perhaps two feet deep, and continue standing in the wet all day, till they go to bed again; but nevertheless account it the best season in the year for doing a good day's labour in.. ..When a tree is so thick that after it is logged, it remains still too great a burthen for one man, we blow it up with gunpowder. ⁶

The size of the logwood tree did not affect the extraction of dye, so the loggers took all available trees, large and small, ultimately depleting accessible supplies almost totally. The loggers were itinerant and the work was very difficult-modern ideals of sustained-yield forestry were beyond imagining.

As easily accessible stands of logwood quickly declined, the Baymen began using oxen for hauling and Garifunas (escaped African slaves from the British Caribbean islands) for laborers, thereby expanding the reach of their operations. Exports to Europe rose from 700 tons in 1800 to 35,000 tons in 1896. In Jamaica logwood supplies actually increased during the nineteenth century, because the species turned out to be an aggressive invader of deserted crop lands. When slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1834, large areas of fertile hill lands reverted to secondary woodland, which contained logwood. By 1897, at the beginning of the era when banana planters recleared those lands, logwood was Jamaica's most valuable export, exceeding sugar and coffee. ⁷

The era of logwood exports to Europe ended suddenly in the late 1890s when chemical dyes totally replaced dyewoods throughout Europe. Only 3,600 tons of logwood were exported from British Honduras in 1913. ⁸ This was just one of numerous examples of industrial products replacing depleted tropical resources on international markets.

In the first century of the colonial enterprise, dyewoods were almost the only timbers exploited for European use. European navies changed that in the seventeenth century, as they began using mahogany in European and Caribbean shipyards. Havana was the major shipyard for the colonial Spanish fleet, and in the 1600s its forested hinterlands began to be combed for mahogany, an effort that continued well into the 1800s.

A major increase in the demand for mahogany occurred in the mid-eighteenth century, when it became the most fashionable furniture wood in Europe. Hepplewhite and Chippendale styles, whose elegant lines and elaborate detail required a fine-grained, easily tooled wood, were perfected by craftsmen working with mahogany. ⁹ In more recent centuries, mahogany, or caoba (as it is known wherever it grows), has epitomized the commercial wealth of the rainforests of Central America and the Caribbean islands. Like most tropical hardwoods, mahogany grows scattered in mixed-species forests, not in easily accessible single-species stands. Mahogany logging inevitably was a matter of high-grading. Sawyers with their oxen searched the forest for single large trees of high commercial value, carving out logging trails as they went. Each great tree that fell shattered numerous smaller trees in its path. After the woodsmen left a logged mahogany forest, as many as a hundred other species remained standing, as did young, twisted, or old mahogany trunks. The best seed trees of mahogany were felled, and as the oxen dragged them to a nearby river for floating away, they damaged still more trees and tore the soil along the paths and riverbanks. Mahogany does not regenerate easily or grow rapidly; it can take up to one hundred years for a tree to mature. Thus, although a degraded mahogany forest was still ecologically stable, its quality as a sylvan community of species was damaged.

British loggers led the way in this phase of forest exploitation, searching the entire Caribbean coast from Campeche on for mahogany, Spanish cedar, and other precious cabinet woods. By the late 1700s the scale of mahogany extraction had become far greater than the dyewood trade had ever been. The logging was carried on in a setting of legal confusion: titles to land were cloudy and contract systems were rudimentary. Quarrels were frequent among the mahogany cutters, most of whom worked the forests without bothering to establish formal rights. During the last half of the nineteenth century, first small-scale Yankee loggers and then larger-scale Yankee timber companies became a major force on the islands and mainland coasts of the Caribbean. Their operations became the major pressure on the mahogany and pine forests outside the British possessions, intricately interweaving the U.S. forest economy with that of the Caribbean Basin.

The first Americans to appear were the hardwood purchasers, who were not lumbermen but shippers-middlemen between the loggers in the rainforest and the manufacturers of fine furniture in American cities from New Orleans to Boston. In the first decades of U.S. independence they imported mahogany mostly from Cuba, by way of their commercial offices in Havana, but also from Honduras and British Honduras. The East Coast markets thus provided profits for Cuban and Spanish speculators who cleared mahogany forests in central Cuba to grow the white gold of sugar. ¹⁰

As urban affluence expanded in the United States during the nineteenth century, an increasingly prosperous middle class demanded more tropical hardwoods for furniture, paneling, and other uses. Craftsmen used several rainforest species in their fine cabinetry, but mahogany dominated the market. Yankee timber importers began searching for mahogany stands and logging concessions throughout the region.

At first the Yankee entrepreneurs and speculators were a miscellaneous lot who made short-term investments in small concessions and organized the logging themselves; their operations are difficult to trace. Probably representative of them was Walter Wilcox, best known as a writer of wilderness camping books, who operated in the rainforest of Cuba. Shortly after Cuban independence, when American investments in Cuba became safer than they had been under Spanish rule, Wilcox bought a timber concession on the Bay of Pigs on the south coast, in an area of largely intact mangrove swamps and hardwood forests, where a few scattered local farmers scratched out a minimal subsistence. Wilcox saw himself as a resourceful frontiersman: a year after his first reconnaissance visit on a sailboat hired in the port of Cienfuegos he returned "with a force of carpenters and laborers and a cargo of lumber and tools. A place was cleared in the forest for a house, docks were built, gardens laid out, wells dug." He added almost parenthetically, "In all that time we were not molested by the natives." ¹¹

Wilcox was typical for his time in his contradictory attitudes toward the forest. One feeling was admiration verging on awe at the forest that he was cutting. Echoing the prose of many other northern writers after their first exposure to its grandeur and mystery, he wrote in 1908 for the National Geographic that

the number of species of trees is very great, and, while including such splendid varieties as mahogany, sabicu, ebony, and Spanish cedar, there are many other hardwoods, probably 150 in number, some of which are very rare or quite unknown to experts in tropical timbers.. ..The mahogany and cedar are imposing trees, the latter sometimes reaching a diameter of seven feet. Their massive branches, hung with purple and yellow orchids, bromeliads, ferns, and other parasitic plants, are the resort of parrots and other birds of brilliant plumage. ¹²

For that audience, lovers of natural history, he presented a photo of teams of oxen hauling the felled mahogany logs to the coast. In a photograph on the next page, he showed a farmer proudly observing a field of corn; his caption blandly read, "Six months before this picture was taken the field was covered with a dense tropical forest." ¹³ This was still the era when the forests seemed so vast that it was civilizing work to clear them for one's own profit and for the local peasants' corn crops as well.

Other early operations were run along the Caribbean coast of Mexico, including what was probably the first long-term operation by a firm specializing in tropical hardwood imports. The Ichabod Williams family firm of New York, whose lumber operations specialized in tropical hardwoods throughout the company's long life from 1838 to 1966, became specialists in negotiations with local authorities, contracts with local labor, and shipment of logs to their sawmill in Bayonne, New Jersey. ¹⁴

When easily accessible supplies in Mexico were depleted and the first series of land concessions ran out toward the end of the nineteenth century, several American companies began searching the Central American rainforests, starting across the border in Guatemala. The region was crudely cosmopolitan. Mexican businessmen from Tabasco, as well as Englishmen and Lebanese from British Honduras, competed with the Yankees as investors. The loggers they hired were very skillful with ax and saw, but they were also a motley, itinerant collection of men who were far from home for long periods of time. Many of them were working off debt peonage incurred in other parts of Central America and Mexico. On their occasional recreational forays into muddy frontier towns, they drank, brawled, and whored. A recent observer in the mahogany region of northern Guatemala describes "a pervasive tone of immorality in the entire operation." ¹⁵ Like the rootless loggers in the commercially penetrated forests of many other countries, they had no stake in the health of the forest, which they attacked like commercial game hunters. In that turbulent setting the largest of the Yankee firms, the American-Guatemalan Mahogany Company, founded in 1907, cut over 16 million board feet of mahogany in twenty-three years, mostly in the Usumacinta River basin. ¹⁶ Companies like this enabled U.S. mahogany imports to double between 1900 and the late 1920s. ¹⁷

Farther around the Caribbean coast, into the Miskito coastal forests of Nicaragua, the George D. Emery Company of Boston was the most important producer of timber products. The company experienced initial success, but ultimate frustration. Its history illustrates the formidable difficulties that affected profit making in the timber industry at the turn of the century. In 1894 Emery negotiated two leases with the Nicaraguan government that gave him the timber rights in previously untouched forests along rivers flowing into the Caribbean. Because of the level of his investment and the extent of his marketing, Emery accelerated the high-grading of the best hardwoods in the region. ¹⁸ Casa Emery, as it came to be known, was soon exporting about 1,000 mahogany and Spanish cedar logs monthly to Boston, an unprecedented scale of operations. Its work force of 1,300 was mostly drawn from the region and included local Miskito Indians and other indigenes, but some one hundred Americans were imported for the more highly skilled jobs. ¹⁹ In 1905, using newly available dynamite, Emery began deepening river channels to smooth travel and log floating. ²⁰ Dynamite was used in the same way by Emery's competitors as well. The channel blasting and the logging operations along the riverbanks had downstream effects: siltation and the disrupted flow of water damaged lowland riverine systems near the coast by increasing flooding and damaging fisheries.

No timber concession was ever granted except through political maneuvering, and none was secure against changing political winds. Casa Emery's concessions had been granted by a friendly regime in Managua, but Central American governments were notoriously unpredictable and faction-ridden. Timber operators, in contrast to banana growers, could easily be replaced; high-grading for maximum short-term profits was the inevitable result. In 1909 Emery became entangled in a Nicaraguan presidential campaign, one in which the U.S. government was enmeshed as well. Emery backed the losing candidate, and the new government retaliated by revoking his concession, ending his fifteen years of logging on the Miskito coast. Washington attempted to intervene through diplomatic channels, on the usual principle of defending the sanctity of American investments abroad, but this time it did no good. Finally Emery sold out in 1911 to Ichabod Williams, whose sources of supply were diverse, enabling him to continue his business for a full century.

Casa Emery initiated the flow of a much higher level of capital and milling technology into mahogany extraction than the rainforest had ever experienced. As in many other fields of resource extraction, the scale of American capitalism shaped major changes. The aftermath of World War I brought a momentous change to the forests, one that originated in Detroit. After a severe but brief postwar depression in the timber industry, mahogany logging investments expanded in the 1920s, and what was most needed was access to forests that were even more remote. Motor-driven tractors appeared, along with large skidders and log-wagons-equipment that far surpassed oxen: tractors could operate with ease on hilly terrain and could haul logs several miles from the cutting site to the river.

The new scale of investment and technology was evident downriver as well. At log collection points near the mouths of rivers, more sophisticated sawmills began to appear that were capable of milling a wider variety of species and utilizing a higher percentage of each log. The situation was parallel to expanded-scale technology in the sugar refineries. The imported sawmills were too expensive and too efficient for local millers: they could neither afford them nor compete with them. Ladinos were beginning to produce mahogany furniture, but their efforts were largely stymied by the financial and organizational power of U.S. and European industry. Two highly qualified American observers noted that "there is a small but steadily increasing local industry producing mahogany lumber, mainly from inferior material unsuitable for export, but inefficiency of plant and limited shipping facilities have hitherto precluded it from competing to any material extent with the highly organized lumber manufacturing industry in the United States." ²¹ Local operators could function only on the fringes of the northerners' corporate power.

Exploiting the Caribbean Pine Forests

A very different dimension of the logging business appeared in the pine forests that grew on drier land and poorer soils in the interior highlands of Mexico and Central America. ²² Little is known about the relationship between subsistence life and commercial pine extraction before the nineteenth century, although the issue must have been significant as far back as early colonial times. The Spanish were actively interested in the pine belt, for several species of pine provided not only low-cost building materials for local use but also pitch and tar for naval stores, just as the pine forests of the Atlantic coast provided for the American colonies. In the 1700s the Spanish colonial regime of Peru relied extensively on the Central American pine forests to supplement the Peruvian uplands as a source of material for shipbuilding and naval maintenance at its shipyards in Guayaquil. ²³

By the nineteenth century these uses depleted pine forests around the Caribbean. These semiarid forests were also grazing grounds for local livestock, since soils were too poor for prosperous crop production. The villagers annually burned the undergrowth in the dry season to encourage the stronger growth of new fodder. In the process they destroyed new pine seedlings; moreover, many of their fires burst out of control, severely damaging more mature trees. ²⁴

Some pine forests were protected from commercial exploitation by their remoteness from transport arteries. In these areas, however, methods of logging were primitive and wasteful: only a relatively small portion of each tree was milled. Partly as a result of this, the production of export lumber remained limited until well into the twentieth century, despite the fact that several of the densely populated islands of the Caribbean imported pine lumber from the southeastern United States for the construction of their expanding coastal towns.

The risks faced by potential U.S. investors in Caribbean Basin timberlands were great, as the Casa Emery case demonstrated. It was difficult to gain and harder to keep logging concessions from local governments. The boundaries of the concessions and their certainty of tenure against the rights of local landlords and peasants were unpredictable, and concessions were likely to be revoked abruptly. Of course, a wealthy or politically powerful corporation could play the game of influence as well as the local regime. The banana companies were the only ones in that league.

American tropical fruit companies began large-scale forest clearing on the Caribbean coast around 1900. In the early years of their operations, they simply removed the primary forest, making no effort to harvest timber for commercial profit. In 1923 the Vaccaro brothers, soon to found the Standard Fruit Company, became the first to harvest timber as one stage of their effort to vertically integrate the entire banana production process. ²⁵ Three years earlier, in 1919, when pine was scarce in the southeastern United States, a Louisiana lumbering family purchased a concession giving it the rights to 80,000 acres of pine forest behind Bragman's Bluff on the Miskito coast of Nicaragua. The family intended to export pine lumber to New Orleans. The declared value of the new venture was $50,000. The Vaccaro brothers, whose banana empire was well established in the adjacent lowlands of Honduras, were looking for land in Nicaragua. They purchased the small firm in 1923 and christened it Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company. They renegotiated the original concession with Managua and gained the right to import their machinery duty-free. In return the company agreed to pay a small export tax on lumber.

The new owners quickly invested $5 million to construct port facilities at Puerto Cabezas and one hundred miles of private railroad to serve both lumber and banana operations. They imported a modern sawmill from Louisiana to supplement the three existing small mills along the coast, and they began exporting pine boards in 1925. This was the first step toward realizing Standard Fruit's long-range ambition to operate in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean countries.

The Vaccaro brothers' joint investment in Standard Fruit and Bragman's Bluff amounted to $8 million. ²⁶ That investment totally dominated Nicaragua's Caribbean coast in the 1920s. Harold Denny, a New York Times correspondent, traveled throughout Nicaragua in 1929, investigating the civil war and American corporate involvement. He described Puerto Cabezas, one of two main ports on the Miskito coast—the other was Bluefields—as a Yankee enclave with rough environs.

Puerto Cabezas is even more American than Bluefields. It is an industrial village of some 1,200 population, situated on a broad, flat plain overlooking the Caribbean. It looks and is precisely like a lumber mill village in some southern state in North America.. ..[Standard Fruit] owns the town and everything in it. The inhabitants, American families from American villages, live in quantity production wooden houses rented from the company, buy their clothing and groceries from the company's store, and find their relaxations in a club built by the company.. ..From the margin of the American settlement the native town of Bilway, 100 feet wide and two miles long, stretches parallel with the seashore. It is a filthy street of Chinese and German stores interspersed with half-breed bars and brothels. The population is largely "mestizo," a mongrel of Mosquito Indian and Jamaican negro, and the languages range from bad Spanish and degenerate Mosquito to Oxford English. ²⁷

In sum, it was both a typical self-contained company town and a typically unstable, rowdy town on the frontier of the exploitation of tropical Nature. It was extremely difficult to maintain orderly operations during the civil war that engulfed Nicaragua in the following years. The Caribbean coast was frequently in revolt against the remote capital. Sandino periodically attacked the fruit companies and their subsidiaries from his base in the rugged interior along the Honduran border between 1926 and 1934, when he was trapped and assassinated by Somoza's men in Managua. ²⁸

In that setting difficulties arose over the duration and territorial extent of the concession that had been granted to Bragman's Bluff. Neither the company nor the government was careful about the ownership claims of local smallholders. Some years previously the Miskito Indians living in the area had confirmed their title to the lands they tilled in one of their periodic negotiations with the distant government. Campesino communities had survived in close symbiosis with the pine forests for many years; many of their settlements dated back to pre-Columbian times. Reacting to the fruit company's 1923 concession, the Miskitos angrily told the government that it had casually given away their ancestral lands to the company. The government ignored the Indians. Conflicts of this type—between Indians and foreign capitalists, and between Indians and national governments—were frequent in locations where detailed cadastral surveys had never been done and land records were chaotic.

A more serious blow to Standard's banana operations, one that probably reduced the pressures on the Miskitos, was the attack of Panama disease and Sigatoka on its plantations along the Caribbean coast. These diseases crippled the company's Nicaraguan operations. In 1935 Standard began preparing to move from Nicaragua to Mexico and the Pacific lowlands. They exported their last Nicaraguan bananas in 1942, and in the same year they liquidated the Bragman's Bluff Lumber Company. Standard kept control of the port facilities but leased the pine forests to the Robinson Lumber Company of New Orleans, which was willing to take the political risks of working with the Somoza regime. Robinson cut large amounts of pine lumber, making no attempt to replant any of it or to protect the growing stock that remained. ²⁹

If efficient management and profitable pine lumber export industry was to develop in the Caribbean Basin, it would likely be in Honduras, where the most extensive and economically most significant stands of pine in Central America are found. Honduras even in the mid-1980s had reserves of 27,000 square kilometers of pine forests. ³⁰

The first Honduran pine lumber was shipped from the Miskito coast to the timber-starved islands of the Caribbean around the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1920s the timber industry was tightly linked to the corporate strategies of the American banana companies, and pine lumber had begun to play a major role in the Honduran export economy. Soon the largest Central American timber operations were in Honduras. In 1926 its primary export, coffee, was valued at $8 million.

Timber exports nearly equaled bananas. That year Honduran exports of mahogany and pine totaled $1.5 million, while banana exports totaled between $1.5 million and $2 million.

The country's corporate and political structure and its available timber resources were only part of the reason that American companies chose to focus their efforts in Honduras. Changing investment patterns, forest resources, and lumber markets in the southeastern United States were equally important, since they determined which pine forests were exploited and how intensive the exploitation was. The destinies of yellow pine and Caribbean pine were inextricably linked throughout the first half of this century.

Just as wheat had been exported from the U.S. eastern seaboard to the Caribbean as early as the mid-eighteenth century, construction lumber was exported beginning in 1829. ³¹ The great expansion of this export industry came after 1865, in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, as the southern lumber industry gradually rebuilt and expanded its scale. ³² The forests of the New England and Great Lakes states were severely depleted by 1880, ³³ and the Mississippi Valley from Minneapolis and Chicago to New Orleans was entering an era of industrialization. Many northern lumber firms and loggers moved into the southern pine and cypress belt, which stretches 1500 miles from Virginia to eastern Texas, in a burst of land speculation that was equal to any in the western states in those years. ³⁴

Markets both domestic and international were eager for the strong, handsome lumber of the longleaf or yellow pine. The most important export market was Europe, where Germany in particular began purchasing large amounts of pine from the American South, but the Caribbean Basin also emerged as a significant market. ³⁵ The Southern Pine Association, a trade association formed by American loggers in the 1890s, had found Latin American markets for 10 percent of their total production by 1900. ³⁶

Lumber firms produced 20 billion board feet of southern pine in 1909. The insatiable appetites of World War I accelerated cutting, and the ecological results were devastating. A 1919 survey declared that 92 million acres—nearly half of the region's pine acreage—was cutover land and that most of these acres were deserted, not fit for crops or cattle.

As the yellow pine forests declined, southern lumber firms began studying Caribbean Basin forests as a potential source for future supplies. ³⁷ U.S. capital was first invested in Central American timber operations during the early 1920s. Yankee loggers could see the great difficulty of setting up financially viable operations where lumber could be transported only by the railroads owned by the banana companies or in the maddeningly shallow rivers. They also faced the legendary political turbulence of the region, which only companies the size of the fruit giants could hope to influence or withstand. A few small entrepreneurs were operating in Nicaragua by 1930, and when Sandino's revolutionary forces turned on gringo companies, the loggers joined the chorus of U.S. interests calling for protection from revolutionary nationalism. The fruit companies were powerful enough to invoke the help of the U.S. Marines - the loggers largely had to fend for themselves. ³⁸

The trend did not last long, for by the late 1920s the pine forests in the southern United States had begun a remarkable recovery under new techniques of fire control and forestry management. ³⁹ The pressure to look beyond U.S. borders for additional supplies rapidly diminished, and when lumber markets began to recover slowly after the early Depression years, U.S. companies returned to exporting pine lumber to Latin American and European markets.

What effects did the American lumber exports have in recipient countries? In British Honduras, despite its considerable pine reserves, little was logged apart from small amounts that were exported west into Mexico. Most building lumber used there was yellow pine imported from the American South, which gave a better finish and was available in convenient sizes. ⁴⁰

Other countries with extensive pine forest resources, especially Honduras, were inhibited by powerful U.S. competition from attempting to improve the biomass production of their forests or increasing their economic value. For countries with inadequate conifer resources of their own, the United States was an important source of lumber. Imports drained national coffers, however, or increased the pressure to expand export cropping in payment.

To a trained eye, timber extraction in the hardwood and pine zones of Latin America appeared inefficient and wasteful. Surveying the forests of the region in 1929 for the Pack Forestry Foundation, Tom Gill concluded that there was little regeneration of logged tracts, and that local foresters (such as they were) seemed passively complacent about the situation.

Today...logging is a thoroughly primitive, unsatisfactory, and haphazard process. Methods are slow and wasteful, and because of the highly selective character of logging, the costs vary from merely high to prohibitive.... There is no steady flow of ties or logs or any other product. For that reason industry has been very loath to consider seriously so uncertain a source of supply. ⁴¹

It was into this setting that modern professional forestry from the North was introduced. U.S. foresters were rapidly learning how to counteract the devastation caused by rampant, unmanaged logging in the forests of temperate North America. Only a few were actively interested in the tropics as yet. These pioneers found grounds for urgency, but they were optimistic that modern scientific forestry and management practices could transform the forest into a resource that could profit the forest products industry and the welfare of tropical societies alike. Whether in this vision the future still held a species-diverse wealth of natural forest or vast expanses of tree farms - that controversy still had to be formulated sharply.

Americans and the Origins of the Forestry Profession in Latin America

Spanish foresters had left only a slight footprint on the colonial landscape. In Spain itself government agents had been at work since the 1700s to manage upland timber for commerce, to reserve certain hardwood species as a royal monopoly, and, in principle, to protect upland watersheds.

Spain's New World and Pacific colonies passed similar laws in the 1700s and 1800s, but U.S. observers after 1898 agreed that these were "paper laws," as Tom Gill called them-edicts existing only on paper. There was little or no enforcement of those laws while Spain was in the Americas, but they were the formal precedent for later American initiatives. The need for better management was urgent, for the forests throughout the region had been severely depleted in the nineteenth century. ⁴²

American foresters first turned their professional interest south into the Caribbean in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, when the United States permanently took over Puerto Rico. The island's tropical forests were the only ones in Latin America that were directly administered by the United States. The U.S. Forest Service recognized that it was almost totally ignorant of the physical and biological properties of Caribbean forests, and in 1911 it established the U.S. Tropical Forest Experiment Station, a research station in Río Piedras, just outside San Juan, to carry out research in the Luquillo Forest Reserve. This marked the beginning of formal U.S. studies of the rainforests of the Americas, but until the 1940s the research developed very slowly. As only a branch of the Forest Service's Southeastern Experiment Station in the United States, the Puerto Rican station had no direct voice in Washington during budget debates, and Yankee hardwood companies around the Caribbean were so unstable that they made little effort to lobby for its research program.

Substantial research began in the 1920s at Río Piedras and Luquillo. It had to begin with taxonomic studies to identify and catalog the vast number of tree and shrub species in the exotic woodlands. Research was designed to broaden the range of marketable species, and for that it was important to understand life cycles and regeneration conditions - this was the beginning of the study of rainforest ecology. From the start this work was closely linked with research at the wood technology laboratory at Yale University. Samuel Record, the leading tropical wood technologist in the Americas, designed and directed the research agenda at the laboratory, and he published the results in the journal Tropical Timbers, which served the needs of tropical biological science and the timber trade alike.

In those years professional management of the Luquillo National Forest began on a modest scale. That forest became an important experimental model for tropical moist forests, offering students experience with a variety of tropical conditions. ⁴³ Through the fledgling institute in Puerto Rico, American foresters were able to develop connections to the emerging international forestry network. In Trinidad, not far from Puerto Rico, was a British research institute, the Imperial Forest Research Institute, which was founded in the 1920s as the empire's American research base for tropical forest science. ⁴⁴ The center in Trinidad was linked to the Empire Forestry Association, a worldwide network established by the British in 1921. The association published a journal, the Empire Forestry Review , and sponsored international conferences, through which it disseminated information and ideology. The Review and its American counterpart, the Journal of Forestry, which was published by the U.S. Forest Service, began publishing in the early 1920s.

In 1928 the Pack Forestry Foundation sent Tom Gill on a survey tour of the forests of the Caribbean Basin, instructing him to bring back a report detailing their extent and composition, how they were being used, their potential for a modern logging industry and silvicultural management, and how extensively they had been damaged. For many months Gill traveled throughout the Caribbean and the mainland of Mexico and Central America. He explored a vast rainforest reserve, much of it largely untouched by the outside world. Only a small, scattered population of peasant farmers and remnant Indian tribes subsisted in the forest. He found few roads, railroads, or other signs of industrial-era penetration. Such logging as he found was mostly small and local in scale. Loggers used rough axes and handsaws to fell the trees, and bullocks hauled the logs from the forest to antiquated sawmills whose machinery wasted a large portion of each log. The loggers were totally unsupervised by government officials or trained foresters, and such forestry laws as existed on paper in a few countries were never enforced on the ground.

The industry was still primitive in contrast to the massive wood products corporations that had been established in the United States. Gill found this both good and bad. He observed that logging south of the border had not ravaged the forest resource as it had in the United States, but neither had it been utilized to meet the needs of Latin American society or to help lift local populations out of deep poverty. The industry had not even been able to meet local demands for construction timber: users imported yellow pine from the southeastern states and redwood and Douglas fir from the northwest coast of the United States, using precious foreign exchange. A more modernized industry could entirely avoid that embarrassing symptom of underdevelopment.

Gill's recipe for the future was to modernize timber processing by building capital-intensive, highly efficient mills that could process more species and waste a smaller portion of each log. Gill recommended that governments invest in better transport facilities, so as to take timber products inexpensively to distant markets. These improvements could be dangerous, he knew: modernization would allow the faster penetration of forests but would not guarantee better management.

The Caribbean countries also needed accelerated research in order to understand how tropical forest ecosystems function. Better biological knowledge was the prerequisite to improved silviculture-management of the forest-which could assure the sustained yield of all marketable species. Essential to good forest management were proper and enforceable laws, forestry agencies to enforce them, and the development of clear legal titles to forested land, whether in private or government hands.

In sum, Gill believed that the pressures of modern life necessitated strong laws, developed by trained scientists and managers and backed by committed governments, to manage this most precious renewable resource so as to meet immediate economic needs and also to nurture it for the long biological future. Local people could not do this-they just lived from day to day in their poverty-nor could those who were working the forest at the time, since they were concerned only with each season's profit.

Gill's book includes lyrical descriptions of the forest's beauty and mystery, impatience with and warnings about the existing Ladino management of the forest, and confidence that modern forestry could both use and preserve this great resource without losing it to the Promethean power of modern machines. His writing also reveals a paternalism verging on condescension toward local forest people and their knowledge and management of the resource. He saw that conuco-slash and burn-cropping techniques produced erosion on hillsides, but he could not distinguish between the ancient sustainable system of multicrop rotation practiced by the indigenous Indians and the destructive maize-beans milpa plots of peasants who had been dispossessed from lowland farms by landlords, either local or foreign.

At that stage of his career, Gill was primarily concerned with expanding wood products for commercial markets; he understood little, and inquired little, about the many nontimber forest products in local use. Like all foresters of his generation, he looked from the top down and from the outside in. His knowledge of trees and love of the forest were exemplary; his knowledge of and curiosity about the local cultures and their use of the forest were rudimentary. Gill's worries about the likely future deterioration of the tropical rainforest were totally appropriate. In his later years, before his death in 1971, he lived to see and protest a steady acceleration of forest clearance in all three tropical continents.

In the 1930s the small group of Americans at Río Piedras began to develop liaisons with foresters working in the independent countries of Latin America. No formal international organization yet existed to facilitate those contacts-such organizations developed more readily in parts of the tropics that were still under colonial rule. Because the foresters at Río Piedras were employees of the U.S. Forest Service, however, they were not bound by the fiscal constraints of private companies. In addition to their research on forest biology and timber products, they could address the broader issues of forestry law and administration in each country and promote the training of competent forest managers. Their agenda was therefore far broader and more ambitious than that of their counterparts who worked in private industry. Corporations did not own forestland, and their contracts were short in term and insecure.

Contacts with Mexico led the way, aided by long-established connections with the father of Mexican natural resources management, Miguel de Quevedo. Thirty years of his work finally resulted in the Mexican government passing forest laws in 1936 (which were based on American law) and establishing its first forestry training program. ⁴⁵ Aside from this, Latin American countries had no real administrative or technical capacity to design or enforce forestry laws before the 1950s. ⁴⁶ Government timber inspectors were usually untrained, and often corrupt.

By the early 1940s the British and American scientists, working together, had carried out some detailed ecological studies, which led to a few experiments in which exotic tree species were planted and assessed for their possible commercial value. The researchers were not given even minimal resources to enable them to study such basic matters as watershed protection or the impact of forest fire. Surprisingly, they were not even able to initiate studies of forest economics. ⁴⁷

The efforts of forest scientists and administrators had little impact against the increasing incidence of high-grading and the expansion of croplands before World War II. In 1940 Gill's ten-year-old conclusions were still valid: little effective forest management existed in the American tropics. Nevertheless, the groundwork was being laid for what would emerge with postwar peace. The tiny fraternity of American tropical foresters was able to accomplish far more in a far more remote tropical setting in the south Pacific.

American Colonial Forestry and Timber Harvests in the Philippines

American forestry operations in Southeast Asia before World War II present a striking contrast to events in the Caribbean Basin for two reasons. First, a complex trade in tropical hardwoods controlled by the Chinese and Europeans had existed throughout the region for centuries before the Americans arrived. Second, in 1904 American foresters were given the direct responsibility of constructing a forestry service for the islands; in the Caribbean, Americans had similar control only in Puerto Rico. The Philippine Islands played a pivotal role in the history of tropical logging and silviculture in the United States and Southeast Asia, for it was there that U.S. foresters and timber firms learned the methods of systematic tropical logging.

By the 1920s the alliance forged between American foresters and loggers and their Filipino counterparts and protégés had produced a forest economy that was as modernized as any in tropical Asia. The Philippines became a stage that showcased the tropical foresters' great gamble with technological and political power. The advanced technology of timber extraction that was developed in the Philippines turned the islands into one of the first great tropical timber exporters, but it also prepared the way for the tragic devastation of the islands' vast forest cover that began after 1946, the year of Philippine independence. The interplay of American rule and Filipino society resulted in reckless and often illegal deforestation after 1950. In recent years the natural wealth of these forests has been squandered, and the biotic treasures of the islands have been decimated. ⁴⁸

Export markets drove the exploitation of the Philippines' lowland forests. Although the islands were net importers of timber in 1900, by the 1920s that trend had been reversed. Hardwood timber was shipped to many markets, primarily in the United States. By 1960 the Philippines were the single largest forest products exporter in Southeast Asia. Little of the forest being cut was growing back as a timber resource; the nation was steadily borrowing from the future, with sobering consequences. The roots of the tragedy lay in the power of the country's landowning elite, which controlled the export of timber as well as sugar and other plantation crops.

Southeast Asia's Timber Economy Before the American Era

When the Philippine Islands fell to the United States in 1898, America inherited one of the great treasures on the planet. Much of lowland Southeast Asia is covered by a richly diverse rainforest dominated by the Dipterocarpaceae family of giant hardwoods. In other areas are seasonally dry monsoon forests, which have a different biological composition dominated either by deciduous species or by extensive stands of pine. In brackish coastal lowlands are some of the most extensive mangrove ecosystems in the world. ⁴⁹ The evergreen dipterocarp rainforest represents a species composition that is almost entirely different from that found in the humid tropics of Latin America and Africa, but both types of rainforest can contain several hundred tree species in a small acreage. ⁵⁰ Its exquisite biotic complexity dazzled but baffled early western observers, who saw it as both intimidating and a challenge to conquer. ⁵¹

Southeast Asia had long produced a harvest and international trade of tropical timber products that far exceeded that of either Latin America or Africa. The hardwood trade was highly competitive, and penetrating it proved to be a difficult challenge for western interests. For many centuries before westerners first arrived in the early 1500s, there was a lively international trade in both specialty woods and many nontimber forest products throughout the region. ⁵² Hardwoods and aromatic species such as sandalwood and sappanwood had their major market in the regionally powerful markets of China. Many nontimber products were exported as well. Tribal communities of the forested highlands harvested animal skins, bird feathers, and medicinal herbs, exchanging them with traders from the lowlands and coasts at semipermanent riverside or coastal locations. These products were then exported, in a complex exchange of goods and money. ⁵³

European penetration of the Southeast Asian economy began in 1511 when Albuquerque conquered the trade-based kingdom of Malacca on the Malayan mainland across from Sumatra. The Portuguese were interested primarily in interdicting the Asian-Arab trade in pepper and spices, which were harvested in the native forests of Indonesia's equatorial islands. The Portuguese made no attempt to penetrate the hardwood trade or to change the pattern of land use in the region. That began to change when they were displaced by the Dutch East India Company.

The Dutch began their conquest of Java in 1619, and from then until 1949 they maintained an extractive empire in Indonesia. They built ships using teak from the forests of eastern Java; as early as 1755 they employed 650 men at their shipyards in Batavia. They purchased the timber from local Javanese and Chinese traders whose small boats sailed the north coast of the island. By the 1700s they began purchasing large tracts of inland teak forest from Javanese rulers. After the Napoleonic Wars, in a forward surge of colonial administrative power, they began exploiting the great teak forests directly. The decimation of the forest continued until 1849, when the colonial regime imported three German foresters in the first step toward developing sustainable timber production. ⁵⁴

Teak was a product that promised sustained timber harvests. Unlike almost all other Asian hardwoods, teak thrives in single-species plantations. In the teak forests of British India, both along the Malabar Coast and in upper Burma, rotational growth and logging in managed one-species teak plantations was beginning to be assured by the mid-nineteenth century. In the multispecies dipterocarp forests the situation was much more difficult. When the Americans began extracting rain-forest hardwoods from the Philippines shortly after 1900, they were not so fortunate as to find teak growing there.

Lauan-Philippine mahogany-had been exported from the Philippines for centuries before the Spanish conquerors arrived in the 1570s. In a pattern typical of many parts of Southeast Asia, local men cut the trees and Chinese merchants exported the timber, much of it heading to markets in southern China. The immensity of the forest resources on the Philippine Islands was evident to the Spanish colonial rulers, but they were able to exploit that wealth only fragmentarily. At the end of the Spanish era in 1898, primary forests covered fully two-thirds of the islands' territory, and three-quarters of that were dipterocarp forests. ⁵⁵ Mature lauan trees are the great commercial timber wealth of the Philippines, but once logged they regenerate very slowly. Hence loggers operated largely in the shrinking virgin forests.

The Spanish regime placed most of its attention on Manila's hinterland, on the island of Luzon. European officials frequently struck up alliances with the men they called caciques, those who already held power in the towns and countryside well before the Spaniards arrived. In joint control of the land, these two groups proceeded to transform large lowland areas of Luzon into haciendas that produced sugar and other crops. ⁵⁶ Many of the other islands retained much of their forest cover through the 1800s.

Spanish law stipulated that all untilled land belonged to the state. ⁵⁷ In the Philippines this meant that virtually all forestland came to be government owned, a principle that was codified in the 1863 law that established the Inspección de Montes, or Forestry Bureau. The main function of the Inspección was to systematize the Crown's claims to forestlands and to stipulate which areas would be more valuable as arable land than as forested public domain. ⁵⁸ In its few years of work, the bureau did little to administer or even to study the islands' forests, whose composition was still largely unknown except to the tribal groups who subsisted in them. Furthermore, the bureau did little to regulate or improve commercial logging. By 1898 logging was still primitive and localized. Trees were cut by light, blunt axes, then hauled by carabao (water buffalo) to rivers, then the logs floated to sawmills downstream. There were only five or six power-driven sawmills in the country, all of them in the environs of Manila.

A considerable amount of the country's lumber trade took the form of small interisland log shipments on sailboats. Much of this was handled by resident Chinese traders, who controlled a large portion of the local market economy around the islands. ⁵⁹ The Chinese had been exporting hardwoods to China and beyond for centuries, both salt-water-resistant species for ships and wharves and lauan for elegant cabinetry and building purposes. ⁶⁰ In the last years of the old century this trade was temporarily disrupted, first by warfare in the Philippines after 1896, and then by endemic political upheaval in China. Under the American regime after 1900 the Chinese traders returned to prosperity and used that strength as an important base for their rise to a powerful position in the timber economy throughout Southeast Asia. The Chinese exporters were gradually joined by Spanish and British entrepreneurs, who controlled exports to Europe. The first U.S. link to the islands' timber wealth appeared in the 1890s, when Philippine companies began importing redwood and Douglas fir for their building projects in Manila.

American companies with early interests in the Philippines included those with links to British logging operations on Sabah, in the northernmost region of Borneo. ⁶¹ Like much of the international trade of the southwest Pacific at the height of the imperialist scramble, this was a high-risk business. No American company or logger survived for long until U.S. rule was formally established in the Philippines after 1898. That political change brought the stability and control that timber operators needed if they were to make any major return on their investments.

The Bureau of Forestry and the Loggers

In the decades after the Spanish-American War, the exploitation of forest wealth in the Philippines was distinctively shaped by American logging and forestry practices and by the ways the U.S. regime's Bureau of Forestry functioned within the overall American colonial system centered in Manila. The U.S. government was almost totally unprepared to take on colonial rule in the tropics. It was familiar with the colonial systems of the Dutch, British, and French, and it knew something about the region's centuries-old international trade in tropical hardwoods-but I knew little about the forest ecosystems that I was about to manage and exploit.

Forestry in the United States at the turn of the century was still in its infancy, but it was being rapidly shaped by Bernhard Fernow and then by his successor, Gifford Pinchot. ⁶² George P. Ahern, protégé of Fernow and Pinchot, became the creator of modern forestry management and timber exploitation in the Philippines. ⁶³ Son of a New York labor organizer, Ahern went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He might never have reached the Philippines had it not been for the U.S. Army. When his days at West Point were over, he was posted to Minnesota, where the white pine forests were being decimated. In the following years he saw firsthand the ecological and cultural damage wrought by the march of European-American civilization across the continent. From Minnesota he moved to South Dakota, where he was translator for the defeated Indian chief Sitting Bull. There and in Montana he spent several years as an explorer, geologist, and hunter. His social and cultural sympathies were wide, he was technically versatile, and his experience of wanton deforestation had sobered him. In the mid-1880s he began planning forest reserves in Montana, and it was here that he came into contact with Fernow and Pinchot. ⁶⁴

In 1898 Ahern was sent to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. When his leg was injured, he was posted to the fledgling military administration of the Philippines. The Americans now controlled one of the great rainforests of the planet, and they had much to learn about it. Pinchot, as head of the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, arranged for Ahern to be assigned the job of creating a forestry bureau in the new colony. His task was to learn as rapidly as possible the rudiments of Southeast Asian forest biology, assemble a team to work with him, and design a system of forestry laws.

In 1901 Ahern wrote to Pinchot, urging him to visit the islands and tour their forest resources with him. Pinchot was delighted to have his first view of the tropical abundance, because, as he later wrote, "of experience in tropical Forestry I had exactly none. But I had learned something about Forestry in Burma and in British India from Dr. Brandis" ⁶⁵ (the founder of British colonial forestry, with whom Pinchot had studied in England). Pinchot arrived in Manila in October 1901, after crossing imperial Russia's vast forest region on the Trans-Siberian Express. Ahern met him and took him immediately to Malacanan Palace, the new home of William Howard Taft, the governor of the islands. Taft had arranged for his official yacht, a 1,400-ton gunboat, to take Pinchot and Ahern on a month-long survey tour of the islands, and he promised to implement whatever regulations they proposed. Pinchot delighted in the comfort and authority of the ship, writing to his mother, "This is the proudest way to travel in my experience. A vessel 212 feet long, with a crew of 78 men, to go where you like when you like." ⁶⁶ He loved the life of a proconsul, surveying his realm of rainforest and its people in efficiency and comfort.

On their first stop, Mindoro Island, where U.S. timber operations would soon begin, they walked for a day "through almost distressingly interesting tropical forest, where every tree was new and strange." ⁶⁷ The two men visited every major island, taking copious notes on the forests, the local economy, and the people. Their fascination focused on scores of tree species that they had never seen before. They delighted in the beauty and grandeur of the trees-yet at the same time they were calculating their potential value as timber. In southern Negros, south of the region of new sugar plantations, they hiked into a forest that Pinchot called "the most luxuriant I have yet seen, and in by far the best silvicultural condition. On the lower slopes it consisted of old trees from 130 to 150 feet in height, frequently with from 90 to 100 feet of clear trunk, standing in a selection forest in which all age classes were represented." ⁶⁸

The two men began to design a system of sustainable timber exploitation. Existing logging operations in the rainforest could not have been further from sustainable. Pinchot recorded in his diary that on the southernmost island, Mindanao, they sought out one well-known sawmill. The operation was owned by the Philippine Lumber and Development Company,

whose manager, Mr. Bourns, had much pull at Manila (but not with Taft). We expected to find bad work, and we found it. Everywhere we went the untouched forest was in a superb condition. [Yet] I have never seen a more complete slash.. ..Everything was destroyed as far as logging had gone. Unquestionably the kind of logging now going on will lead to erosion of the most serious character on a surface so steep as to be totally unfit for agriculture. ⁶⁹

It was urgently important to stop such logging operations, and the only way to do that was to design strict forest laws and to train a generation of foresters who would have the authority to control both the ravaging work and the corrupt influence in Manila that protected it. Returning to Manila, Pinchot and Ahern designed a set of laws that Taft's regime officially adopted in 1904. The carte blanche that Taft had given them was backed by President Roosevelt's complete trust. This was the fulfillment of the Progressive dream: full authority had been placed in the hands of those who knew best what was necessary to meet human and biological needs. Pinchot outlined the forestry system in a long letter to Taft. In the preface he stated,

The internal condition of the forests, the degree of governmental control, the efficiency and spirit of the Insular forest service organized by Captain Ahern, and the general economic situation, combine to present the best opportunity for successful and profitable forest administration of which I have knowledge.. ..A great development of forest industries in the Islands is evidently at hand. If this development is not to be accompanied by serious, extensive, and permanent injury to the forests, preparation by study and experiment must begin at once. ⁷⁰

Pinchot returned to Washington, leaving the future of the Philippine forests in Ahern's hands. From then until he returned to the United States in 1914, Ahern was the creator and shaper of modern forestry for the islands. He was committed equally to rapidly modernizing the timber industry of the country and to making the forest wealth serve the longterm needs of the Philippine people. Both ambitions were, at best, only ambiguously fulfilled.

Ahern was confident that modern scientific forestry and the rapid expansion of timber exports could overcome the pervasive poverty of the islands. One urgent priority was to modernize timber operations so that the islands would no longer have to rely on imported lumber for domestic needs. In 1917, looking back on his years there, he reminisced that "communities living in sight of virgin forests imported lumber from abroad. Near such forests were people living in houses of thatch and bamboo." ⁷¹ The Philippines had been importing building timber since the nineteenth century despite the great riches of its forests. Like many of the rapidly expanding ports of the southern Pacific rim, Manila was being built with timber from the U.S. Pacific Northwest. ⁷² For Ahern and the men he hired to work with him (including Filipinos who had already been serving in the Inspección de Montes under the Spanish), reversing that pattern was a matter of establishing competent laws, organizing their effective administration, and linking that system to the most up-to-date, large-scale logging technology.

The forestry law adopted in 1904 carried over major elements of its Spanish precedent, including the provision that declared almost all the forested land to be government property. It created the Bureau of Forestry and gave it great powers, including the authority to decide which forests would be more appropriate as agriculture and which would be retained permanently in forest cover.

The bureau also had the authority to regulate commercial logging by granting timber concessions. If a company applying for a concession could demonstrate that it had adequate capital, machinery, and management for the task, it could receive a license for ten to fifty years. To encourage the expansion of the industry, the bureau looked in particular for large firms possessing the most advanced technology and the strongest capitalization, and it granted most of its large concessions for long terms. It also granted short-term leases, usually of one year, which were meant to provide lumber for local use. In both cases the bureau was required to specify conditions for cutting and marketing, although in practice its inadequate staff and limited funding often left that supervisory work undone. Foresters were also charged with the collection of stipulated stumpage fees and other timber taxes. ⁷³

The felling laws directed timber firms to clear-cut the forest on good agricultural land below elevations of 500 feet. On land inappropriate for agriculture, foresters would select marketable trees for felling, imposing a minimum diameter of 40 centimeters (14 inches) for hardwoods. Stressing maximum growth rates more than maximum biotic diversity, the laws indicated that all commercially valuable trees over 75 centimeters in diameter should be cut. If the species was not considered commercially useful, loggers were allowed to remove all trees regardless of size. ⁷⁴

The Bureau of Forestry immediately forged close working relations with logging companies, especially American firms that were interested in expanding their operations to the Philippines. Often the bureau carried out detailed field studies and planning for these firms. The results were impressive: major American firms began operating in the islands almost as soon as the forestry laws were in place.

Ahern and Pinchot knew their commercial counterparts well. Their contacts with the timber industry in the American northwest immediately yielded fruit when the Insular Lumber Company, the first modern lumber company in the Philippines, was launched in 1904. Headed by W. P. Clark, a leading manufacturer of sawmill equipment in Seattle, Insular took advantage of the new law to gain a 115-square-mile timber concession in the lauan forests of Negros, which was beginning intensive forest clearing for sugar plantations. Thereafter, sugar expansion and lumber operations were closely linked, and their alliance was far more efficient than were those anywhere in Latin America. As one forester observed with pride six years later, "The operations are an exact copy of the lumbering operations of a large company in Seattle, Washington, and the sawmill, of 100,000 board-feet daily capacity, is as thoroughly fitted up with up-to-date appliances and as well run as almost any mill in America.. ..All this is a new venture, believed to be utterly impossible a few years ago." ⁷⁵

The technological transformation was immediate and dramatic. On tour several years later, the leading American forester and ecologist Barrington Moore, although skeptical of some of the aspects of forest management that he saw, wrote, "In utilizing the forests the most astounding progress has been made from a lumbering point of view." ⁷⁶ In contrast with existing logging methods in the islands, which used only rough axes for cutting and carabao for hauling, Insular and other American-backed firms rapidly made the lumber technology in the islands the most up-to-date of any in the tropical world. In the early years, American supervisors controlled every aspect of logging operations, as "boss loggers, superintendents of logging railways, sawyers and saw filers, and yard bosses." ⁷⁷ All other workers were local, including those trained for various semiskilled jobs. By 1911 Insular employed 800 Filipino and Chinese laborers, who worked under only 18 American supervisors.

Another U.S. firm that began operating at this time was the Cadwallader-Gibson Company, which launched a long-lasting operation on Manila Bay in 1904. It was almost equally as significant as the Insular Lumber Company was in the evolution of American technology in Philippine tropical forestry. Cadwallader-Gibson worked closely with the bureau over the years to refine the system of logging laws and to train Filipino recruits at the nearby national school of forestry, which was founded in 1910. ⁷⁸

Under Ahern's direction the bureau also cultivated close relations with Filipino loggers, teaching and encouraging them to expand and modernize their operations. In this work, the foresters were entirely in tune with the general tenor of American colonialism in Manila, where entrepreneurs from the United States and their local counterparts evolved much closer working relationships than those that developed in many other colonial systems. In forestry as in plantation agriculture, one broad consequence of these ties was the strengthening of Manila's elite, allowing them to dominate land use after independence.

The domestic timber trade had evolved long before the Americans arrived. It had its own structure, which shaped American intentions as much as the new resources influenced its expansion. In 1916 one member of Ahern's team characterized the industry as falling into three categories according to size and complexity of operation. ⁷⁹ First and smallest were the shops of the local retail trade throughout the islands. These firms cut and finished their lumber by hand. Reflecting the overall character of the commercial economy, all of these firms were Filipino or Chinese. Second in scale were the small power mills, with stocks of thousands or tens of thousands of feet of rough and milled lumber. These were more varied in scale, owned by Spaniards, Filipinos, or Chinese, as well as a couple of larger firms owned by Americans or Europeans. Third were the large specialized mills, mostly owned by Americans or British, although one was owned by Spaniards, one by Chinese, and one by a Filipino-Spanish partnership. The American foresters' goal was to modernize the Filipino firms; the entrepreneurs' goal presumably was to maximize profits with minimal governmental control over their operations.

The evolution of the Filipino-American lumbering connection and its role in transforming lowland forests into agriculture are illustrated by an important early concession, the 1905 grant to the Mindoro Lumber and Logging Company. Mindoro, the seventh largest island of the archipelago, lies only ten miles across the Verde Island Passage from the southern coast of Luzon. ⁸⁰ At the turn of the century only the narrow plains of the eastern and northeastern coast had been developed; mountainous Mindoro was still relatively untouched. Mindoro had not shared the economic expansion that some islands experienced in the nineteenth century. Its total population in 1903 was only 28,300, most of it clustered around several small ports. The mountainous interior was home to various swidden-farming tribes that had not had much contact with the lowlanders. ⁸¹

The eastern lowlands of Mindoro receive between 80 and 100 inches of rain annually, mainly in July and August, and it has no severe dry season. The soils of the region are rich clays. It was an excellent setting for wet rice cultivation. The area's forests were easily accessible to the nation's major urban market, Manila. Northern Mindoro thus was one of the country's most attractive targets for loggers. The 1905 license to the Mindoro Lumber and Logging Company gave it the exclusive right to commercial logging on a tract of eighty-five square miles along the east coast. ⁸² The tract was mostly virgin lowland dipterocarp forest, with some mature second-growth trees. Its total population was 650. No land survey had been done and none of the inhabitants held formal land titles. Thus the company had no legal problem in operating as it wished.

Mindoro Lumber was a subsidiary of a Manila milling company; thus it is likely that it was a Filipino operation with direct connections to Ahern's forces. Mindoro Lumber became an important actor in the category of medium-sized firms that produced lumber for the rapidly expanding Manila market, a dimension of the timber industry that was controlled by Filipinos and Chinese, not foreigners.

The Mindoro Lumber Company's sawmill processed mostly lauan, but it handled smaller amounts of several other species as well. The company still relied on carabao to haul the logs to the water, but it also used some newly imported American equipment, including heavy American axes and a portable sawmill. The lumber was shipped to Manila by small steamer or sailboat. Manila's construction market was booming, and the company had no trouble finding buyers.

Firms like Mindoro Lumber prospered, and their expansion was reflected in the rapid rise of national timber production figures. Nonetheless, conflicts between the Bureau of Forestry and Filipino commercial interests soon became evident. The landed and commercial elite resisted any system of sustained-yield logging, and their opposition quickly found a political voice in the national legislature. The lower house, which was made up entirely of elected Filipinos, annually opposed any additions to the bureau's budget, making it impossible for the bureau to establish operations in the richly forested islands. ⁸³

In those years Dean Worcester was the secretary of the interior for the colonial government and the most influential American in the islands. In 1915 he criticized local lumbermen for wanting only quick profits and resisting restraints on their access to the forest. ⁸⁴ He knew that they had power as a lobby, and he worried-prophetically-about their capacity to circumvent the bureau's regulatory powers. Moore, on an inspection tour five years earlier, had found that the legislative constraint on the forestry budget was accompanied by strong pressure to maximize timber harvests, presumably for both private profit and public revenue. ⁸⁵ As Moore well understood, a race was developing between those who favored the expansion of the timber industry and those who supported sustained-yield forest management: the long-term fate of the forest would depend to a considerable degree on the changing balance between the two. The result of the combination of these forces was a rapid expansion of cutting.

Until the 1920s Philippine timber primarily supplied domestic markets. Ahern's ambition was to make the Philippines an exporter of timber, and to make the timber industry an important contributor to the islands' net balance of trade, by marketing Philippine timbers to the burgeoning ports of Hong Kong, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Sydney, and Singapore. Both Ahern and Clark saw that the markets of the western Pacific promised great demand for Philippine lumber. Insular Lumber, Clark's company, successfully introduced lauan timber to international markets as Philippine mahogany. By 1920 lauan and similar species, particularly red lauan, were replacing American redwood in western Pacific ports.

Timber exports expanded very slowly. One major stumbling block was the lack of standardized timber grading

In 1910, very early in the colonial years, Ahern set up a college of forestry at Los Baños, not far outside Manila, where his team began training Filipino foresters. Some of the first graduates of the basic course there were sent on to Yale Forestry School, the alma mater of Pinchot, for advanced training in American forestry management. By the mid-1920s nearly all foresters in the islands were Filipino: the entire five-hundred-man hierarchy of guards, rangers, and foresters was made up of nationals, except for five Americans at the top. In 1936 Arthur Fischer, the last American chief of the bureau, turned his office over to his Yale-seasoned protégé and friend, Florencio Tamesis. From that time forward Americans were only consultants. No other tropical colony moved local men into authority over forest resources so fast.

The American trainers had done their job systematically. Their local protégés had adopted the skills, values, and perspectives of the forestry fraternity. They knew how to harvest timber from the lauan forests efficiently and market it internationally. They were sure that this made a major contribution to the nation's economic growth. They argued that this was the only way to generate the revenue that would carry the industry beyond mere high-grading. And despite the enormous remaining task of scientific study of rainforest biology, they were convinced that they had the tools to accomplish it. Not surprisingly, their conception of competence precluded a full understanding of the forest peoples and their lifeways.

Internationally the new work of modern forestry was a profession with high social prestige. In tropical countries especially, foresters were recruited almost exclusively from high status backgrounds; the social perspectives of their class fit well with the profession's belief in the prerogatives of expertise. Filipino foresters were almost exclusively recruited from the landed class, with its links to Manila society. These young men understood the realities of urban and international markets and assumed that urbanization and rising standards of consumption were the pattern of progress. Except for those who specialized in laboratory analysis or sawmill technology, they loved being in the deep forest, discovering new species of trees, shrubs, and vines. They were paternalistic or hostile to the agrarian poor and at best condescending to the tribal cultures of the mountain forests.

When the global economy contracted sharply in 1930, markets for tropical primary products went into a state of collapse. The economy of the Philippines was no exception, and timber exports declined with other commodities. The worldwide depression did not affect the overall pattern of ownership in the timber industry. The political setting did change significantly in 1935, when a new constitution brought the islands Commonwealth status and internal autonomy, one step short of total independence. The new government, dominated by the landlords, set about legislating to defend Filipino commercial interests against foreign competition, especially the Chinese. The special ties with U.S. lumber interests were carefully preserved, however: under the new legislation, only Filipino or U.S. firms could be given long timber leases. Investment by other foreigners was limited to 40 percent of a firm's capital. In 1939, as the Depression was lifting but the Pacific was drifting toward war, investment in the Philippine sawmill industry, which had an estimated $15.5 million capitalization, came from several nations: 42 percent was U.S. capital, 26 percent was Filipino, 12 percent was Chinese, 7 percent was British, and 4 percent was Japanese. ¹⁰⁴

By that time the logging industry stood fifth in capital investment in the country, fourth in the value of its production, and second in the size of its labor force. It had become a major force in the national economy, in part because the Bureau of Forestry had spent years developing foreign markets for tropical timbers. The market for Philippine timber grew most rapidly in Europe, where red lauan and many other specialty woods were gaining popularity. The United States remained the largest single market, one the bureau continued to cultivate. A booklet issued by the bureau in 1939 reminded its potential buyers that when Americans bought Philippine lumber, they were "helping not only the Filipinos, but also the American lumbermen in the Philippines and the American machine manufacturers in the United States." ¹⁰⁵

The symbiosis between American and Philippine lumber industries was shattered by World War II. During the Japanese occupation of the islands, the Philippine economy, including agriculture and forestry, and urban life were totally disrupted. Many Filipino foresters joined the resistance against the Japanese occupation, and forest administration and control dissolved. The last year of the war was the most destructive. As the Japanese forces retreated, they destroyed nearly all the sawmill machinery in the country. They left Manila and other cities badly battered. In the process of withdrawing from the Manila area, the Japanese burned the records of the Bureau of Forestry and leveled the college of forestry at Los Baños. ¹⁰⁶

The war left a legacy of severe social disruption on forested land. The upheavals of the war dispossessed masses of peasant squatters, who were still looking for new land after the war was over. In 1948 Tamesis summarized the dilemma of social policy that the foresters faced.

Forest destruction increased after the liberation. Illegal clearings to alleviate the food shortage destroyed valuable forests. On account of the tremendous demand for timber, illegal cutting and timber smuggling became widespread. The great number of unlicensed firearms left over from guerrilla warfare makes enforcement of forest law difficult, especially in the more remote regions. ¹⁰⁷

The most pressing task after the end of the war was the islands' final transition to independence, which was accomplished in 1946. The rebuilding of the country and its economy began simultaneously, starting with ravaged Manila. The devastated timber industry revived rapidly. Approximately one hundred cast-off U.S. military sawmills were installed, old lumber was recycled, and new supplies were milled. ¹⁰⁸ The small-scale local lumber industry recovered especially fast: most of the rebuilding of Manila passed through the hands of ninety Chinese dealers, who charged high prices. In the nationalistic mood of the time, local resentment against those timber dealers fueled legislative efforts to dislodge ethnic Chinese from their dominant position in the nation's retail trade. ¹⁰⁹

Gradually, as the political system and economy stabilized, the forest wealth of the Philippines was tapped again. The islands became the great supplier of timber products to Southeast Asia, a leading source of export earnings for the government, and a source of enormous wealth and power for individuals, many of whom began logging illegally. Market demand rapidly outstripped administrative control in the forests, for the forestry administration could not be reestablished in the countryside until the early 1950s.

Global Markets and the Deforestation of the Philippines after 1945

In the course of the 1950s the Philippines regained their prewar position of Southeast Asia's largest producer and exporter of hardwood timber. This position was based on the islands' market economy, which was one of the most developed in the tropical world, and its forestry system, which had been one of the most advanced in the colonial world. Southeast Asia dominated global tropical forest production throughout the post-World War II era. ¹¹⁰

The 1950s saw a sharp decline in production costs of lauan plywood and veneer, and Philippine lauan exports dominated the Southeast Asian industry through the 1960s. ¹¹¹ Although Americans were no longer in charge of industry or government policy, U.S. interests continued to concentrate in the Philippines until the late 1960s, when they moved for a short while into Borneo. In 1949 forest products were 1.3 percent of the country's total exports; a decade later, by 1959, they had become 15 percent of total exports. ¹¹² Major profits were flowing into entrepreneurial pockets-but the country's forests were being rapidly depleted. The Bureau of Forestry recovered very slowly from its wartime decimation, and it had little power to control the issuance or management of timber concessions.

The College of Forestry at Los Baños was slow to recover after the war. Although a new generation of forestry recruits went to Yale for training, especially in wood technology, from 1946 on, ¹¹³ the college itself was effectively revived only in 1957, with major assistance from the Division of Forestry and Forest Products of the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Association (FAO) and the U.S. International Cooperation Agency (the forerunner of USAID). ¹¹⁴

In the mid-1960s the timber supply in Philippine forests began to decline precipitously as its virgin forests began to disappear. The gamble taken by the American foresters in the previous generation-that more efficient, larger-scale logging technology could both utilize and sustain the Philippine forests-had apparently failed. Timber merchants with powerful political leverage in Manila and a burgeoning squatter population with political patrons in the countryside were the twin forces that were driving a disastrously rapid deforestation of the Philippines.

For many reasons the Bureau of Forestry was politically unable to raise stumpage fees and other timber taxes to reflect rapidly rising world prices. Consequently the government began to lose large amounts of potential revenue, money that went instead into private pockets. ¹¹⁵ Management of the country's forestlands was also becoming more fragmented because several government agencies had influence over land use planning. ¹¹⁶

The world market for lauan grew insatiably and profits soared for those who logged the timber, whether legally or illegally. Equipped with a new generation of more powerful logging and milling machinery, Filipino and foreign loggers dramatically increased their operations after 1960. Even Palawan island, a frontier 350 miles from Manila and the last great island forest in the Philippines, began to reel under the blows of ax and saw. ¹¹⁷ The race to cut the last easily accessible lauan forests accelerated rapidly after 1965, when Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the republic. Marcos's rule was effectively a dictatorship, and his policies of "crony capitalism" bled the country dry: he rewarded his friends with vast short-term timber concessions, and they profited from the islands' natural resources. ¹¹⁸

Trade statistics from these years dramatically register the shrinkage of timber supplies. The late 1960s saw a steady decline in timber production, exports, and earnings. Between 1968 and 1969, and 1974 and 1975, log production fell from 11.58 million cubic meters to 8.44 million. Exports in the same years fell from 8.65 million cubic meters, with a value of $232 million, to 4.6 million cubic meters, with a value of $198 million. Logs and lumber exports, after more than doubling in the mid-1960s, fell from 4 billion board feet in 1970 to under 1 billion in 1985. By 1985, purchasing power from earnings had fallen to 13 percent of the 1970 level. ¹¹⁹

By the mid-1970s 13.1 million acres of the Philippines were listed as treeless ex-forestland; much of this was critical watershed. Moreover, logging roads led to the destruction of far more than just trees: they allowed squatters to penetrate the region. Squatters slashed and burned patches of forest, planted survival crops that they tended for a brief time, and then turned the degraded land over to cattle. ¹²⁰

The loss of forest cover is difficult to assess precisely, because several surveys since the 1950s have presented widely varying figures. It is significant that Bureau of Forestry statistics for the amount of land that has been deforested are regularly much lower than those from other sources. A somber trend is clear. David Kummer, in the most systematic analysis, concludes that the nation's forest cover shrank from 50 percent of its total surface in 1950 to 44 percent in 1957, 35 percent in 1969, and to a mere 22 to 24 percent in 1987. ¹²¹ The figures express a seemingly irreversible depletion of forest stock. By 1976 the Bureau of Forestry had reforested only 52,000 acres. ¹²²

This growing crisis was reflected in the constant changes made by the government to the terms of timber concessions and the regularity of the violations made by the timber corporations. In 1959 Nicolas Lansigan, head of the Society of Filipino Foresters, attacked the lumber barons publicly, concluding, "While some lumbermen are decidedly of the desirable type who are frankly worried about the fate of the forests and the future of their investments. ..many are plain timber miners of the cut-and-get-out variety." ¹²³

The complaint illustrates the running tension between foresters and loggers. Lansigan's criticism also reveals the strain that was typical between foresters and villagers. The tension was generated by the slash-and-burn squatters, who were supported in increasing numbers by local landlords who used them to gain control of government forestlands.

And the kaingineros! They are now the lords of the forests. Many of them have taken the "land-for-the-landless" policy as the green light to squat at the nearest forest land.. ..Forest officers have grown tired hailing them to court.. ..Since that ill-fated day one President on the spot released some kaingineros from jail, the situation has never been the same. Squatters are literally sticking out their tongues at the poor forestry men doing their duty. ¹²⁴

Forestry management had become deeply entangled with social and political controversies, but the foresters had made no effort yet to distinguish traditional agroforestry systems from the effects of social displacement, or production forestry from rainforest conservation.

American Foresters and Timber Corporations after Independence

In their new postwar and postindependence role in the Philippines, Americans had no political or administrative power, but as consultants they could continue to monitor and perhaps marginally influence the trend of forest exploitation. The Truman administration saw the value of maintaining close professional ties between the two countries, as well as encouraging the further expansion of Philippine exports of primary products to American markets. In 1951 American timber specialist Winslow Gooch was sent to the Philippines to conduct a two-year study of the country's forest resources. The study was sponsored by the Mutual Security Agency (the U.S. bureau that replaced the Economic Cooperation Administration after the Marshall Plan ended in 1951) and was directed by Tamesis.

Gooch's final report to the agency was a highly specific survey of timber supplies, logging companies, forest laws, forest products of all kinds including nontimber products, and useful information for potential concessionaires. It showed a vital, varied, and internationally competitive wood products industry among the Filipinos themselves. Gooch also noted that the Bureau of Forestry and other agencies were having some trouble enforcing forest laws against illegal operators and exporters. ¹²⁵

Of the few American foresters who visited the country in these years, the most prestigious was Tom Gill. The Philippine government and the U.S. International Cooperation Agency cosponsored Gill's tour of the islands in 1959. He was commissioned to assess the quality of logging and forestry operations throughout the islands, and he was appalled at what he saw. Addressing the Philippine Lumber Producers Association in Manila at the end of his tour, Gill reported, "Some weeks ago I flew over and visited Cebu, Bohol and Negros. Parts of these islands made me think I was back again in Korea, North China, or the man-made deserts of Mexico. For I saw thousands upon thousands of hectares of cut-over, burned-over and abandoned land, pock-marked with red and yellow scars of bare earth at the mercy of sun, wind and rain." ¹²⁶

Irresponsible lumbermen bore half the brunt of his critique; landless squatters and their political patrons bore the rest. "The legitimate landless Filipino, sincerely looking for a place to make a home, is being rapidly replaced by professional squatters organized very often by someone higher up.. ..The result is. ..a land grab that could go down as one of the most notorious in history-a nation being robbed of the very thing that makes existence possible-the soil and the productivity of the soil." ¹²⁷

Gill's sympathy for his colleagues in the forestry service was reflected in his recommendations for reform. He advised the Philippine government to greatly increase the Bureau of Forestry's budget, to reflect its value to the treasury and to the nation, and to strengthen its power so that it could prosecute the loggers and squatters who violated the forestry laws. He maintained that timber leases should be awarded only to the most efficient and responsible loggers and that the leases be awarded on a long-term basis, long enough to make it worth the loggers' while to invest in the next generation of trees. ¹²⁸ Although his formulas were plausible, they did not address the root of the trouble: the broader political and economic forces that were at work in a politically polarized society. His recommendations did not suggest that foresters and villagers should cooperate in managing the resource: his advice was entirely paternalistic. ¹²⁹

One of the major purposes of Gill's tour was to encourage American timber corporations to invest in the Philippines. Gill hoped that more enlightened cooperation would develop between American timber corporations and Filipino loggers. This hope was largely fulfilled in at least one joint venture, the Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines, or PICOP, the largest and most modern paper manufacturer in the islands. The firm's roots stretched back into the 1930s, when Andres Soriano, a Spanish immigrant, first invested in Philippine industry and built the family fortune primarily by producing San Miguel beer. ¹³⁰ In 1935 Soriano joined a group of Filipino investors in Manila to found the country's first paper manufacturing firm, largely to replace imported packing materials in the sugar industry (another instance of the modernization of a tropical forest industry being linked to a major export crop).

In 1951 the Soriano family invited the world's largest paper company, the International Paper Corporation of Washington state, to become a partner in developing a paper industry in the Philippines that would use native wood stock. The American firm agreed, but it took a decade of research before they believed they had the technology to produce reliable paper pulp from the hardwoods available on the islands. PICOP was launched as a joint venture in 1963. By 1974 PICOP was capitalized at $72 million and controlled 80 percent of the paper pulp industry in the islands. By 1980 it was the largest forest products company in all of Southeast Asia and was praised internationally. One leading forestry expert praised it for its "mastery of papermaking from mixed tropical hardwoods; major commitments to plantation forestry, unequalled anywhere in Asia, and silvicultural research; dedication to community and social development; underwriting tree farming, food production and seeking to break dependence on shifting agriculture." ¹³¹

Unfortunately, PICOP's innovative management was expensive. Moreover, social turmoil and government corruption of the Marcos years prompted most American timber firms to withdraw from the Philippines, including International Paper. ¹³² In the 1970s International Paper owned 40 percent of PICOP; by 1980 International Paper had cut back its participation in PICOP to 10 percent. ¹³³ PICOP began incurring heavy annual losses, and in 1980 it began turning to the government for major subsidies, in effect becoming a semipublic corporation.

By the 1980s direct U.S. investment in the Philippine timber economy was minimal. The major American connection with deforestation in the islands in recent years has been indirect. America has supplied a steady market for forest products. Hardwoods harvested by Japanese firms in Mindanao and elsewhere are processed into plywood, sawnwood, and veneer in South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore, and then sold in Japan and the United States.

The Philippines today is probably the most ecologically degraded large country in the tropics. During the colonial era American resource managers in the Philippines developed a greater degree of actual control over the forests than they did in any Latin American country (although it was perhaps weaker than the control exercised in the more authoritarian European colonial systems). Paradoxically, the control American foresters had may have been the worst possible degree of power over Nature for the fate of the living ecosystems of the archipelago.

The Timber Economy in Tropical America after 1945

Latin America experienced a similar postwar acceleration in the timber industry, although it was slower and more tentative than the postwar growth in the Philippine Islands. Slower growth was a reflection of the region's corporate technology, forestry administration, and government support for forest exploitation, which was less developed there than it was in the Philippines. Put another way, international market demand was not as interested in Latin America's forest resources.

There were two dimensions to the changes in forest exploitation and management that occurred after the war in Latin America: breakthroughs in processing technologies and multinational corporate systems, and the belated development of professional forestry. Biology and policy were combined in an attempt to meet local people's needs as well as profit from distant markets. Surprisingly - a shred of hope for the forest's biological survival - there were some indications that a forestry system designed to meet the needs of local populations might also encourage a more biologically diverse approach to silviculture, one that might even blend modern science with traditional knowledge.

The demand for forest resources generated by the international market for industrial products grew inexorably. The market was seductive: it promised ever-rising profits, and it was backed by an ideology of socioeconomic development that had not yet learned to recognize that the planet's natural resources had limits. None of this was uniquely American, for the world of modern timber corporations and the world of the forestry profession shared the unrestrained optimism of those years.

Although World War II was not fought on New World soil, the natural resources of all the Americas were mobilized for the war effort; nearly the entire planet was drawn into the vortex. Agriculture was accelerated to the maximum extent possible given the limited civilian work force. Many forests both temperate and tropical were cleared for temporary food production, but by 1945 they had been abandoned, leaving diminished soil and damaged vegetation. ¹³⁴

The story was similar for the production of lumber. All combatant nations drew on available timber resources for materiel. The American military sponsored a search in tropical woodlands for strategic timber species such as exceptionally light balsa, which was used for airplane parts, and mahogany, which was transformed into boats and gliders. ¹³⁵ The number of tropical species used in northern markets increased, adding another element to the complex ecological legacy of global warfare.

Probably most fundamental for the long term, World War II brought further acceleration of technological scale. Between 1943 and 1945 three U.S. firms—Ichabod Williams from New York, Freiberg Mahogany of Cincinnati and New Orleans, and Weis Fricker of New Orleans—introduced trucks and other mechanized equipment for hauling timber in the Guatemalan Petén and in British Honduras. Together the three Yankee firms hauled out fifty million board feet of hardwood timber between 1943 and 1948. In 1948 the border between Guatemala and British Honduras was closed—politics once again determined the loggers' fortunes. ¹³⁶ This was a clear example of how urgent wartime priorities, and their associated profits, increased corporate capability to extract natural resources in peacetime.

As the war neared its conclusion in 1945, Allied planners knew that Europe and East Asia faced a monumental task of rebuilding that would continue to place heavy demands on the planet's natural resources. Northern Europe's conifer forests could not provide for all of Europe's timber needs, and the Soviet Union, home of the world's greatest conifer forests, was crippled. Canada and the United States had only a limited capacity to expand their harvest of yellow pine, Douglas fir, and other conifers. High consumption levels in the United States were also driving the timber cutting.

In 1949 Marcel Leloup, director of the Division of Forestry and Forest Products of the FAO, discussed the critical international shortage of forest products and cited the market supported by consumers in North America: "The per capita consumption of saw timber is one cubic metre, five times greater than in Europe. The region uses 65 percent of the total world consumption of pulp, although the population is only 8 percent of that of the world." South America, where consumption was very low and the timber industry was underdeveloped, had the largest reserve of unexploited forest.

The United States still imported far more timber from the Philippines than from Latin America. ¹³⁷ The entire U.S. market for tropical hardwoods was modest from the Yankee perspective: tropical species were less than 1 percent of U.S. hardwood consumption. American timber imports from Latin America rose from 974,000 cubic feet in 1948 to 1,291,000 cubic feet in 1956, only a gradual increase. ¹³⁸ But, just as in earlier years, the U.S. demand for specialty hardwoods was very significant for the tropical exporters themselves and the particular tracts that they high-graded. ¹³⁹

The trade in softwood species was more complex. Faster growing softwoods include pine and many species native to the biologically complex rainforest. Softwoods are valued primarily for inexpensive building lumber and as the major source of paper pulp. The paper industry gradually learned how to use more softwood species for the production of pulp, and as it did, it found clear-cutting of the rainforest to be increasingly valuable. Planners turned their eyes to the tropical horizon and found a major potential source of paper pulp in the pine forests of southern South America.

The era of massive tropical timber exports was only beginning in South America in the late 1940s. In striking contrast to the Philippine timber economy, Latin American timber production and export expanded only slowly until the 1960s, when rapid industrialization and economic expansion began. Latin America continued as a small exporter of hardwood logs and coniferous sawnwood. Even then, two-thirds of the trade in timber products was from one Latin American country to another. One major exception was the European market for Paraná pine.

The country with the most accessible reserves of marketable timber was Brazil, whose southern states in the temperate zone well beyond Amazonia's rainforest had great stands of Paraná pine, or Araucaria. This species, which was not a true pine, had evolved only in the far southern lands that in geologically remote times had been linked to Australia, not the tropics. The harvest of Paraná pine was a great windfall for Brazil's export economy, but by the late 1950s Brazil had lost most of its Araucaria forest ecosystem. This devastation occurred at least two decades before the more massive onslaught on the Amazon rainforest began in earnest. ¹⁴⁰

There was obviously major potential for increased timber production throughout the forest region of Latin America, but there were many hindrances to the expansion of the industry as well. Old mahogany firms, both American and European, continued to provide specialty hardwoods. They faced familiar difficulties in dealing with local authorities, however, for through the 1950s tropical timber management remained in its infancy, and governments continued in their old bureaucratically irregular ways. An FAO study in 1959 concluded that although Latin America had ample resources, "the relative unattractiveness of investment in an industry which may not immediately yield great profits" had resulted in a severe shortage of development capital. ¹⁴¹

The forest products industry in North America began to respond to this opportunity. Major northern timber corporations had accumulated the scale of investment capital and the technical and managerial capacity needed to begin risking major investments in the tropics. They also had achieved greater "efficiency," extracting a wider range of forest species and processing a higher percentage of each tree. Because Yankee companies were able to use more of the harvested trees, t