The Lumberman and the lumber industry in the 1950s Philippines

In 1954, a new Philippine trade periodical published its first issue, one of many to follow. The Lumberman, as well as providing a wealth of detail about the early postwar logging and lumber industry in the Philippines, also records a sustained attempt to imbue readers with a progressive forestry ethos capable of combating entrenched notions of the forests as wastelands and trees as a hindrance to civilisation. It would be easy to dismiss this project as naive, and the magazine itself provides a foreshadowing of the wholesale destruction of forests during the 1960s and 1970s, but for those caught up in the events of the 1950s the future was not so certain. The possibility of a capital-intensive industry using the forests of the country in a sustainable manner was not to be ruled out. Although in the end the social forces interested in this project were not strong enough to prevail, this should not stop our recognition that attempts were made to advocate a different path. This study of The Lumberman acknowledges this point.