11 Before the advent of the Americans, the Spanish government in the Philippines had its own Inspeccion general de Montes, established in 1863. Perhaps its longest lasting achievement was the entrenchment of the notion that foresters should be in charge of deciding whether land was more valuable for agriculture or forestry, a principle ‘which American foresters gladly inherited later on’ (Dennis Roth, ‘Philippine forests and forestry: 1565–1920’, in Global deforestation and the nineteenth century world economy, ed. Richard Tucker and John F. Richards [Durham, NC: Duke University Press], p. 41). Nano, a forester writing in the 1950s, notes that the Americans also were able to take advantage of experienced forest personnel trained under the Spanish, rehiring them as part of the new Bureau of Forestry in the early years of its existence. He also records that the Spanish forestry regime left few forest maps and no working plans or timber inventories, although the forest laws were found to be ‘excellent’ (Nano, Jose, ‘Brief history of forestry in the Philippines’, Philippine Journal of Forestry 8, 1–4 [1951]: 22–3)Google Scholar, although Roth concludes that ‘historians have found scant evidence that the [Spanish] bureau actually carried out this mandate or had any noticeable effect’ (Roth, ‘Philippine forests and forestry’, p. 41). Potter concurs with Roth's assessment, writing that ‘the Spanish foresters in the Philippines, being largely cut off from ideas on forest management and short of personnel, were unable to evolve a system which combined the commercial needs of the market with their conservation ethic’ (Lesley Potter, ‘Forests versus agriculture: Colonial forest services, environmental ideas and the regulation of land-use change in Southeast Asia’, in The political ecology of forests in southeast Asia: Historical perspectives, ed. L. Tuck-Po, W. de Jong, and A. Kenichi [Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2003], p. 62). A dissenting voice is provided by Bankoff who argues that the destruction of most of the records of the Inspeccion general de Montes in a fire in 1897 has meant that historians have underestimated its capabilities (Bankoff, Gregory, ‘A month in the life of Jose Salud, forester in the Spanish Philippines’, Global Environment 2, 3 [2009]: 28)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nevertheless, this lack of records effectively meant that there was ‘a silvicultural “tabula rasa” on which the incoming Americans could experiment’ (Potter, Forests versus agriculture, p. 62).
