Philippine forester visits WNC Industries

Title

Language

English

Year

1953

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

• Philippine Forester Visits WNC Industries By w ALT DAMTOFT Western North Carolina is having a hand in the planning of a forest products laboratory for the Philippine Islands. Eugenio de la Cruz, chief of the division of forest investigation of the Philippine Bureau of Forestry, is spending two weeks in this area studying forest laboratory and management procedures and visiting forest products industries. He said the purpose of the visit is to have the advantage of the latest U.S. techniques in establishing the Philippine laboratory to be built at Los Baiios, Laguna, in the Makiling National Park. The laboratory, de la Cruz said, is a cooperative project of the U.S. and Philippine government under auspices of the Mutual Security Administration" of this nation. The Philippine forester foresees a great expansion of the forest products industry in this country following completion of the laboratory. Lumbering, he said, is presently the major forest products industry of the country. Most lumber mills, he added, were destroyed or dismantled during the Japanese occupation of World War II. Most have now been rebuilt. De la Cruz said his country's forests have 3,000 species of hardwoods, but only two species of pine. Elwood L. Demmon, director of the Southeastern Forest Experiment Station here, is working closely with de la Cruz during his visit. The U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been of great assistance to him in his tour of the nation under MSA auspices, de la Cruz said. He said he will visit WNC paper mills, lumber mills, and furniture factories and GRADUATION Issus--March, 1953 study the administration of experimental forests. Following his arrival by air in Washington, D.C., several months ago, de la Cruz said he spent two and one-half months at the Forest Products Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service in Madison, Wis. Following this study of the management and operation of a forest products laboratory, he began a tour to follow up the use of research findings in the practical business of running a forest product industry. This follow up, he said, has taken him along the West coast, to Louisiana, to Arkansas and to Atlanta. In Atlanta, he studied the operation of the Southern Pine Conservation Group. On Sunday, de la Cruz will go to Raleigh and Durham to visit the forestry schools at State College and Duke University. From there he will go to Washington and return to the Philippines at the end of January. The trip is de la Cruz' second visit to the United States. On the first, he was able to see only a smaU part of the country. On that visit, he attended Idaho State University School of Forestry and was graduated from the Yale School of Forestry in 1927. He said he was unable to do much traveling as he was a self-supporting student and attended Yale under a scholarship. De la Cruz has spent his forestry career with the Philippine government. He said forestry is a well recognized profession in his country-but added he had a little trouble getting one of his three sons to enter the profession. One of them finally did but not until after he had told his father that judging from the (Continued on page 30) Page 25 hearted or lose your temper, but hold firmly to the conviction that what you are do~ng is for the public and not for any particular person. The law is with you and you are protected by the government. What you should have in you at that very moment is just a particle of the courage of Ranger Pulasky, (1) who in spite of danger besetting him and his party, braved and challenged his fearful odds. Any intimidation or threats should be 1·esisted notwithstanding the consequences; at the same time you should be sufficiently cautious, and deal with the person kindly but firmly. That is courage well displayed-duty well done. With all the foregoing qualifications, you as a ranger are capable of doing all kinds ( 1) Ranger Pulasky was in the empioy of the United S'.ates Forest Service when he met danger in the form of a big forest fire that broke out in one of the 1egions in his district. It was so appaling that had it not been for his courage, all his men and some inhabitants of the region might have perished in this conflagration. North Star Lumber Company, Inc. 26-28 Plaza Moraga Manila EXPORTERS OF LOGS AND LUMBER Cable Address: NORLUMCO Page 30 P. 0. Box 3150 Tel: 3-82-61 of work that may be assigned you by the Bureau, without shirking responsibility. You may be many miles away from your superior, in one of the lonely islands in the Archipelago, but with your honesty and selfrespect your work will always be reliable. You may have plenty of work to do, but with your intelligence and care you can dispatch it with promptness and put all your information gathered from the field in an accurate and comprehensive report; you may have a big territory to cover, but by being hard-working you can visit all the places under your jurisdiction and with no more equipment than a compass, a bolo and a haversack you can hike miles and miles in a day and climb mountains ordinarily inaccessible to the majority of the people. And finally, you may face danger on the way by having to cross a swift river without a banca, or you may be threatened, but never humiliated. And with courage unfailing, that courage which has been taught and imparted to you and instilled in your mind while in the Forest School, you will almost always come out triumphant, ~d able to show the exemplary courage of Ranger Pulasky. (Reprinted from the "Makiling Echo") PHILIPPINE FORESTER ... (Continued from page 26) work put in by the latter, the profession was "99 per cent perspiration and one per cent imagination." De la Cruz also wanted one of his children to be a physician. He was only partially successful in this. His only daughter, he said, became a nurse and later married a physician. Two months ago, de la Cruz' first grandchild was born to his daughter. The forester hasn't seen the grandchild yet. And though he expressed gratitude to MSA, the Forest Service, the Department of Agriculture and many other r i>lic and private agencies which he said had made his U.S. trip very pleasant, he was just like any other first-time grandfather about wanting to see that grandchild. FORESTRY LEAVES

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