>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Silence ]
>> Hello my name is Mary Lou Reker and on behalf of the Library
of Congress's Office of Scholarly programs and the Kluge Center,
I want to welcome you to a lecture
by Dr. Maria Theresa Ventura entitled Market Empire:
The United States, the Philippines, and Natural Resource Management.
Dr. Theresa Ventura came to the library in a fellowship sponsored
by the American Council of Learned Society and the Mellon foundation.
She received her MA and her PhD in history from the universe--
from Columbia University
and was awarded the university's Bancroft Dissertation Prize.
Dr. Ventura is now an assistant professor in the department
of history-- history [laughter].   Can we do that one again?
[Laughter] Okay, thank you.   Dr. Ventura.
>> Yeah.
>> And Dr. Ventura is now an assistant professor.
>> Just pause for a moment.
Keep looking at the camera and then you can begin again.
>> If you want to start from the top [inaudible].
>> Do you want me to do the whole thing again?
>> Yeah, yeah, you might as well.   >> Okay.
[ Inaudible Remark ]   >> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Hello, my name is Mary Lou Reker and on behalf of the Library
of Congress's Office of Scholarly programs and the Kluge Center,
I want to welcome you to a lecture today by Dr. Maria.
[ Simultaneous Speaking ]
>> Yeah. Hello my name is-- hello my name is Mary Lou Reker and on behalf
of the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs and the Kluge Center,
I wanna welcome you to a lecture
by Dr. Theresa Ventura entitled Market Empire: The United States,
the Philippines, and Natural Resource Management.
Dr. Ventura came to the library on a fellowships sponsored
by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation.
She received her MA and her PhD in history from Columbia University
and was awarded the university's Bancroft Dissertation Prize.
She is now an assistant professor in the department of history
at Concordia University in Montreal.
And her research here at the Library of Congress has helped
to give an international aspect to her work.
Theresa has been studying how the US Scientific Agriculture,
ideas about tropical nature and colonial politics produce
in noble form of development in the early 20th Century Philippines.
Her fluency in Spanish, as well her ability
in Tagalog have helped her research here at the Library of Congress.
Americans were long eager to form alliances with land owners
in the Philippines and to settle agrarian unrest there in order
to build commercial exchanges.
Today, Dr. Ventura will explore the work of the Philippine Bureaus
of Public Land and of forestry during American occupation
and their role in creating an environmental revolution.
>> So, thank you to the American Council of Learned Societies
for providing a year of funding for post doctoral research and writing
and to the Kluge Center for offering an amazing work space.
I have to thank Carolyn Brown and Mary Lou Reker for inviting me back
to speak and Yvonne French for making the arrangements.
But especially I wanna thank the librarians and staff
who brought multiple volumes of the Philippine Journal of Science,
the Annual Yearbooks of the Forestry Service and the Bureau
of Public Lands directly to my desk which was wonderful.
The work that I'll present today is largely based on that material,
material which in the history of the tense and tangled relationship
between the United States and the Philippines has been underused
but nevertheless tells an important story about empire and the creation
of markets, natural resources and environmental change.
When I came to the library to continue my research
on US-Philippine relationship between the war of 1898
and the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1936,
my questions were threefold.
First, how did Americans and Filipinos see
and seek to harness nature?
Second, how did these visions shape the US occupation
of the 7,000 island archipelago?
And third, what was the impact on Philippine land uses agriculture
and agri-- ecological change?
In answering these questions, I sought to bring the concern
of historians, of science and the environment to bear on the histories
of empire and international relations which meant asking
about the ways and which ideas of civilization, science
and development could facilitate cooperation between Americans
and Filipinos in contribute to tensions and clashes
within these very broad groups.
This in turn shed light on two other understudied but important groups
who shaped the colonial state.
The first were more than 200 American agricultural scientist,
botanists, chemists and foresters who along
with countless Philippine colleagues,
catalogs Philippine nature, attempted to turn its bounty
into commodities and designated lands for use as agricultural
or forest, private or public.
The second includes the nonhispanicized indigenous people
living throughout the islands but all focused on those mainly
in the mountainous regions for whom natural resource management meant
the enclosure of their lands and a threat to their livelihoods.
This approach to US and Philippine history necessarily begins
by integrating the consumption of overseas tropical resources
into traditional narratives about the United States submergence
as an industrial world power in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Four, as Americans were becoming producers of industrial goods,
they were also becoming regular consumers of once exotic goods
from the Caribbean and the Pacific.
You may have had one of these for breakfast today--
the banana, the pineapple and coffee.
Tropical fruits are just the most visible manifestation of a trade
that included hardwoods, dyes, furnishes, natural rubber
and Gutta-percha which line the underseas cables connecting
the globe.
The flow of goods from equatorial regions to North America constitute
with the Environmental Historian,
Richard Tucker has called the Ecological Empire.
That is in addition to shrinking politically and geographically,
the world also shrunk ecologically.
The taste and desires of consumers as far away as New York,
Boston and London contributed to deforestation
and monocrop agriculture in the Caribbean and the Pacific
which in turn provided a fertile breeding ground for crop diseases
and ecological degradation.
Adding tropical consumption to the history
of US foreign relations also adds another solution
to an old dilemma for US historians.
This is not a problem within Philippine historiography,
but for US historians, how to understand the formal annexation
and occupation of the Philippines which with population
of 8 million people became the United States' largest
overseas territory.
Until recently, historians had characterized late 19th Century US
expansion and are driven by a search for markets,
markets for American produced industrial goods.
As this well known, the US grew from a world deter nation
to an industrial powerhouse in the 50 year span between the end
of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great War.
By 1913, the US produced 1/3 of the world's industrial output,
more than Great Britain, France and Germany combined.
A modern navy secured oceanic trade routes while diplomatic statements
and agreements advanced an open door of free trade in contrast
to the formal empires of Europe.
Within this narrative, the Philippines occupies for lack
of a better word, a particular place.
Its annexation after the US intervention
and the Cuban revolutionary struggle precluded the possibility
of statehood.
It appeared as an aberration and a deviation
from what were supposedly American anti-colonial principles.
Historians have explained this as, it was a colony acquired
in a moment of forgetfulness.
The Philippine-American war which took the lives
of 3,000 American soldiers and over 200,000 Filipinos was a violent
reminder that the American people did not actually have a taste
for formal imperialism.   Much new and excellent work
that I won't recount here has thoroughly disputed this view
which has others have noted tell us very little about why the US stayed
in the Philippines beyond the war's official end in 1902?
What Americans thought they were doing?
What Filipinos wanted?   And what actually happened?
So, including consumption and natural resource management can help
to further answer those questions, first, the increased consumption
of tropical goods was not a haphazard and unorganized events.
It depended upon the labor and knowledge production
of agricultural scientists, economic botanists and forester who were
as important to the continental and overseas expansion
of the United States as navies and the search for trade routes.
These figures did not see their work as an abandonment
of American anti-colonial inheritance rather they believed
they were improving nature by bringing useful and unknown goods
into the world, a project that would serve American consumers,
Filipino growers, small and large by integrating all into a web
of mutually beneficial market relations.
Their work from this perspective was compatible
with agricultural improvement and natural resource management projects
in the American West which provided a training ground for key figures
in the American colonial state in the Philippines as well as with
that of Europeans like the British
and the Dutch who's botanical gardens and conservatories in South
and South East Asia served as an inspiration.
For American scientists, annexation
of the Philippines was an opportunity to take their work
into new environments to enhance their reach
in international standing.
So, the personal and the political were very much entwined.
Take for example the reaction of David Grandison Fairchild
to the prospect of sustained American intervention
in the Philippines.
In 1898, Fairchild was a plant explorer, someone in search
of exotics that could be usefully introduced to American agriculture.
He had recently become the head of the USDA's office
of seed and plant introduction.
Scarcely a week after US naval forces had routed the Spanish
at Manila Bay, Fairchild sent an excited letter to Joseph B. Steere,
a Michigan naturalist
who had visited the Philippines twice since the 1870s.
Fairchild was familiar with Steere's work, the work of Jesuit botanists
in the islands and with the fact that a collection
of Philippine rice varieties had been exhibited
at the Paris World's Fair in 1878.
As he informs Steere, after spending a year in the Dutch East Indies,
Java and Sumatra, he was alive to the possibilities
that there are an organizing of such colonies
if they are properly managed.   He continued, he was desirous
of his ascertaining Steere's opinion regarding the possibilities
of these islands.
I believe we should hold them and develop them.
Fairchild hoped to send a USDA expedition with the army to "gather
such information and the material plants, seeds,
et cetera as would give an idea to the resources of the country."
While this formal expedition did not materialize as Fairchild envisioned,
something similar did occur,
American agricultural scientists traveled with the army
and explored the country in the army's wake.
Their original task was to locate suitable grasses
for the American cavalry that is as the US and Philippine cooperation
to oust the Spanish from a colony
that had waged its own revolutionary independence movements
since 1896 turned into warfare between Americans and Filipinos,
agricultural scientists materially assisted with the war effort.
During the course of the war, more USC experts went to work
for the ends of their government,
their tasks included the identification
of local food sources suitable for Americans and in 1900
to create a Bureau of Agriculture which was modeled on the USDA.
The bureau was initially headed by Frank Lamson-Scribner,
an agronomist with the monicker, the grass doctor
who had experienced cultivating grasses
for cattle grazing in the American West.
The bureau also hired a very young botanist named Elmer Drew Merrill
to investigate and catalog plant species in the hopes of finding new
and valuable goods for American and world markets.
And these could include medicinal plants, food crops,
a range of every, of goods that we would now consider everyday.
Merrill would stay in the Philippines for 21 years,
becoming the longest serving administrator
in a colonial state notorious
for a very high overturned-- high turn over.
He oversaw the founding of an agricultural college
in Los Banos, Philippines.
Back in the United States, he was briefly the head
of the New York Botanical Garden and took charge of the Harvard--
Harvard's Arnold Arboretum.   The Bureau of Agriculture was one
of four Natural Resource Management Institutions and three
of which were headed like Scribner by men with extensive experience
in resource management in the American West.
These other institutions included the bureaus
of public lands, science and forestry.
All four were located under the department of the interior led
by Dean Conant Worcester, a Michigan zoologist, who had first traveled
to the archipelago with Steere.
Worcester was a member of the Philippine Commission.
An unelected American dominated governing body initially led
by William Howard Taft.
Under Taft, the commission designed laws to encourage foreign investment
in the colony and agricultural exports abroad,
how did they do this?
The bureau of public lands set to facilitate easier land sells
and to entice outside investors to lend money to Philippine growers
by establishing clear titles for large planters.
This bureaus chief William B. Tipton had been a surveyor
in the former Spanish territories of Arizona and New Mexico.
Tipton, like many others believed
that American lenders would extend cash to planters only
if land could be mortgaged which in turn depended on legal titles.
His bureau also encouraged small cultivators to apply
for legal homesteads up to 40 acres in size.
Scholars have interpreted the Philippine homestead law
as a sincere if misguided effort to make Filipinos small--
to make small farmers out of Filipinos.
In actuality, US land law upon annexation declared all lands not
publicly owned to be private which in turn categorized hundreds
of thousands of small cultivators
without official titles as squatters.
The homestead program would have these small cultivators pay
application costs, survey fees and taxes
on lands they had already considered their own in exchange
for official state recognition.
It was not as you can imagine very popular and the bureau
of forestry bore the imprint of Gifford Pinchot who as head
of a very flagellin US forestry service was an apostle
of scientific conservation in the US.
Forestry in the US at this time was torn between figures like Pinchot
who believed that management could produce maximum
and sustainable temper-- yields over a very long term
and preservationists who advocated setting aside certain landscapes
for the sake of beauty.
In the Philippines, conversationist held the day pursuing an agenda not
yet possible in the United States.
Pinchot's former student and army lieutenant George Patrick Ahern
headed the forestry bureau.
Ahern's experience again like Scribner
and like Tipton's was also in the American West.
He head with the army, mapped forested lands in Montana
and designated what is today the boundaries of Glacier National Park.
The laws and governing structure
of the forestry bureau anticipated the establishment of a nationwide
and professional forestry service in the US.
An admirer of the Philippine forestry service would call it the
finest piece of work that Anglo-Saxon people are trying to do.
Just to summarize this-- the mission of these bureaus very quickly.
It was first, make the Philippines pay for its own administration
and therefore proof the profitability
of scientific management both abroad and at home.
In this mission experts like Merrill,
Tipton and Ahern were simultaneously aided
by an institutional foundation laid by the Spanish and by critics
of Spanish colonial rule.   So, the institutional foundation,
the Spanish bureaucracy opened an Inspeccion General de Montes
in 1862, the first official forestry service in the archipelago.
In 1884 and agricultural commission encouraged the founding
of experiment farms and distributed its findings to planters
through an official bulletin of agriculture.
US experiment stations basically built on top
of these older experiment stations.
In 1893, the Spanish Colonial Government declared
that all agricultural lands without official title was crowned property.
Large planters and small cultivators alike had one year
to proof their claims.   The US built upon this president
when it declared all non-privately owned lands property of the state.
The chiefs of all four bureaus also relied on Philippine assistance
to familiarize them with the new landscape and
yet in all four institutions,
Americans disparaged the Spanish past.
They, they-- and, yeah, in all four institutions,
Americans cast their Spanish predecessors
as inefficient and backwards.
Taft for instance derided Spanish land reforms as a non-policy
that discouraged investment, and I just wanna say
that for very policy oriented people
to call something a non-policy was an insult on a magnitude
that we can't imagine today.
On the one hand, why did they do this?
On the one hand Americans had to intellectually
and idealogically distance their work from the Spanish in order
to prove to reluctant home audiences and Filipinos
that they were not brute imperialists.
>> On the other, their disparagement of the Spanish legacy was assisted
by a handful of wealthy Filipinos
who if not quite active revolutionaries in 1896,
nonetheless, cheered the end of Spanish rule
in the beginning of something new.
For example, Ramon Reyes Lala, the son of a wealthy planter family
who had been exiled by the Spanish during a crackdown
on any revolutionary suspected activity.
Lala studied at Oxford and was living in New York in 1898.
He hailed Dewey's naval victory and Manila Bay as an opportunity
to "make the glories of my native land better known using the new US
interest in the Philippines to secure a book contract
for the Philippine Islands," political and natural history,
he had been writing for the past 10 years.
He also authored a series of articles in the American press.
Lala, they're not nearly as well known as revolutionaries and rebels
in the Philippines today to scholars then positioned himself
as a representative figure for American audiences
who in turn embraced him, and I'm quoting the US papers here,
as a member of the more enlightened classes of the Philippines
and to quote, "man with a Filipino view of the Filipinos."
Like Fairchild and others,
Lala believed that greater foreign investment and an increased
in trade would improve the situation and standing
of the Philippines as a whole.
In this he completed his personal interests with the interests
of the island as a whole, yet his views were deeply characteristic
of late 19th century liberalism and nationalism in the Philippines
and the Spanish speaking Caribbean as well.
Leaders of politically unstable or new nations such as Honduras
for example invited US fruit companies to invest
in their countries by offering generous land grants
with the expectations that these companies would build railroads
which would then help consolidate national rule.
International trade, scientific exploration and agriculture,
the taming of wild tropical forests, these were also lift the nations,
these nations in question, in a scale of civilization
that acquainted technological prowess
and mechanization with modernity.
Liberalist like Lala understood his proposed projects
as more than profit driven.
They sought to take what was natural and through the application
of human skill, turn into something useful for mankind.
They were building nations and developing a citizenry.
Anything or anyone that stood in the way
of harnessing nature therefore stood in the way of civilization itself.
It was not necessarily clear to men like Lala nor should it have been
that outside investors would retain the balance of power
in the political histories of these countries.
Lala's representation of Philippine nature in his book
and his other writings conveyed his hopes
for scientific intervention quite clearly.
The Philippines was, as to "A botanist's paradise,
a region in which an ardent naturalist might browse for years
and still have new treasures to find."
His 7,000 islands teamed with an amazing tropical growth.
He said there were no barren stretches of land,
no drought stricken shores, but instead, an abundant rainfall,
an equitable climate, a rich soil
and the warm influences of equatorial waters.
He exaggerated the forest wealth saying everywhere is a wealth
of trees from the mountains right down to the ocean shore
and continued that the people of the Philippine Islands were not wealthy
and that Philippine products did not dominate world trade not
because the islands were not inherently, naturally wealthy
but because the Spanish looked upon nature with a "lazy eye," his quote
and could not be troubled about anything
that cannot be put to some immediate use.
As a result, the Philippines, Lala continued, maybe said to be
in a large measure, unexplored, waiting for the botanist
to discover their treasures, the poet to spring their beauties,
the practical man to develop their resources.
He hoped that a sustained American intervention after 1898 would bring
to the Philippines an invasion as he termed it of three modern classes
of enterprise-- the scientist, the engineer
and the practical economist.
These figures would seek everywhere for what the Philippines have to add
to the useful productions of the world.
In short, these figures were essential to the transformation
of nature into a commodity, to the creation of trade,
to the production of wealth.
I want to place Lala's image of tropical nature
in a wider discourse of context.
Lala, by blaming the lazy Spanish eye
for what we would today call underdevelopment essentially
inverted a much more common view about the relationship
between nature and civilization,
that the scholar David Arnold has coined, "dubbed tropicality."
Splitting the globe into two distinct tropical
and temperate zones, this thought held
that the inherently fertile lands
of the equatorial region allowed inhabitants
to easily cultivate small plots for food thus precluding the development
of more advanced civilizations.
The temperate zone in which winter, in which by contrast--
can I just start that over?   From the temperate zone?
That's good.
Winter is in the temperate zone by contrast stimulated foresight
and government such as some rich soil made poor people.
This discourse of tropicality simultaneously defined
and explained difference, justified administrate of colonialism,
in as much as Lala's writing and the work of other Philippine elites
who attempted to set it aside,
Americans who in very much steeped in tropicality.
The British naturalist Benjamin Kidd who published the Control
of the Tropics in 1898 toured the United States
at the same time as Lala.
Kidd's tropics like Lala's were inherently fertile
and waiting for development.
Kidd's tropical people unlike Lala's were incapable
of sparking this development without a firm
but benevolent western hand to guide them.
To be sure, there are many other significant differences separating
Kidd and Lala and also varying subtleties within this discourse,
but for the reminder of this talk, I'd like to consider healthy idea
about limitlessly fertile tropical nature stacked
up against Philippine realities and the effects on policy and people.
So to begin with, the Bureau of Agriculture was very slow
to realize the reality of food shortages
and environmental degradation that had already resulted
from a long process of agricultural commercialization.
Spain had opened it's colony to world trade in the 19th century
and with that the infusion of merchant capital resulted
in regionally specialized monocropping.
States on the main island of Luzon were worked by tenants
who grew a mixed of rice, sugar, coconut and coffee.
The island chain in the Visayas has massive sugar plantation,
hemp harvesting and processing dominated in the Bicol region.
Exports pass through Manila which begins its phenomenal growth.
Mindanao, the southern most island and home
to a Muslim majority remained largely outside of Spanish control
and so I'm not going to talk about it very much right now.
And we'll say that the commercialization dramatically
affected the archipelago's 8 million people.
Politically, it created a class of Hispanicized land-owning elites
who commanded peasant labor and soon imagine Catholic lowlanders
as belonging to a rightfully independent Philippine nation.
This nationalist imagination marginalized non-Christian
highlanders, migratory agriculturalists
and Muslims in the south.
Environmentally, commercialization resulted in deforestation,
soil salination and a slew of crop and animal diseases.
From regular locust outbreaks to a devastating coffee blight
in Southern Luzon, rinderpest which is a cattle plague
that swept the globe during those time reduced stocks
of water buffalo, the draft animal of wet rice cultivation
by 85 percent and this left the once fertile fields fallow.
Food shortages interspersed with famine became common,
the island of Negros suffered 10 distinct years
of famine 1856 and 1897.
Manila's insatiable appetite commanded the peasant staples
of chicken and eggs turning them into valuable commodities.
By 1877, the colony regularly imported mechanically milled rice
from Burma and Vietnam.
So, here we have this you know, very rich nation or archipelago
that that doesn't actually produce enough food for its own population.
These food shortages and global trade had a tremendous impact
on Philippine health contributed to the revolution in 1896
and also shaped the resistance to the American occupation.
From a perspective of health for example,
mechanical rice milling removed a very thiamine rich skin
from the rice husk which resulted in the loss of B complex vitamins.
An extreme thiamine deprivation contributed
to a disease called polyneuritis which is a painful, debilitating
and sometimes fatal edema
in the lower limps popularly known as Beriberi.
The endemic deficiency at this time may have contributed
to an infant mortality rate in Manila of 50 percent in the 1890s.
So, elites defined nationalism as, as greater participation
in international trader where one aspect of an elite definition
of nationalism was participation in this greater trade.
Revolutionary independence as others have looked
at revolutionary peasants understood independence from Spain,
Kalayaan as a return to a past where food was not scarce,
where prizes were not high and where land was abundant.
Many rank and file peasant fighters anticipated broad economic
and social changes after the revolution
and were sorely disappointed
in the short lived Philippine republic's policy
of reinstituting commercial agriculture prior
to the reestablishment very briefly of Spanish rule.
American forces in 1898 simply exasperated these problems.
American forces burnt fields, halted the inter island food trade,
reports of soldiers in Cuba sickened by tainted beef, by tainted meat
from Chicago, what was known
as the embalmed food scandal forced the commissary
to command your-- scarce local meats.
South-Western Luzon, which had been host to the fiercest
and most prolonged fighting had been completely cut off
from food supplies and not coincidentally surrendered
at the start of the planting season in 1902.
Postwar US alliance says with land owners resulted in the support
for the reconstruction of commercial agriculture.
The effect was to increase rice importation and depress incomes
for remaining small rice farmers.
The Bureau of Agriculture was eager to prove its legitimacy
to the large planter, those it considered the best man
of the Philippines and devoted less attention to food crops in favor
of improving sugar cultivation and milling processes.
To the extent that Americans looked at food crops during this time,
it was really in search for tropical fruits that could sort of,
they could sell in the United States, a kin to the banana.
So, imagine if you know, instead
of a banana this morning you had a chico or a mangosteen,
fruits that are incidentally coming back now as super foods.
The bureau also invested its scarce resources in the development
of coconut plantations in Southern Luzon
and rubber plantations on Mindanao.
Coconuts were not strictly a food resource.
French agricultural experiment stations in Africa had revealed
that coconuts could be processed to produce nitroglycerin.
The Bureau of Science in the Philippines joined this effort,
studying the internal properties of coconuts and the ideal land
and spacing dimensions for coconut plantations
because these coconuts could be used to make dynamite,
it could be used as weapons of war.
The Bureau of Agriculture did not pay serious attention
to the food needs of the island until dual tragedies
in 1902 brought famine, the first being a drought,
the second being the eruption of Taal Volcano in Southern Luzon.
So, there was a rather a small but nonetheless significant famine
which resulted in a rice and cost of food prices
and widespread labor unrest in Manila during those time.
Even then, the bureau did not quite approach the problem in a way
that devoted more land to food crops rather it suggested planting land
to corn-- planting rice land to corn,
a food they though was more helpful and also a food
that it could be grown annually.
Corn which had been grown in the Philippines for hundreds
of years was too mending,
not fit for human consumption, it was animal fodder.
This is in turn sparked a massive corn campaign which was running
on rather militaristic lines, it blended agricultural education
with dietary reforms held corn growing contests in the schools,
food demonstrations and yet it did not really make much of an impact
on the everyday diets of Filipinos.
So that's one way in which the Bureau of Agriculture dealt
or was forced to deal with the reality
of Philippine environmental limitations.
Turning real quickly to the bureaus of public lands
and forestry is another way of looking at sort
of the expectations versus the realities.
First, the virginal forests
that Americans anticipated were actually home to very ethnically
and linguistically diverse peoples
who had eluded lowland and Spanish control.
Americans cast these people into two very broad groups,
the first called Negrito and the second called the Igorot
which referred to the extremely diverse peoples
of the mountain province of Luzon,
this is the Cordillera mountain area.
Some of these agricultural practices of these people were migratory;
they mixed the controlled burning of lands for pasture,
a process called Kaingin which after a few seasons will return to forest.
Upland mountain agriculture combined the growing of taro
and sweet potatoes in common forest lands with the harvesting
of wet rice in privately owned plots on steeply terraced mountains.
Well, Americans marveled at the technological prowess that went
into designing and building the terraces, these Negritos
and Igorots still represented the least civilized people
in the Philippines from the American perspective.
Therefore their land uses were not seen as legitimate.
Ahern of the Forestry Bureau believed that clearing
with fire destroyed valuable timber.
He thought it was irresponsible, he even called it, an evil.
Ahern lambasted Kaingin as the most destructive agency
in the Philippine forests.   We can scroll.
He empowered his forest officers to make arrests, to impose fines
but then lamented that his measures failed
to accomplish the desired results
because essentially policing a forest is a tremendous task.
With the assistance of the Philippine Lumbermen's Association,
he began an education campaign to try to encourage the influential
of the people to see Kaingin as an evil and to you know,
ask them to practice conservation of their resources.
So, again his campaign against Kaingin was waged in the name
of conservation and efficient management.
But what his forestry service essentially accomplished or sought
to do was to transfer the rights to the forests from non-Christians
and from small cultivators to commercial lumber interests.
These large lumbering interests incidentally had a much greater
capacity to enact a swift deforestation
than small producers combined.
And this is precisely what happened rapidly
in the last half of the 20th century.
The bureaus of forestry, public lands
and agriculture together unintentionally increased small
cultivator's reliance of forest resource.
The loss of agricultural lands, food shortages and the displacement
of squatters led countless small cultivators turned to the forest
for foraging, firewood and planting
which was accomplished most swiftly with controlled fire.
It soon became impossible for the forestry bureau to distinguish
between wild Kaingin makers and displaced lowland farmers
who would be required to make formal applications for homesteads
on lands, they were suspected burning.
Thus, US policies grounded in the belief that scientific agriculture
and management would result
in efficient land use essentially encouraged what appeared
to Ahern's bureau as a chaos of uses.
The immediate reaction on the part of the Bureau of Forestry was
to seek greater aide for the enforcement and punishments
of squatters in the forest and to call for the indefinite extension
of American rule in the islands in the name of conservation.
So, American land lore-- land law
and these policies were I think indisputably disruptive
in its unintended consequences.
But these unintended consequences could also work
in very surprising ways so I don't want to end the talk
on a very sour note so we'll consider one
of these surprising unintended consequences in the case
of what is now know in Filipino law
and land right circles as the Carino Doctrine.
The Philippine commission had identified a swap of land
in Mountain Province as the ideal temperate location
for a summer capital instead
about building the city today called Baguio.
Land in and around Baguio was part of an extensive ranch owned
by the Ibaloi chief, Mateo Carino who sued the insular government.
An American judge in the Philippines found Carino's claims
to the land void as he did not posses a legal title recognized
by law.
Carino's case was just one of three challenging the American ability
to decide between proper and therefore valid land titles.
His case however, was the only one
to go before the American Supreme Court.
The US Colonial Government after disparaging land law--
after disparaging Spanish land law had essentially argued
that Carino failed to gain legal title
as per those 1893 Spanish degrees-- decrees discussed earlier.
His land they held had legally reverted to the crown and hence
to the US with the transfer of sovereignty.
Carino instead argued that he had prior
"vested rights" based on his family use.
In 1909 the Supreme Court decided in Carino's favor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion
that to deny Carino's claim was a violation of the 1902 organic act
for the Philippines which declared "no law shall be enacted
which shall deprive any person of life or property, life liberty
or property without due process of law, of law."
The court essentially refused
to declare unhispanicized Filipinos squatters
on their own land recognizing vested rights.
American laws which favored private owners became in the hands
of this Ibaloi man a very powerful tool for the protection
of indigenous land rights despite the intent of the law's founders
to promote commercial development.
This Carino Doctrine did not have a widespread and immediate impact
until the 1970s and 1980s when human rights lawyers resuscitated it
and they're the one's who are now calling it the Carino Doctrine.
And it's, you know, I guess ironic than that American law is now used
to make a case for the protection of ancestral land rights.
So, to conclude, I confess that I'm still in the process
of answering many of the questions I raised
at the beginning of this talk.
But I hope that I have shown that the drive for overseas markets
at the end of the 19th century was equally and also
about developing tropical goods for sale in American markets.
This work was materially assisted by the knowledge and skill
of agricultural scientists, foresters and botanists
who saw empire as a chance to enhance their reach and expertise.
Some Filipinos, for whom liberalism and nationalism were entwined
with greater world trade, welcome this work,
if not the violent war of which it was a part.
Yet the development promised by scientific management
and conservation for many others was destructive.
Within this historical dynamic and in this contest over the meaning
of development and the designation of proper land uses,
I think we can recognize the outlines
of some very contemporary problems
and hopefully device better solutions.
Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the library of congress.