Here’s To FORI! We Tried To Influence The Information & Publication World Of Forestry 1975-1980. If We Failed, It Wasn’t For Lack Of Trying!

Above, at the upper campus of UP Los Baños, the façade of the Forest Research Institute (FORI) building newly constructed in 1977(?); I describe the female figure now, revising a line from “The Rhodora” by Ralph Waldo Emerson – “If eyes were made for seeing / then innocence is its own excuse for being.”

I was one of the innocents beguiled by the promise of a new adventure in information & publication in the field of forestry. I worked there 1975-1980. Those were years before the Internet came to the Philippines. Those were years when I became The Editor In Chief of FORI.

In the Philippines, researches in forest production and forest products had hardly begun, even as Secretary of Natural Resources Arturo Tanco proclaimed the “irreversible decline” of PH’s forestlands. If silently, I took that man-made disaster as an intellectual challenge – our fight for the forests was our fight for our lives.
(“Fight” from pottonandburton.co.nz/)

The above image shows the name of the institution that replaced FORI, “Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau.” Only the name is new; the FORI building was constructed in the late 1970s yet.

FORI Director Filiberto S Pollisco fully supported me, more or less. I would describe now my FORI years as 100% original, 97% pleasant and productive – nobody’s perfect!

A graduate of UP College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños, 1965, BSA major in Ag Edu, I taught myself creative typewriter-based writing, editing, producing publications.

Pete Bueno recruited me and assigned me to the Information Section under the Technical Services Division of FORI. I cannot stop thanking him for that appointment – and the complete trust he gave me as writer and editor and publisher.

It was I who originated the monthly newsletter Canopy, quarterly technical journal Sylvatrop, and quarterly color magazine Habitat. I was The Editor In Chief of each one; I originated each of those names – and no, I did not have any model to pattern any one of them. I have always been an original original.

Canopy – I encouraged every FORI staff to contribute to the newsletter. When articles were lacking, I wrote them myself using pseudonyms so that the newsletter would not look like the intellectual output of only one person! I also typed and proofread all the articles before we went to Abiva Publishing House to print the issues. No, not one issue was late! My assistant Rody Maningas and I were at Abiva to help expedite the publishing.

Sylvatrop – The complete name is “Sylvatrop, The Philippine Forest Research Journal, a quarterly. This is the very first such journal in the Philippines.

Habitat – The quarterly color magazine I patterned after the A-1 popular American National Geographic. Oh yes, I was one of the photographers.

With those FORI publications, my intellectual contributions to the publishing world are therefore FORI’s contributions to furthering science & communication in that discipline. Nobody can take that away from me!

FORI, today you may be gone institutionally but not intellectually.@517