One island too many: reappraising the extent of deforestation in the Philippines prior to 1946

The extent to which parts of the Philippine archipelago were deforested prior to 1946 has received less scholarly attention than it deserves. Unfortunately most of the forestry records of both the Spanish and American colonial regimes were lost as a result of mishap and warfare. However, by sifting through hitherto largely untapped archival sources in Manila and Washington as well as a considerable body of contemporary commentaries, it is possible to reconstruct a much more accurate picture of the scale of forest loss and chart the growth of a commercial timber market during the second half of the nineteenth century. Attention is also drawn to a fundamental misconception about the effective size of the colonial state and therefore the unit of analysis used to calculate previous attempts at forest cover and depletion. The exclusion or inclusion of Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, has implications for both the true extent of deforestation under Spanish rule and the subsequent rate of forest felling during the ensuing American period. Finally, the contention is made that the quality of forest cover data collected by manual means in the past is perhaps more accurate than previously acknowledged and requires more serious consideration in conjunction with material obtained by modern instrumentation.