MANILA, Philippines - In 1971, Oscar Gendrano was a young forester on a mission in Casiguran, Quezon. His mission: Cut down as much timber as he could and bring them home to Manila where the once-towering trees would be trimmed into matchsticks.

Armed with brand-new power saws, he arrived on the dazzling white shores of St. Ildelfonso Point, where he was met by tall, kinky-haired black men in loincloths. They were the Dumagat, a gentle and hardworking people who had lived by the sea long before the Spaniards came to Philippine shores, and certainly long before he got there like a conquering Magellan with not a sword but a power saw.

But that was all it took to convert these gentle natives into power saw-wielding loggers who agreed to cut trees and haul them to shore on their shoulders—all for cigarettes and bottles of Siok Tong.

“Was it a fair exchange?” Oscar asks himself in his memoirs, “Oscar: A Man of the Forest.”

It is a question he would ponder all his life and a question that would turn his memoirs into a full confession: “As a forester, I was an instrument of oppression against some of these indigenous cultural minorities. I was an accomplice in destroying the values that these helpless people have held dear for generations. Unfortunately, no court ever passed judgment and meted out punishment to me. I wonder who among those loggers who, on their way to their riches, had to obliterate the forest communities, felt an iota of guilt for what they did to the indigenous people.”

There was another time in Agusan del Sur, when their logging crew bulldozed what turned out to be the Manobo’s sacred ground. No less than the datu (chieftain) of the Manobos turned up to block the bulldozer.

Imagine the logging firm’s relief when told that the solution would not require a court battle over the rights of indigenous people to their ancestral lands, but required them instead “to butcher a pig and offer it to the spirits of the sacred spot in the forest.”
Oscar had the graciousness to invite the datu to a campfire dinner of the very same pig, over which the datu gave the loggers his permission to continue. After dinner, the now drunk and wobbly datu disappeared back into the forests carrying gifts of rice and Ginebra San Miguel.
Oscar had every reason to celebrate his many triumphs in diplomacy (a previous firm that ignored the Manobo’s warnings found the driver of their bulldozer dead with a spear through his heart). But he would later come to regret what was lost in those bargains.

“Some of my best years as a forester were spent walking in the forest, looking at the old (about 100-300 years) and huge Dipterocarp trees before they were mercilessly cut down by power saws.”

The realization could not have come easily. Oscar was born to entire generations of kaingeros. “My first lessons were about total forest destruction, rather than prudent use. Forests, we thought, hindered food production and had to go.”

As a teenager, he helped his father and cousins clear the forests for rice. Too small to wield an axe, his job had been to burn the felled Luan (Dipterocarp) trees that were so gigantic, he says, that the fire went on for weeks.

He became a forester quite by accident, one of those unthinking decisions young people make or leave to fate. He needed a course that would land him job right after school. “Why not forestry?” a distant relative suggested.

The decision led him to the cutthroat arena of the academe, to the corporate jungles of white collar Manila, and to the real jungle where the headhunters he might encounter are of the real kind.

Like Indiana Jones, he led a dual life that would have been glamorous were it not for the snakes and leeches.

Once after three weeks in the forests of Batag Island, Samar, Oscar found the prized but vanishing species of Almaciga trees. Unfortunately, not only did he find the trees but also “thousands of mini-leeches smaller than match sticks, curled up on leaves ready to spring to a luckless victim who happens to pass by. The young forest ranger in our team was not so lucky when a mini-leech landed on his left eyeball. It took me 15 minutes, in driving rain, to pluck out this tiny, slimy and sticky creature of the tropical forest, from the ranger’s already teary and bloody eye.”

Luckily, Oscar had the intelligence, discipline, and resourcefulness to rise to the top of the forest industry. He became the Executive Director of Wood Industries. For 17 years, he roamed the rich tropical forests of the Asia Pacific as Forestry Specialist for a Development Financing Institution (DFI). He was elected National President of the Society of Filipino Foresters (SFF), a position he held twice.

He’s had enough highs and lows in his adventurous career to have witnessed the best and worst of the forest industry.
While enlightened foresters taught loggers the wisdom of growing one tree for every tree cut, other foresters were “petty grafters who bilked loggers for pocket money, food, wine, women, in return for being extra lenient in enforcing rules on forest conservation.”

“With meager salaries, no government employee could resist generous bribe offers from blatant violators of forest laws. There was very little obstacle to cutting as much timber that they could make money from, and not one logger ever understood, nor bothered what selective logging meant.”

There was big money to be made and it was made, but not by him. Oscar could see the forest for the trees.

“Looking back 30 years later, I know that if I had the guts, I could have struck gold. But it was instant wealth that could have changed my person in many ways and, perhaps, forever destroyed many of my cherished values. The greater and immeasurable gratification was: through these years, without bearing an iota of guilt, I can proudly put food on my family table, and tell my children: “Let’s say the grace!”

On his birthday party on the year he retired, Oscar threw a small party for his friends and neighbors and gave away little bags of healthy seedlings of Philippine hardwood.

His book is a seedling too. Part confessions of a forester, part accounting of his career, and part love letter to his wife, children, and grandchildren, his story will lodge itself in your heart and surprise you by growing there. And soon you too will be worrying about trees and dreaming of Dipterocarps and how your grandchildren will climb them.