The family of Kang Yong Su, a forest ranger of the Unsan County Forest Management Station in North Phyongan Province, has looked after forests generation after generation.

The first ranger of the family was his father Kang Yun Gyong who became the ranger of the Pukjin Workers’ District in Unsan County in 1953.

Kang Yun Gyong, who is depicted in Korean feature film A Forest’s Swaying, afforested mountains in the Pukjin area, which had been stripped bare by bombings in the Fatherland Liberation War between 1950 and 1953, and was thus awarded the title of Merited Forest Ranger for the first time in the country.

His sincere efforts had an enormous influence on his children. Following in his footsteps, his eldest son Kang Yong Gun cultivated forests until the last moments of life and his second son Kang Yong Su has been working as a ranger for 12 years.

It is not an easy job for a ranger to take charge of wide area, climbing mountains to plant and grow trees and to prevent the destruction of forests by fire and harmful insects.

Originally Kang Yong Su was head of the Pukjin branch post office, and he volunteered to work as the ranger, when the mountains his father and elder brother had afforested were heavily damaged due to years of natural calamities.

He worked out a new plan for reforesting mountains and devoted his all to it. He sometimes travelled long distances to secure saplings and good species of seeds, and picked out stones from vacant lots around his home and spread manure over them to plant tree seeds, instead of grains or vegetables. He worked from early morning until late at night to tend sapling patches. Whenever strong wind blew or a long dry spell persisted, he made strenuous efforts lest saplings should break or wither. Those young trees were then transplanted on mountains and they grew up inch by inch.

His persevering efforts to build wonderful forests generation after generation moved his siblings and their spouses who had been working at other jobs, and they gave him active assistance in afforestation.

Finally, more than 2 700 hectares of forests in the Pukjin Workers’ District turned into the major woodland producing timber for economic construction and improved people’s livelihood in the province and the treasure mountains covered with fruit trees and medicinal herbs and providing habitats for many wild animals.

In June five years ago, the thickly-wooded area in the district was designated as a useful animal reserve, and in 2015 Kang Yong Su was awarded the title of Merited Forest Ranger.

His family find themselves in the mountains every day with the mind of increasing the forest resources of the country and his descendants grow along with flourishing forests.