FOREST LOST
Producing Green Capitalism in
the Brazilian Amazon
Forest Lost is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource extraction; instead, they require keeping carbon in place through forest protection. Maron Greenleaf explores forest carbon offsets to understand green capitalism—the use of capitalist logics and practices to mitigate environmental damage. She traces cultural, environmental, governmental, material, and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable and how forest carbon’s commodification in the Amazon turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth. At the same time, Greenleaf shows how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations. While forest carbon in the Amazon demonstrates that green capitalism can be socially inclusive, it also shows that green capitalism can reinforce the marginalization it purportedly seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts’ alluring promises and vexing failures.
PRAISE
“In this compelling book, Maron E. Greenleaf disentangles the overwhelmingly complex socio-ecological, political-economic, and interspecies relationships that have both resulted in the climate crisis and that must be understood and transformed to combat the climate crisis. She does this through a brilliant analysis of ‘green capitalism’ and its history, transformative power, failings, and afterlives.”
— Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University
“Maron E. Greenleaf’s key insight that making forest carbon entails a remaking of socioenvironmental relations—a complex and open-ended process that presents challenges as well as opportunities—allows her to retheorize the making of value through novel relations, reworkings, and speculations about what’s to come in rural Amazonia. Forest Lost makes a signal contribution to the study of the political ecology of the region while offering explanatory frames that will help illuminate the global proliferation of carbon markets with the care and attention that ethnographic immersion allows.”
— Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon