“A road called the BR-364 meandered through my research, and it meanders through this book as well…I use the BR-364 to connect and elucidate some of the socioenvironmental relations enlisted in the effort to make the living forest and its carbon valuable, as well as to reveal the tensions within this effort.”
(Greenleaf 29, 30)
INTERLUDE I
HIGHWAY LANDSCAPES
“When I rode fast on the BR-364 between the cities of Rio Branco and Feijó, it often looked to me like nothing was being grown or made alongside of it. That was not true. In fact, people were growing food, raising animals, and collecting various forest products. But this extraction and production tended to be extensive and, in this sense, different than the monocrops and feedlots I was familiar with from the United States. Their relatively low yield per hectare were hard for me to see when traveling at high speeds.” (Greenleaf 57)
INTERLUDE II
THE FLOOD
“The flooding [of the BR 364"] revealed how reliant many Acreans were on the one paved connection to the rest of the country, a connection made more tenuous with more frequent flooding in a changing climate.” (Greenleaf 85)
INTERLUDE III
THE RURAL ROAD, PART 1
“When I asked about which government benefits had most positively impacted their lives in recent years, smallholders I spoke with often offered a non-forest focused example: the paving of the BR-364 and the building of more side roads off it. These roads offered them access to the education, health care, consumer goods, and connectivity that many rural residents wanted.” (Greenleaf 111)
INTERLUDE IV
THE RURAL ROAD, PART 2
“The BR-364, then, was at once a symbol of the promise of Acrean inclusive integration and development—green or otherwise—and the evidence of its uneven impacts and broad failures.” (Greenleaf 130)
