GREEN CAPITALISM

My first project examines “nature-based” capitalist solutions to climate change. In it, I study efforts to give new monetary value to living forests and the carbon stored in them—or “forest carbon.” My book from this project—Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon—is an ethnography of a famed effort to monetarily valorize forest carbon in the Amazon rainforest through carbon credits and other forest finance mechanisms. It elucidates the social and cultural dynamics of these valorization efforts to offer a critical and ethnographically-grounded account of green capitalism in one of the world’s most climatically and culturally important landscapes.

To do so, I approach forest carbon relationally, tracing the complex social and environmental relations that hold carbon in place in living forests and keep it from being released into the atmosphere. These relations include complex infrastructural, governmental, and multispecies relations within the Amazon rainforest, as well as socioenvironmental relations far beyond it. Through this analysis, I illuminate the everyday contestation and complexity obscured by green capitalism’s promise of easy fixes and profits.