Maron Greenleaf

MARON GREENLEAF, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to aid writing and research on “Forest Lost: Carbon and Inclusion in the Brazilian Amazon.” Living forests have new monetary value due to market-oriented responses to climate change that monetize the carbon that they store. ‘Forest Lost’ is an ethnography of a prominent effort to realize that value by creating forest ‘carbon offsets’ and using other forms of financing in the western Brazilian Amazon. The book project traces the material, governmental, and multispecies relations enlisted in these efforts. The story it tells counters both dominant and critical understandings of carbon offsets, the commodification of nature, and ‘green capitalism.’ It shows how the forest’s new monetary value engendered and was engendered by an environmentally premised welfare state and environmentally negotiated citizenship, rather than by standardized market relations. My analysis also examines the limits of this effort, exploring its links to increasing deforestation and support for pro-deforestation candidates, like Jair Bolsonaro. ‘Forest Lost’ illuminates the political potentials and contradictions of enlisting capitalism to combat environmental degradation in one of the world’s most climatically and culturally important landscapes.